Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa.

By Keith B. Richburg BasicBooks, $24

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHILE SERVING as a foreign correspondent in Africa, I heard what was, if true, perhaps the most self-loathing comment I could imagine a black American making. The Washington Post's new Nairobi bureau chief, a young man named Keith Richburg, had been seen about town, regaling his white colleagues with the thought that he was glad his ancestors had been taken from their native villages and ended up in America. Better to have been brought across the ocean in leg irons, he said, than to be stuck now in modern Africa. Here was an extraordinarily brave man, one journalist told me, because he spoke openly and without apology of matters that most of his colleagues only dared whisper, namely that Africa was beyond salvation. And because Richburg is black and works for one of the world's most prestigious newspapers, his comments, of course, could not be dismissed as racist rantings.

To say that slavery was preferable to the rigors of life in modern Africa seemed a bit overwrought for someone who had barely unpacked his bags. In any event, now, after finishing a three-year tour on the continent, Richburg has written a book in which he elaborates at length on his revulsion with all things African. To hear him tell it, the continent's problems are so "intractable" that the outside world best leave it alone until "Africa is ready to save itself." In one passage, he writes: "I do not hate Africa or the Africans. What I hate is the senseless brutality, the waste of human life." But a few paragraphs later, he oscillates, admitting: "I am terrified of Africa. I don't want to be from this place." And perhaps the greatest sin, he insists, is to romanticize "Mother Africa" as "some kind of black Valhalla, where the descendants of slaves would be welcomed back and where black men and women can walk in true dignity" He's tired, he writes, "of all the ignorance and hypocrisy and the double standards heard and read about Africa, much of it from people who've never been there. Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I'll throw it back in your face."

The resulting memoir, Out of America, takes the reader on an angry tour through some of the world's most wretched places. Each chapter fleshes out his ordeal with anecdotes, autobiographical reminiscences and broad cultural reflections. In refugee camps in Zaire, he sees bodies stacked up like firewood, and in Somalia he witnesses thousands of people literally dying on the streets from starvation. In Rwanda, perhaps the worst place of all, he writes: "I watched the dead float down a river in Tanzania," and "there I was, drenched with sweat under the blistering sun, standing at the Rusmo Falls bridge, watching the bodies float past me. They were bloated now, horribly discolored. Sometimes the hands and feet were bound together. Some were clearly missing some limbs."

There is something both heroic and sickening about this. Richburg surely knew he would be pilloried for his views, attacked by multiculturalists and Afrocentrists and assorted Western do-gooders, and you can almost hear him reveling in anticipation, eager to take on all comers. He's been there, and you haven't, he declares, which on its face makes an exceedingly compelling argument. And this brings us close to the central problem with Out of America. Richburg tells readers they will learn what Africa is really like. In fact, what we mostly learn is how horrible war is and how wretched the current generation of African leaders is. This is all true, and Richburg's book provides many convincing illustrations. But he never goes beyond his description of Africa's troubles to give us a deeper understanding of the people who are being affected--let alone the multitudes who are not currently living in a war zone.

Richburg does break new ground, however, in his disillusionment with black leaders, scholars, and others who have sought in recent years to put Africa at the core of the black experience in America. And in Richburg's hands, Africa furnishes a pretext for talking about his deep ambivalence about his own racial identity.

Indeed, there is considerable confusion about what racial insecurities and resentments Richburg carried around with him before he ever set foot in sub-Saharan Africa. We learn that he was born and raised in the Detroit of the 1960s, that his early childhood was integrated, that he attended a mostly white high school in Grosse Pointe, and that many of his friends were white. "Mine was not what you might call a particularly `black childhood' just a childhood, an average American childhood." Whenever trouble arose between blacks and whites, he felt himself to be "on both sides, on neither side--not wanting to have to take sides." Later at the University of Michigan, he recalls with some chagrin that "Afrocentrism" was already entrenched in the curriculum and that signs of a new black awareness were everywhere. "It seemed to me almost like a kind of voluntary resegregation" and "when I walked into the dorm dining room, I had to decide whether to sit at the black table with my black friends or to integrate the white table so I could sit with my white friend. Once he recalls sitting next to a white friend in a class on African politics, a "lanky blond gymnast." "Maybe it was my imagination, but you could cut through the thick layers of hostility with a butter knife. Hostility toward her just for being there, a white woman in a black studies class. And hostility toward me, it seemed, for breaking rank, for preferring the company of the enemy, the oppressor. It was the dining hall test, and I had failed. I had chosen the wrong side."

