It is almost possible, but not quite, to squeeze out a tear for Mobutu Sesse Seko in his last days as the diminished dictator of Zaire. Everyone was cheating him, from his own children to the suppliers of the pink champagne he popped open each morning at 9. He had lost control of the military. He could not believe that after 32 years as unquestioned ruler, the "Helmsman" of a huge nation ridiculously endowed with natural riches, he could be defied. But in 1997 a group of rebels took Zaire with little fighting, later restoring to the country a name that conjures many images: Congo.                                                                                                                                                                                                 As Mobutu fled to Morocco, his own elite guard pocked his getaway plane with bullets. The relevant symbol at this point was not his trademark leopard-skin hat, but the diapers he left behind in one of his palaces. Dying of prostate cancer, Mobutu was incontinent.                                                                                                                                                                                                 All this makes for a rich morality play, not only about one man corrupted absolutely (even gleefully, it seems) but also about a continent in a very big mess. "In Mobutu's hands, the country had become a paradigm of all that was wrong with postcolonial Africa," Michela Wrong writes in her firsthand, and first-rate, account of the Mobutu era, "In the Footsteps of Mr.Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu's Congo." It was a parody of a functioning state. Here, the anarchy and absurdity that simmered in so many other sub-Saharan nations were taken to their logical extremes."                                                                                                                                                                                               This is no stretch: Mobutu, a cook's son and bright star of Congo in its early days, looted billions while his people were reduced to meal a day. He played off one ethnic group against another. He presided over an ever-deepening disorder, which he discovered, no doubt to his sublime satisfaction, he could manipulate to his own good use. This remains the state of play, with few exceptions, around Africa. Mobutu was a pioneer. Neither Wrong nor Bill Berkeley, the author of "The Graves Are Not Yet Full: Race, Tribe and Power in the Heart of Africa," gets far in prescribing what might haul Africa out of its chasm.

Neither spends much time poking around for the exceptions to the continent's crisis of spirit and structure. That is not their intention. These two books are about how Africa got the way it is. Both are also briskly written, Wrong's in particular. That is a plus for a subject most outsiders do not even bother to ignore actively.                                                                                                                                                                                                There are many excellent books about Africa, some of them by journalists like Wrong, who has spent several years in Congo, and Berkeley, with almost 20 years of reporting around Africa to his credit. But they tend to fall into two categories: broad apologies for Africa or screeds lamenting the continent's evils - "the horror," if you will. Responsible people might disagree, but to me Wrong's book is a few cuts above because she presents Mobutu's tale as simply that - a good tale. Her version is, in fact, a bit of a romp. But her first order of business is to rescue some of literature's most quoted last words.                                                                                                                                                                                                  In the 1890's, when the Congo had barely begun to exist for outsiders, Joseph Conrard went to work there as a steamship captain. He turned his experience into the novella "Heart of Darkness," the story of Mr. Kurtz, whose mission of commerce and general betterment ended with him, a classical convert, going more native than the natives. Among other unspeakables, the book hints, Kurtz became a cannibal. "The horror, the horror," Kurtz said, and he died, his body steaming enigmatically away on the Congo River.                                                                                                                                                                                                 As Wrong notes, the words are often summoned to describe Africa's latest wretchedness: Aids, Ebola; war-induced famine in Ethiopia or Sudan; limbs hacked off children in Sierra Leone; half a million or more dead in a genocide in Rwanda. But, as she rightly says, Conrard was more preoccupied with rotten Western values, the white man's inhumanity to the black man, than, as is almost always assumed today, black savagery." Kurtz had gone to Congo largely to export ivory, just as the founder of  the Belgian Congo, King Leopold II, made his main business supplying rubber to the new pneumatic tire industry, costing the lives of perhaps 10 million Africans who were forced into labor.                                                                                                                                                                                               Thus, many of the troubles of Africa - which was mostly sealed off until only a short century ago - start with outsiders. First came the slave trade, by Arabs and, later, by Europeans. Then Europe carved up the continent, imbuing Africa  with a profound identity crisis. Maybe worse, the colonists created illogical boundaries that split the natural divisions of geography and ethnic groups, making democracy and state-building after independence in the 1950s and 60s no easy task.                                                                                                                                                                                              Enter Joseph Mobutu, who showed how African leaders could profit from the West's sorry legacy. A tall army sergeant who tried his hand at journalism, Mobutu was initially a friend of Patrice Lumumba, Congo's first prime minister, then his Brutus. Taking power in 1965, Mobutu worked both sides of the cold war, and in the process ensured that no bad behavior would go unrewarded. He stole everything he could.skimming millions off consignments of copper or diamonds. No one had any doubt what he was up to. He barely even bothered to conceal it, except tauntingly to keep up appearances. Wrong describes him at news conferences, as reporters pricked him with questions about his crimes: "It was difficult not to feel a certain grudging admiration for the impeccable politeness, the fake innocence, the ironic demeanor that all broadcast one defiant message: I know your game and am far too old  and wily a fox to be caught out."                                                                                                                                                                                                    