BECAUSE OF AND in spite of Hollywood films like The African Queen and television shows like Tarzan, tropical Africa south of the Sahara and north of the Zambezi is terra incognita for most Americans. Some cling to fragments of the "noble savage" myth advanced by Jean Jacques Rousseau, who argued that in an idyllic "state of nature" uncorrupted by civilization, people are innocent, happy, and brave.

Others accept the opposing myth promulgated by Thomas Hobbs that in a "State of Nature," there are "no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worse of all, persistent fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

Neither myth reflects the real tropical Africa that I saw in the 1960s while there researching three books on U.S. policy. Almost everywhere I saw poverty, corruption, and a retreat from the rudimentary rule of law established by the British and French colonial powers.

As Kempton Makamure, a political opponent of President Mugabe, wrote recently in Zimbabwe's Financial Gazette, "It is entirely possible that conflicts within independent states in Africa have caused more privation, deaths and stalled development than the colonial rule they have replaced."

President Kennedy and some of his Africa hands were more optimistic. Naive might be a better word. They saw themselves as heralds of freedom. Unduly critical of the European colonists, they seemed unaware that the British, for example, had ended slavery 79 years before Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Perhaps the greatest flaw in the official U.S. perception was the failure to recognize that long before the Europeans had arrived, Africa had seethed with tribal wars and indigenous slavery. The Western traffic in human beings would not have been possible without the active participation of African slavers eager to sell Africans of other tribes to their Western counterparts. As a poignant African proverb put it, "The tears of a stranger are only water."

Back to Hobbs. If it took a thousand years for the barbarian tribes of Europe to become democratic and prosperous states, how long will it take African tribes that missed the Renaissance, Reformation, Magna Carta, and Industrial Revolution?

The British, French, and Portuguese colonialists--and Christian missionaries--introduced Western medicine, schools, and rudimentary institutions for governing by the rule of law. Despite these benefits and postcolonial aid efforts, economic development and democracy faced formidable obstacles.

When the colonial powers withdrew, tribal conflict again erupted and in some places indigenous slavery reappeared. Since 1955, bloody wars in Nigeria, Congo, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda, and elsewhere killed as many as five million people and produced more than six million refugees. Indigenous slavery, stamped out by the colonial powers, had returned in some places, notably in Sudan.

And brutal demagogues like Mobutu in the Congo, Adi Amin in Uganda, and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe have ravaged their countries to enjoy the fruits of unbridled power.