What is especially telling about these reminiscences is how often blacks are made out to be narrow-minded, even a bit foolish, while whites are depicted as largely innocent victims of black hostility and paranoia. Once, his white suburban friends were on an outing in the heart of Detroit's inner city and crossed paths with a group of black kids from his neighborhood. "One of the white girls saw one of the black girls with an Afro comb, a pick, stuck in the back of her hair, and made some ill-advised comment like, "Why do you have that comb in your hair?" Predictably, given the always simmering hostility of blacks, all hell broke out. The black teenagers were soon "hitting at the windows with chains and bottles and anything else they can get their hands on." As for him, "I was embarrassed. Humiliated. These were my friends and schoolmates--my white friends." And "this is how black kids in the ghetto behaved. This is how they would see me. I was so ashamed that I wanted to cry."

Years later, as a young reporter at The Washington Post, Richburg found that blacks were still acting badly. This time it involved conspiracy theorists in the black community who believed, altogether absurdly, that there was a grand scheme by whites to keep them down. They called it "The Plan." "I learned pretty quickly after coming to Washington that as a journalist, especially one working for the Post, there's no escaping the ongoing urban race war, no way to ignore the Byzantine layers of racial conspiracy theories, no way to simply do your job and be a reporter without being `a black reporter.'"

There is something breathtaking about Richburg's racial defensiveness. On one hand he deplores racial stereotyping, and then goes on to make sweeping judgments that perpetuate them. To say there is "no way" to ignore racial conspiracy theories and "simply do your job," is nonsense. Or take this passage, where he recalls recoiling at the cynicism of his white journalist colleagues during his early days in Africa. "I felt uneasy, the way you do when you're a black guy in America, and you're hanging out with a bunch of white friends and someone tells a friendly `nigger' joke." Excuse me? What are "friendly nigger" jokes? And what kind of person passively listens when his so-called friends insult him to his face?

Much of Richburg's experience on the continent took place in Somalia, which he says "became the prism through which I came to view the rest of Africa." Now imagine a foreign correspondent writing that Bosnia became the "prism" through which he came to view the rest of central Europe, or that the Chinese thugs who put down the Tienanmen Square uprising were typical of Asian leaders throughout the region. It is a preposterous conceit, but Richburg blithely barrels ahead, using Somalia and the later tragedy in Rwanda as metaphors for what he calls "my own disillusionment."

This is not to say that Africa is not plagued with tragic social and political problems. And the atrocities and injustices Richburg witnessed were horrible. But were they all that different from the Khmer Rouges genocidal march through Cambodia, or, for that matter, the Holocaust? African atrocities are different, Richburg insists, because they were committed by people whose culture and behavior are so alien to Western values that they are almost impossible to comprehend. Early on, he concludes, "! knew I could never truly understand what it was like to be an African."

But are Africans really all that different from the rest of us? To demonstrate that they indeed are, Richburg recalls a photograph he once saw of a Kenyan teenager shown laying flat on his back, one of his hands chopped off, while an older man stood over him, "gleefully holding what looks like a giant meat cleaver." The boy had been accused of stealing and the crowd was imposing street justice. "I became fixated first on the boy's screaming face, but then on the faces of the crowd in the background; they were all laughing and smiling" Richburg says, concluding: "How could I possibly relate to these Africans, when we are separated by such a wide gulf of culture and background and emotion and sensitivity? The truth is, as Richburg must surely know, that Europeans, Asians, and, yes, Americans, have behaved just as inhumanely in the recent past. Has he not seen photographs of southern whites grinning as they celebrated the castrated and burned corpse of a recently lynched black man? Are these murderers all that different from those surrounding the teenager in the Nairobi slum?

Still, after having said so much about Africa, Richburg does not seem greatly interested in Africans themselves. We get the names, nationalities, and even sexual peccadilloes of several British journalists, and we meet two black American diplomats who profess to feeling disgusted with the continent, and there are countless interviews with western relief workers. But where are the ordinary Africans, the people one would expect to bump into at the market or have a drink with at a hotel bar? Richburg confesses to spending much of his free time in Nairobi and elsewhere with the mostly white expatriate community, but we hear nothing of the considerable number of black expatriates on the continent. This is not a niggling point, because Richburg makes much of the idea that being a black reporter in Africa put him at a distinct disadvantage to his white colleagues. I wish it were that simple.

Perhaps the most chilling thing about Out of America is how impervious to new experience Richburg shows himself to be. Again and again, he explains how his time in Africa became "an exploration, and a discovery, of myself." In truth, Richburg emerges from his tour with every one of his prejudices intact. "So am I a cold-hearted cynic?" he asks, "An Africa hater? A racist, maybe, or perhaps a lost and lonely self-hating black man who has forgotten his roots?" It's a rhetorical question, and he clearly pleads innocent to all charges. In the end, however, readers may not be so forgiving.

Kenneth Noble, former West Africa bureau chief for The New York Times, is currently on leave, writing a book about the Liberian Civil War.