African Sprouts

RATOONS (248 pp.) -- Daphne Rooke -- Houghfon Mifflin ($2); Ballantine Books (35-c-) For a country with about as many English-speaking people as North Carolina, South Africa exports a high quota of readable novels. The latest on this fall's list is Daphne Rooke's Ratoons. Novelist Rooke (Mittee) takes in the conflict of Zulu against Hindu, Englishman against Boer on a turn-of-the-century sugar plantation, but the drama of racial tensions serves mainly as a backdrop for a melodrama of personal relationships.

Fond of her gentle mother, fearful of her bluff, cruel father, Helen Angus is romping through her teens with artless innocence when Ratoons begins. Then the hothouse climate brings her emotions to quick bloom; she falls in love with a half-Boer boy named Chris and soon is pregnant. Before she can nerve herself to tell anyone, Chris departs for the Boer War, and Helen's mother, herself pregnant, dies while giving birth to a puny boy. When the child dies, Helen's father substitutes Helen's illegitimate baby for his own Nicky.

As the years march by, Helen acquires a gift for juggling the happiness of the three men in her life. Without letting him know that he is her own son, she brings Nicky up well; she runs her father's household and patiently retrieves him from the shacks of native women. As for Chris, she meets and sleeps with him occasionally, never pressing him to offer marriage. For the Helens of this world, Novelist Rooke implies, selflessness can prove its own richest reward.

What saves Ratoons' mechanical plot is Novelist Rooke's sense of scene. Among the book's vivid ones: a sweaty Hindu midwife charging across a hut head down and butting her patient to speed delivery; a band of Zulus chanting a hymn of hate for Hindus: "Who is it that takes our land? The little coolie, the skeleton. Who is this rat that walks like a lion amongst the Zulus? . . . Rise, O Zulus, kill!"

Ratoons, Novelist Rooke explains, are the sprouts that spring from last year's sugar-cane roots. No full-grown stalk of a novel. Ratoons itself bristles with sprouts of promise.

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