THE OPENING QUESTION : TROPICAL GANGSTERS <i> By Robert Klitgaard (Basic: $22.95; 273 pp.) </i>

When economist Robert Klitgaard told colleagues he was heading off to work on development in Equatorial Guinea, they were aghast: “What are you?,” asked one. “A masochist? It’s the armpit of the world! On a scale of one to ten . . . it’s a zero.” Klitgaard turned out to be charmed by the small West African country, though its people’s lack of drive and determination eventually managed to defeat even his dogged optimism, forcing him to leave the country after 2 1/2 years despite serious doubts about whether his reforms will be implemented.

Klitgaard politely downplays his frustration in these pages, but it is palpable nevertheless in wry references to “poll taxes without the polls,” jokes about the mandatory confiscation of gin for “biological inspection” (read: consumption), and quotes from ministers whose idealism has grown weary: “Without having even a bicycle,” says one, “we want a Mercedes.”

Interestingly, though, a clue to the decadence that so mystifies Klitgaard can be found in a scene he himself vividly paints at this book’s beginning. It is of a bumbling national parade in Malabo, a sleepy capital of faded orange houses set amid the dark greenery of a volcanic island. Government workers holding banners of support for the President march past two scraggly palm trees in white trash-can planters. Then come “more cabinet ministers than the country has college graduates,” as Klitgaard quips. Finally, the President rolls by in his car, flanked by Moroccan guards who must suddenly halt, then sprint, to keep up with the car’s uneven pace. An inept imitation of Western pomp, it seems, but then a group of dancers arrives: Bedecked in dresses of looping horns, pompons, flowers, leopard skins, pillows and rear-view mirrors, they make the parade electric.

The procession suggests that the Guineans can indeed become galvanized by practices that resonate from their own, mostly Bantu culture. In contrast, their quasi-Western institutions, from banks to bureaucracies, are failing not so much out of incompetence as out of indifference. They are simply reluctant to embrace something so foreign.

The Guineans’ dilemma is to a large extent sub-Saharan Africa’s: They are most inspired when their leaders develop a national identity distinct from that of the old European colonizers, but their leaders’ ability to do so is limited by a dependence on economic aid, which now requires them to follow Western models. Klitgaard’s inability to see this dilemma often leaves him mystified by the culture, as when he wonders why the Guineans would want to keep their empty national bank open instead of luring in foreign investors, as logic dictates.

And yet, while “Tropical Gangsters” hardly affords the reader an intimate view of West African culture, it is a fine example of a genre recently booming with the revival of wonder-struck books by such writers as Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham and Sir Richard Francis Burton: Africa-as-seen-by-outsiders. Like these explorers, Klitgaard is compellingly unpredictable. At one moment, he’s the teen-age surfer, vainly scouring the island in search of the perfect “tube.” (He learns to ask for “Hawaii Five-O,” but only manages to find “Hawaii O-Point-Five.”) At another, he is the middle-aged man, sharing a government minister’s sudden and unexpected grief:

“I received his secrets,” Klitgaard writes, and “outside, as if in cosmic sympathy, the skies had opened, and the rain was cleansing the city.”

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