Death Zones

By Paul Gray

AFRICAN MADNESS

by Alex Shoumatoff

Knopf; 224 pages; $18.95

African Madness is a terse testament to wanderlust. The book recounts four trips that Alex Shoumatoff, a staff writer for The New Yorker, made to that continent in 1986 and '87. As he notes in his preface, "My vision of the tropics was, and still is, largely romantic." This mood seems to represent a triumph of hope over experience. Three of the visits recorded here were prompted by somber, decidedly unromantic events. Shoumatoff went to Rwanda shortly after naturalist Dian Fossey was hacked to death with a machete in her remote mountainside camp. The trial of former emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa -- on charges ranging from corruption to cannibalism -- drew him to the Central African Republic. And the spread of AIDS across the continent inspired a depressing pilgrimage through a belt of impoverished, afflicted countries.

It is hardly news that catastrophes, man-made and otherwise, are pummeling Africa. But Shoumatoff's first-person reports do not simply catalog misery. Once on the scene, the author concentrates on the feel of a place and the conversation of the local residents, building the big picture through small details. He acknowledges Fossey's courage in trying to protect an endangered band of mountain gorillas; he also discovers that her love for the great apes was matched by her contempt for the Rwandan people. In the Central African Republic he encounters people who wonder why the West makes such a fuss about eating human flesh. Visiting his first AIDS clinic, he is greeted by a doctor visibly wasting away with the disease he is supposed to treat.

Shoumatoff's fourth trip took him to Madagascar, a spot that had intrigued him since childhood. Geologically torn from the mainland some 160 million years ago, the island once teemed with unique flora and fauna. Now, the author finds, forests are being leveled to grow crops, the soil is eroding, species are being crowded or poached out of existence. Shoumatoff does not underline his conclusion, but it is evident throughout the book: once an incubator of life, Africa today offers a panorama of possible deaths. -- P.G.