A Brightness in the Dark Continent : CAMPING WITH THE PRINCE And Other Tales of Science in Africa <i> by Thomas A. Bass (Houghton Mifflin: $19.95; 282 pp.) </i>

“Right from the start,” Thomas A. Bass writes in the first line of his book on Africa, “I know that nothing about this trip is going to go as planned.” It’s a nice opening that tells as much about the unpredictability of Africa itself as it does about the pages that follow.

Bass chose an unlikely vehicle to explore a face of Africa we know little of. He spent two years traveling the continent with seven scientific expeditions, and what emerges in “Camping With the Prince, And Other Tales of Science in Africa” goes beyond a familiar recitation of Africa’s plight and confronts broader questions about the role of Western aid, the residue of colonialism and the willingness of African governments to improve the lives of their people.

Although some readers may occasionally wish Bass were less diligent in satisfying his scientific curiosity, his journey from Timbuktu to Turkana introduces us to a host of compelling African and Western characters whose struggle to make Africa a healthier, more prosperous place is often doomed to failure.

One of the refreshing strengths Bass brings to what I suspect was a labor of love is that his real heroes are Africans: bright, educated, dedicated and optimistic--the people we read of all too seldom in the gloomy news reports emanating from “the dark continent.” Thomas Risley Odhiambo, recalling his upbringing in colonial Kenya and his early work as an entomologist for the Tea Research Institute of East Africa, says, “The head of my department told me he could not conceive of an African being an entomologist. Africans didn’t even grow tea. It must be remembered, of course, that they were forbidden to do so by law.”

When his employers at a second job with the Ugandan Ministry of Agriculture discovered he was doing research, they told him not to waste the department’s time and to get back to his responsibilities curating the insect collection. So Odhiambo, who wrote his doctoral dissertation at Cambridge, did research on his own, at night and over weekends. He became the first black man in East Africa to publish a scientific paper in an international journal, and the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology he started in a rain-soaked Nairobi garage eventually grew into an $8 million organization with 40 senior scientists.

Bass has admiration for the scientists he finds in the field--trying to develop an early-warning system for famine; to find solutions for drought-related problems in the Niger delta; to determine the effects of overfishing in Lake Malawi--but he leaves no doubt that African governments share responsibility for the continent’s problems, and that Western governments’ aid projects often are nothing more than white elephants. “I would quit if I had the nerve,” a Dutch official from the World Bank says. “We’re part of the mafia of high-level bureaucrats that’s involved in recycling ideas from the 1950s and calling them new.” The Norwegians spent $2 million on a fish-freezing plant in Kenya that never froze a fish and another $20 million on a road connecting the plant to the Nairobi highway.

Irrigation schemes have created a plague of waterborne diseases. Vaccination programs have resulted in epidemics when discontinued. Malnutrition has been aggravated by the West’s attempt to replace breast-feeding with infant formula. “The patient,” Bass writes of Africa, “has been sick so long that one grows suspicious of both the doctors and the diagnosis.”

Indeed, it was the white man who brought many diseases to Africa in the first place and, according to many Africans the author meets, Americans who were responsible for the spread of AIDS, a disease they see as symbolic of the decay of the white empire. Another scientist makes a convincing argument that famine is not the result of natural disaster and insufficient food, as we generally believe in the West, but stems from the Africans’ inability to get the money to buy food.

The odd but inviting title of Bass’ book comes from the visit of Prince Philip, the World Wildlife Fund president, to the Mali outback, where Stephen and Alison Cobb are trying to save the Niger delta and its people from the encroaching Sahara. Very little goes right for the prince.

He finds python skins for sale in the lobby of his hotel; his physician’s aides forget to refrigerate the snake-bite serum, and the site Mrs. Cobb chooses for a picnic of cucumber sandwiches is not to his liking. He gulps down a sandwich and roars off, passing right by another royal picnic the governor has laid on down the road. Prince Philip ends up by giving a brief speech in the middle of nowhere about the Sahelian drought, attended only by Bass and the prince’s small entourage.

One wonders, if things can go so badly for a prince, what prayer does the average African have? Still, Bass manages to find reason for hope in his entertaining narrative. His optimism is based not on the proximity of solutions but on the fact that a new generation of post-colonial Africans--scientists and others--are taking the lead in grappling with the problems that control their destiny.