LAND OF A THOUSAND HILLS My Life in Rwanda By Rosamond Halsey Carr with Ann Howard Halsey; Viking: 248 pp., $23.95

Poor Africa. Who could love a paradise so wrecked, so lost, so intimate with suffering? After the 1994 Rwandan genocide, Rosamond Halsey Carr had her doubts. She had called this mountain kingdom her home for nearly 50 years and now wondered what life would be like in a country “whose soul had been extinguished.” Nothing was the same, nothing except the memories--and the desire to help. Eighty-seven years old, Carr lives today in the Rwandan city of Gisenyi, near the Congo border, attending to the lost and orphaned children and casting her mind to the past. “Land of a Thousand Hills” is her soulful journey through time.

She arrived in Africa in 1949, and the ravishing land stole the heart of this woman whose career had been as a fashion illustrator in Manhattan. She married an adventurer and a hunter and, although the marriage didn’t last, her romance with the place did, its jagged peaks, clear lakes and rich flowering soil. She managed a plantation in the highlands. She grew acclimated, independent, fell in love with the exotic harmonies of people and animals that lived there and watched the sun set on the European African dream. Neither an apologist nor a critic of the colonial days, she reminisces about the lavish parties she attended and the people she met, “about those glorious years of privilege and complacency, before the Africans reclaimed the land that was theirs and our world was forever changed.”

And it changed with a vengeance: In 1959, anarchy fell upon the country. Ethnic rage boiled over. Tutsis fled to Uganda; Hutus took charge. Central Africa burned with the wild fires of liberation. In the west, the Congo sloughed off Belgian rule; Patrice Lumumba and the Mouvement National Congolais took to the streets and to the radio. “We must intimidate the whites!” Carr recalls hearing a broadcast. “If the whites are frightened, they will do what we want!”

As a new Africa emerged from black hope and white fear, Carr was left alone. By 1963 she was the only American landowner to live in Rwanda. Still she survived, making friends with Dian Fossey, adapting to the new economy and eventually witnessing a period of surprising peace and prosperity. So much the greater her heartbreak: On April 6, 1994, a plane carrying President Juvenal Habyarimana was shot out of the sky as it made its descent into Kigali. “This is the end of the world, Madame,” her cook told her.

In measured tones, she describes how the killing spread across the country. One day eight people were clubbed to death in her fields as they tried to escape their attackers, and soon there were food shortages, power outages and the stench of burning villages and rotting corpses. Carr does not try to explain what happened 5 1/2 years ago, but she is clear that the tragedy lies--as it did in the 1960s--with the world community and the United Nations.

The story Carr tells in “Land of a Thousand Hills” is simple. It reflects the protected and privileged world she found herself in and her deep love for this faraway place. The impression is profoundly resonant: The stories of Africa today--of famine, civil war, AIDS and genocide--keep this land and its people at a tragic distance. The countries here deserve far more than pity.