Africa Betrayed : OUT OF AMERICA: A Black Man Confronts Africa.<i> By Keith B. Richburg</i> .<i> Basic Books: 235 pp, $23</i>

Keith Richburg is a journalist, and the fact is painfully clear in the way he has written “Out of America.” From one news story to the next, one disastrous destination to another, from calamity to crisis to devastation and folly, Richburg paints a portrait of Africa that is vividly familiar to anyone who turns on the evening news or flips through a weekly newsmagazine. And that seems to be a large part of the problem with his book: that he writes as a journalist. There is nothing new here, nothing that we have not already seen far too many times before, and we are given no new ways to see these tragic circumstances.

As Washington Post bureau chief in Africa, Richburg has experienced firsthand the cruelty of life and the nearness of death that hides from most of us, and certainly from those of us who have not been there, the fullness of Africa, its beauty, its incomprehensible generosity, its wealth of emotional richness. Unfortunately for the readers of his book, he experiences Africa and sees the continent only with the eyes of a news gatherer whose Africa is completely framed within the hot news spots, the danger zones, the headline story. And that is all he sees of Africa and all he allows us to see.

Which is not to criticize his book for what he has written, for that would be an attempt to negate his experience, or to ask that he write a different book. He saw what he saw and felt what he felt, and that is enough. But perhaps it is because he is a journalist that he saw these things and only these things and always from within the simultaneously protected and on-the-edge cloak of a foreigner with an agenda.

But it is to criticize the book for the way he has written it, one-dimensionally and without feeling.

Where is the beauty that surely must be there, where is the love to balance all that is terrible in this place that Richburg reveals to us? This world, this Africa, is indeed in many ways, in many places, a kind of hell for him, but where is any shred of hope or trust in an African tomorrow to counter his admitted cynicism?

And that is precisely Richburg’s point: There is none. His aim is to reveal Africa in all of its stinky, rotting and horrid ugliness--devoid of any beauty whatsoever. “Talk to me about Africa . . .” he writes, “and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose into the images of rotting flesh.” For Richburg, Africa is a hopeless nightmare of bureaucratic craziness, rebel armies on the rampage, genocide, starvation and far too few bright spots to mar the morass with anything resembling hope.

Had Richburg been white, such an unrelenting portrayal of misery would have been understandable--in the sense that a white reporter would have no emotional subtext to draw upon--and therefore easily dismissed as just another reportage. But Richburg is a black American, and his able reporting is served by an added dimension.

An American black man living, working and traveling in Africa is a compelling premise, all the more forceful if that black American exits Africa with a sense of gratitude not for slavery itself, surely, but for the slavers without whom Richburg, with a bit of imaginative extrapolation, would have been born to Africa and left to Africa’s misfortunes.

As the hacked up and bloated corpses float in the Kagera River, victims of Rwanda’s genocide campaign drifting on the water toward Lake Victoria, Richburg writes that “if things had been different, I might have been one of them.” The prospect leaves him thanking God that his ancestors were snatched away and survived the voyage to America. Thus he revels in his role as mere spectator to the countless civil wars and tribal clashes that plague the continent.

“Come with me, if you’re willing, and I’ll take you on a journey--it’s my own personal journey, much of it taking place inside my head. It won’t be pretty, but that’s my point. I want you to feel it like I did. Touch it, smell it. Let me be your guide. . . .”

He promises, but he doesn’t deliver. Something is missing, an emotional element that eludes a reporter just telling the story. Although he takes us where he wants us to go, shows us what he wants us to see, he never gets us really to touch Africa or to smell it--and Africa never touches us. After a while, it all blurs into more of the same: Africa as a harsh place ruled by despotic maniacs and overseen by an inefficient bureaucracy totally committed to seeing that nothing gets done and that nothing ever changes. In the end, we care no more about Africa when we have finished his book than we did before we started; care no more than the bureaucrats and the expatriate workers and the journalists covering Africa; in fact, care no more than Richburg himself.

“I’m leaving Africa now, so I don’t care anymore about the turmoil in Rwanda and have no interest in this latest tragic development. I’ve seen it all before, and I’m sure I’ll see it again.”

The same, too, with his readers. He doesn’t care--why then should we?