Killing the Wizards.

Killing the Wizards, the result of New York Times reporter Alan Cowell's ten-year immersion in Africa, is an informative, beautifully organized book, jampacked with historical and current facts and with Cowell's educated and well-considered interpretation of them. More important, it's about him. Though he's never intrusive, Cowell is always present. He examines his conscience and reveals his feelings, making this journalistic work a valuable meditation as well.

In the subtitle, "to" is the operative word. The second half of Killing the Wizards is explicitly devoted to South Africa, but from the beginning of his narrative Cowell points us there. The white tribe of South Africa - the tribe to which apartheid is a philosophy as well as methodology - for years instigated, encouraged, and underwrote strife among its neighbors. The end of the cold war along with the economic pressure of the West have undermined the enactment of South Africa's shameful policies, but the consequences of South Africa's defense of apartheid are evident through all Cowell's time and travels in Africa.

Reuters sent Cowell to Zambia in 1976. "Going to Africa was a return to the history that had drawn my forebears to a continent of which they were as ignorant as I. But it was also a venture into a modern era stained with the conflicts that had been their bequest." Cowell's sensitive examination of his part in collective guilt is an important theme in Killing the Wizards. His passionate feeling for Africa is another. But the book is not one of praise. Greed, barbarism, the lust for power, along with the passionate, small-minded self-protectiveness that permits or engenders the other transgressions pervade the continent.

In Zaire, where President Mobutu's salary matches the national debt, the Belgians' ruthless plunder and precipitous desertion have left poverty, sickness, extreme disorder, and depravity behind. Thirty-two years after independence, no road runs all the way through Zaire from north to south, and the jungle is likely to overtake pipelines before they can be completed. People with AIDS lie untended, corruption and slaughter afflict the populace, and those in power cut their meat with solid gold knives and forks. Cowell quotes Conrad's Mister Kurtz. "The horror! The horror!" to remind us that Zaire is still the Heart of Darkness. It's not alone: in the Central African Republic. Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the emperor, once kept human flesh in a cold room, ready to satisfy his cannibalism. Other African countries, such as Angola and Mozambique - once Portugal's - are in ruins.

The African countries Cowell writes about have no real nationhood; the boundaries are the inventions of colonialists. And until very recently, most of the wars, too, were white men's inventions. Cowell delineates and explains both as he brings us closer and closer to apartheid's home.

Cowell is right-minded about the white presence in Africa, without being self-righteous about it. His examination of his own actions and his own conscience are what make Killing the Wizards exceptional, and what connects those of us distant from Africa to it. Cowell, as a white man of position, is a beneficiary of racism, and he knows it. Servants, a gin and tonic at sunset, and a luxurious Johannesburg suburb make up his world for much of his time in Africa. He's ashamed of his participation, however tangential, in the injustices privilege grants - as when, for example, he drives a short distance in the rain, while the black man guiding him walks outside.

Ironically, South Africa does not have the astonishing, sometimes primitive, disarray and corruption Cowell finds elsewhere on the continent. He doesn't have to send his dispatches by carrier pigeon or, in order to travel, put a bribe in the hand that reaches under a whitewashed window. In South Africa an easy, pleasant life is accessible to a white person who minds his own business. But it is, of course, Cowell's mission to do the opposite, and he does so with a full heart: His longing for justice fuses with the great struggle he sees.

White and black South Africa, Cowell observes, are today fraught with internal contradictions. To white separatist hardliners, the myths of Afrikaner history are a religion. As apartheid is abandoned, that faith lacks not only an ethical foundation, but also an institutional one. An unjust white South Africa only survives because of the support - perhaps it's fair to say the collusion - of the West. In the past, and today, it has relied also on its huge, enslaved, black labor force. Both these empowering factors are slipping away. Among blacks, charismatic leaders like Nelson Mandela are giving strength and wisdom. But the anger of black youth is intensifying, sometimes taking tragic and destructive forms that threaten to plunge the nation into anarchy. Cowell reports on young men who blame their parents, and their parents' generation, for not having thrown off the oppressor. Some young blacks refuse to go to school (admittedly, because first of all it teaches subservience). Others turn to bombings and knifings and the heinous tire "necklaces" as necessary tools of revolution.

Because of his frank reporting, Cowell was exiled from South Africa in 1987. He visited again in 1990, as the present government turned away from apartheid. Despite these dramatic changes - symbolized by Mandela's release from prison - the future is uncertain. "Kill the wizards," instead of being a cry of black warriors against white invaders, has become one of the black tribe against black tribe. Confusion and evil have not disappeared from Africa, and Cowell concludes that some of the optimism he once had was not justified.

Still, at the very end of the book as he flies out of Johannesburg, Cowell writes: "I doubted I would ever be able to say - or want to say - it was all behind me." Cowell succeeds at understanding and explaining the troubled continent where he lived for so long. His loving hope prevails.