One Man's View of a Continent the Africans Pbs;

By RICHARD ZOGLIN.

The room in an expensive West African hotel has most of the amenities of Western accommodations. But the radio and television sets do not work, nor does the telephone. As for the hot-water faucet, it has never even been connected. A perfect symbol, our guide tells us, for the central contradiction of a continent: Westernization is only a facade that hides the "realities of Africa."

Those realities -- at least, one person's view of them -- are the subject of The Africans, a series that has ignited PBS's latest brush fire of controversy. The nine-week survey of African culture, history and politics has drawn a sharp attack from Lynne Cheney, the Reagan-appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supplied $600,000 of the program's $3.5 million budget. The series, she charges, "frequently degenerates into anti-Western diatribe" and fails to meet NEH's "standards of balance and objectivity." Among her complaints: a sympathetic portrayal of Libyan Leader Muammar Gaddafi. At Cheney's insistence, NEH's name was removed from the show's credits, and a request for funds to promote the show was denied.

Executives at Washington's WETA-TV (which co-produced the series with the BBC) and at PBS have stood by the program, pointing out that it is intended to be an African's view of Africa. Its writer and host, Ali A. Mazrui, a Kenya- born professor of political science at the University of Michigan, admits that his opinions do not "fall into the mainstream of American thinking." But he argues that NEH ought to be willing to "fund things that are outside the perspective of the Western world."

Most of the problems of present-day Africa, Mazrui suggests, can be traced to Western interlopers: from the missionaries and slave traders of early days, through the European colonialists who carved up the continent with arbitrary national borders, to capitalists who have plundered its natural resources, "often bequeathing decay rather than development." The series contains no on-camera interviews, just Mazrui's narration set against striking shots of African life and landscapes. The rhetoric is sometimes excessive ("the collective burial of a people," "Western sharks in search of a pound of flesh"). And Mazrui's approach can be annoyingly simplistic: his blaming, for instance, virtually all African violence on weapons imported from the West and his naive romanticizing of Gaddafi.

But Mazrui's personal, impassioned views are what set The Africans apart from most of PBS's good gray fare, and he makes telling points about his homeland's cultural predicament. Africa today, he says, is dependent on the West in ways it cannot control: without the English and French languages, | public business in most countries would come to a halt. Western moral standards have often seemed as impenetrable to Africans as theirs have to us. "Early European missionaries," Mazrui notes, "found it easier to admit a slave owner to Communion than a member of a polygamous household." Meanwhile, Africa still has to import most of the manufactured goods made from its own abundant raw materials. For all its polemics, The Africans has a great deal to say, and it does so with eloquence and power.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York