NONFICTION - April 26, 1992

KILLING THE WIZARDS; Wars of Power and Freedom From Zaire to South Africa by Alan Cowell (Simon and Schuster: $23; 273 pp.). As an Africa correspondent, selling your stories to American readers in 1992 is no mean feat. Bush wars 10,000 miles away in the Transvaal, after all, carry only so much interest at a time when AK-47 fire is reverberating through our inner cities. And the region’s wars seem even less relevant now that the continent is no longer a checkerboard of East/West ambitions.

In “Killing the Wizards,” Alan Cowell of the New York Times solves this dilemma with elan. Rather than precisely charting which bombs were hurled toward what city, he relates human dramas that hit close to home and paints devastating caricatures of leaders who are blissfully far from home. The real war the communists and the colonialists were fighting on the continent was not one against each other, Cowell came to realize, but one against their own faulty assumptions.

We see how followers of Cecil Rhodes--lured to the continent by the promise of creating modern cities where streets are lined with jacarandas, fragrant flowers and modern supermarkets--end up mourning the fall of their country, Rhodesia, in a drafty, retired servicemen’s meeting hall in Durban, under dusty, faded portraits of Queen Elizabeth II. Their faulty assumption: “Beyond the tribe lies only glory.” The indigenous Africans who took over from colonialists like Rhodes, in turn, are being defeated by their assumption that “beyond the tribe lies only peril”: It has provoked Africans such as Winnie Mandela to hate those perceived as disloyal to their tribe, while showering tribal leaders with absurd wealth. While legless beggars stake out turf on the grandiose sidewalks outside President Mobutu Sese Seko’s mansion in Zaire, for example, Mobutu is known to phone his airline to reserve a DC10 so one of his wives can take friends on a European shopping spree.

What’s most impressive about “Killing the Wizards” is that it refuses either to glorify or demonize the colonialists or the natives. Cowell’s ambivalence goes against the literary grain, which is divided these days between writers such as Wole Soyinka, who eloquently criticize indigenous African leaders, and writers like Basil Davidson and Noel Mostert, who will publish books in June arguing that Africa was well on the way to developing sophisticated nation-states when the “civilized” West began setting up shop.