The fact is that many forces kept him far from accountability: the West was so eager for his friendship, and do-gooders so eager to do good, that Congo received some $9.3 billion in foreign aid between 1975 and 1997, when rebels finally forced him from power. In Zaire the state was the only real path for advancement, and so nearly everyone, from soldiers to functionaries to the revolving door of top officials, had a stake in keeping the chaos alive.                                                                                                                                                                                                  "The momentum behind Zaire's free fall was generated not by one man but thousands of compliant collaborators, at home and abroad," Wrong writes. The details are what gives her story its juice. She documents the excesses: Mobutu's marriage to identical twins; the lavish palaces and gifts of Mercedes; the suitcases full of cash for European spendfests. Here too is Western treachery: the C.I.A.'s ludicrous approval of a plot to kill Lumumba with a vial of poison; the clockwork meetings with United States presidents, very much aware of the riches of copper, cobalt, uranium and diamonds that Congo had to offer by the ton. She also shows how poor Mobutu, in his last pathetic days was consumed by the system he had created.                                                                                                                                                                                                   As in many African countries, loyalty was largely bought. Wrong quotes Mobutu's Belgian son-in-law, white and a playboy (a fascinating side story in itself), on the drawers full of $100 bills Mobutu continually dipped into to keep the system going. "He paid out, and paid out," the son-in-law says. He was surrounded by leeches, thirsting for dollars ... I looked into his eyes and I felt sorry for him.                                                                                                                                                                                             Through it all, Mobutu, who died less than four months after fleeing Zaire, left behind one undeniable gift: Wrong notes that most people in Congo actually feel like Congolese, citizens of a coherent nation in one of the world's least coherent geographic states, as opposed to a collection of dozens of ethnic groups. The paradox, of course, is that with Congo now split into fiefs of warlords, rebel groups and foreign armies, it has never been so close to being dismembered. Mobutu himself was often fond of quoting the French saying "Apres moi, le deluge."                                                                                                                                                   Wrong's narrative is only barely strung with the spine of an overarching ideas, but this is no great weakness when well-reported anecdotes can do the work. Beckeley's book does have an organizing principle: that the violence and chaos in Africa are not "as senseless as they seem." Rather, African leaders deliberately exploit  ethnic divisions, disorder or outside ties to hold on power and to make money. There is no such thing as "ancient tribal hatred." The real problem is states that operate like criminal sydincates. "Ethnic conflict in Africa is a form of organized crime," with its gangsters in control of states, he says.                                                                                                                                                                                                   It can be a dicey thing for comfortable outsiders to write about what is wrong with Africa, particularly in language as blunt as Berkeley's ("Mobutu Sesse Seko was nakedly, flamboyant evil," he says at one point). On the one hand, as Berkley points out, Europe and America do not have to look far back for their own examples of genocide, slavery, militarism or corruption. And there are inevitable questions of race when white people condemn Africa. On the other hand, there is no denying Africa's problems (and Africans themselves are the first to point them out, ever more loudly, I believe).                                                                                                                                                                                                    Berkeley resolves this problem neatly: His book begins with the statement, "This is a book about evil." But he goes on to say that it is about evil in Africa - not Africa or Africans, are evil in themselves. This may sound obvious or patronizing, but five minutes of conversation with most American on the subject of Africa makes the need to come out and say it quite clear. In fact, Berkeley explains that his book is partly a "pointed rebuttal" to two other authors who have attracted attention in recent years for books on Africa: Robert D. Kaplan, who argued in "The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the New Century" that a chaos and "new-age primitivism" were emanating from places like Africa; and Keith B. Richburg, a Washington Post reporter whose portrait of Africa and its citizens in "Out of Africa: A Black Man Confronts Africa" was grim, to say the least.                                                                                                                                                                                          Berkeley's palate is broader than Wrong's: rather than focusing on one country, he moves around Liberia, Zaire, South Africa, Sudan and Rwanda. In each he shows how leaders like Charles Taylor, in Liberia, or Sudan's Islamic leaders and rebels (a disturbing number with Ph.D.'s), hold on to power as they disregard what their people might need. Like Wrong, he lays a good deal of the blame for Africa's problems on the West: one chapter is devoted entirely to Chester A. Crocker, the top Africa official in Ronald Reagan's State Department, casting him as a distant version of the African "Big Man," on whom many lives depend. I would never in a million years tell you I was seeking what was in the best interests of Liberia," Crocker tells the author at one point, about how the United States befriended one dismal regime after another in Liberia. I was protecting the interests of Washington." Crocker deserves points for candor.                                                                                                                                                                                                Over all, Berkeley's book is a smart and broad introduction to the political crisis in Africa, even if it suffers from a bit of hand-wringing. He is certainly less amused than Wrong. One almost wishes his book had come out a few years earlier: the reporting, while still illustrative, is aging. Crocker, for example, left the State Department in 1988. Berkeley does take a stab at what might turn Africa around, citing how President Museveni has made Uganda a largely peaceful, developing place, if not a full-fledged democracy. The last chapter is the most hopeful: how the cycle of impunity, with African leaders like Mobutu managing to escape responsibility for their acts, is being chipped away, if slowly, as an international tribunal brings the criminals of Rwanda's genocide to justice.                                                                                                                                                                                               Several years ago, The Economist wrote that "it is easy and fashionable to be pessimistic about Africa's future." There is not much in either of these two books to dispute that. What endures is the amazing ability of Africans to suffer, survive and wait, in some dignity, for better days.