NONFICTION - Nov. 30, 1986

ANOTHER DAY OF LIFE by Ryszard Kapuscinski; translated from the Polish by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mrozkowska-Brand (A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: $14.95; 113 pp.). Eleven years and 30 or 40 “little wars” ago, Angola gained its independence from Portugal, and Ryszard Kapuscinski, a Polish journalist, was there to record the collapse of the decaying colonial regime, the struggle for power among the three Angolan liberation movements and the ultimate triumph, with some Soviet and Cuban assistance, of President Agostinho Neto’s Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which still governs the country today.

But Kapuscinski’s impressionistic reportage is less about Angola than those “little wars,” perhaps a dozen of which are under way at any time up and down the Third World. When those wars seem to matter in geopolitical terms, as the conflicts in Afghanistan, Nicaragua and Cambodia do today, the rest of the world pays some attention; more frequently, they are ignored.

“War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides,” Kapuscinski observes as he is caught up in the murderous Angolan struggle. “To others, it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.” Kapuscinski, whose books on the fall of the Shah of Iran and the ouster of Emperor Haile Selassie in Ethiopia have become classics, was right in the middle of it all in Angola, and he tells it very well.