DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997                TAG: 9704170562

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY JACKIE R. BOOKER 

                                            LENGTH:   77 lines

AFRICAN-AMERICAN JOURNALIST FINDS FLAWED AFRICA

OUT OF AMERICA

A Black Man Confronts Africa

KEITH B. RICHBURG

Basic Books. 257 pp. $24.

Near the end of Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa, author Keith B. Richburg writes: ``Africa. Birthplace of civilization. My ancestral homeland. I came here thinking I might find a little bit of that missing piece of myself. But Africa chewed me up and spit me out again.''

Africa, with all of its seemingly intractable problems - AIDS, famine, repressive dictators, mass murders - cuts to Richburg's very core. After his three-year experience there, the young Washington Post reporter can no longer romanticize Mother Africa.

Born in Detroit, Richburg attended Catholic and suburban schools, majored in journalism at the University of Michigan and earned a master's degree in international relations at the London School of Economics. After interning with The Post he became a full-time reporter, covering the D.C.'s gritty crime scene, and receiving an assignment in Southeast Asia. But neither his education nor his work experience prepared him for his next stop - East Africa.

Richburg became The Post's Africa bureau chief. Based in Nairobi, Kenya, he was first impressed by the smell of constant fear and death. This sense plagued him throughout his stay. As a dark-skinned African American, Richburg was often mistaken for an African, and, therefore, a member of an ethnic faction. After disease, warring ethnic factions are responsible for the most African deaths. Because of his skin color, facial features and the African myth that black U.S. journalists are not assigned jobs on the continent, Richburg had several confrontations with gunmen.

Richburg covered the civil wars in Somalia and Rwanda. Famine and massacre are among the many African issues that defy explanation for him. He questions, for example, how a strongman like Mohamed Farah Aideed of Mogadishu, Somalia (who recently died) was able to manipulate the United Nations, the United States and the rest of the international community into giving $3 billion to assist his country.

Most of the food earmarked for starving Somalians was sold, Richburg reports, and the profits sent to European bank accounts, spent on expensive cars, and used to pay thugs to maintain order, not democracy. Despite the killing of American soldiers, aid workers and foreign reporters, the international money continued to flow into Somalia.

In Rwanda, massacres carried out by both the Hutu and Tutsi, rival ethnic groups, deepened Richburg's dislike for Africa. Beatings, rapes and murders occurred daily in Rwanda. The sight and smell of death caused him to recoil. Richburg is especially stunned by the anonymity of death in Rwanda, the mass graves, the decapitated bodies and the rivers clogged with human corpses.

After his stint in Africa, the young African American who arrived optimistic felt cynical, disillusioned and even angry. He endured racism, often from black Africans; the executions of friends and fellow journalists, and gross examples of inhumanity. He also confronted his own identity and found it to be distinctly, and gratefully, American.

Richburg is now The Post's Hong Kong bureau chief.

Although Richburg has written a powerful account of contemporary Africa, he dismisses in one paragraph the legacy of Western colonialism. African independence four decades ago did not erase 400 years of colonial rule. Richburg does not consider, for example, the problem of foreign governments supplying weapons to African dictators who preach democracy, but enforce their rule with brutality. Nor does he consider that Western-style democracy may not work in many African nations, which have little or no history of open elections.

If there is a bright spot in Africa, Richburg notes, it is in South Africa. With the election of Nelson Mandela, rival factions have not engaged in genocide, and black and white South Africans are learning to live in harmony. The international community has welcomed the country back into its good graces. MEMO: Jackie R. Booker, formerly an associate professor at Norfolk State

University, is now an associate professor of history at South Carolina

State University.

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