Last Days in Cloud Cuckooland:: Dispatches from White Africa

Reared in Rhodesia, educated at a university in South Africa, Boynton has worked for publications in Britain and the United States but keeps returning to Africa. This book--part memoir, part reportage--consists of engaging tales hobbled somewhat awkwardly by white Africans from different countries and different eras. Boynton opens with a pessimistic picture of democratic South Africa: white suburbanites, terrified of burgeoning crime, live behind layers of security. Though Boynton says he long resisted white shibboleths about decline under black governments, he found himself hankering for the ""benign paternalism"" of colonial rule. After describing contemporary Afrikaners ""on the run from black Africa,"" he flashes back to the 1960s, when white Belgian colonialists sought refuge in his Rhodesian homeland and he confronted his own ambivalent colonial identity. Perhaps the most interesting chapter involves Rick Turner, the academic who led white antiapartheid activists in Durban, South Africa, and was murdered in 1978, allegedly by the government. Other tales involve poor white South Africans who have been arrested for killing, Boynton's return visit to a corrupt Zimbabwe, white conservationists bickering with Western organizations that wanted to ban the ivory and rhino-horn trade and three right-wing South Africans ignominiously killed in the days before elections, which were finally held in the country in 1994. Boynton concludes with deep skepticism about black rule in Africa, though he acknowledges that South Africa's future looks better than its past. While he claims that black rule has been mostly bad, Boynton's seeming endorsement of partial recolonization insultingly dismisses those black Africans who support democracy and fight corruption and inefficiency. Photos. (Aug.)