The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands [Hardcover]

Aidan Hartley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003

An epic narrative combining the literary reportage of Ryzard Kapuscinski with a historical love story reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

In his final days, rising from a bed made of mountain cedar, lashed with thongs of rawhide from an oryx shot many years before, Aidan Hartley’s father says to him, "We should have never come." Those words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back over 150 years through four generations of one British family. From great-great-grandfather William Temple, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his role in defending British settlements in nineteenth century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer sent to Africa in the 1920s, building dams and irrigation projects in Arabia in the 1940s, then returning to Africa to raise a family—these were intrepid men who traveled to exotic lands to conquer, to build, and finally to bear witness. For finally there is Aidan, who becomes a journalist covering Africa in the 1990s. Weaving together stories, his family’s history, and his childhood in Africa, Aidan tells us what he saw.

After the end of the Cold War, there seemed to be new hope for Africa but again and again—in Ethiopia, in Somalia, Rwanda, and the Congo, the terror and genocide prevailed. In Somalia, three of Aidan’s close friends are torn to pieces by an angry mob. Then, after walking overland from Uganda with the rebel army, Aidan is witness to the terrible atrocities in Rwanda, appearing at the sites and interviewing survivors days after the massacres. Finally, burnt out from a decade of horror, Aidan retreats to his family’s house in Kenya where he discovers the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved and smelling of camphor, the chest contained the diaries of his father’s best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who died under mysterious circumstances over fifty years ago. Tucking the papers under his arm, Hartley embarked on a journey to southern Arabia in an effort not only to unlock the secrets of Davey’s life, but of his own. He travels to the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia where his father served as a British officer. He begins to piece together the disparate elements of Davey’s story, a man who fell in love with an Arabian princess and converted to Islam, but ultimately had to pay an exacting price.

The Zanzibar Chest is an enthralling narrative of men and women meddling with, embracing, and ultimately being transformed by other cultures—one of the most important examinations of colonialism ever written.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Toward the end of this mesmerizing chronicle, Hartley writes simply of Rwanda, "Like everything in Africa, the truth [is] somewhere in between." Hartley appreciates this complexity, mining the accounts that constitute his book not for the palliative but for the redemptive. Born in 1965 in Kenya into a long lineage of African colonialists, Hartley feels, like his father whose story he also traces, a magnetic, almost inexplicable pull to remain in Africa. Hartley's father imports modernity to the continent (promoting irrigation systems and sophisticated husbandry); later, Hartley himself "exports" Africa as a foreign correspondent for Reuters. Both men struggle to find moral imperatives as "foreigners" native to a continent still emerging from colonialism. Hartley's father concludes, "We should never have come here," and Hartley himself appears understandably beleaguered by the horrors he witnesses (and which he describes impressively) covering Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda. Emotionally shattered by the genocide in the latter ("Rwanda sits like a tumour leaking poison into the back of my head"), the journalist returns to his family home in Kenya, where he happens upon the diary of Peter Davey, his father's best friend, in the chest of the book's title. Hartley travels to the Arabian Peninsula to trace Davey's mysterious death in 1947, a story he weaves into the rest of his narrative. The account of Davey, while the least engaging portion of the book, provides Hartley with a perspective for grappling with the legacy that haunts him. This book is a sweeping, poetic homage to Africa, a continent made vivid by Hartley's capable, stunning prose.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hartley, a journalist and British subject with four generations of colonial administrators in the family, offers a startlingly refreshing perspective on the political, social, and cultural impact of British colonialism in Africa and Arabia. The son of a foreign service officer, Hartley was raised in East Africa and educated in British prep schools. As a journalist, he traveled the war circuit through Rwanda, Ethiopia, Somalia, Bosnia, and other hot spots. Drawing on his personal experience of colonial legacy--his family being more comfortable fighting and dying in the colonies than living in Mother England--and his contemporary journalistic perspectives on war and conflict, Hartley details a fascinating odyssey that reflects on the past, present, and future of colonialism. He criticizes the policies of the UN and the U.S. in many of the world's trouble spots, putting a contemporary face on historic colonialism with an accuracy and veracity seldom seen in Western critiques. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 414 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press; 1 edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0871138719
• ISBN-13: 978-0871138712
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (45 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #310,519 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #66 in Books > History > Africa > Central Africa

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

98 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Romantic, absurd, gripping - you can't put this book down, July 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands (Hardcover)

I picked up this book based on its cover artwork and the title, which sounded romantic and intriguing. I was not at all prepared for the author's harrowing accounts of his years in East Africa as a stringer for Reuters, or for the lingering effect this book has had on me. While he uses bits of his family history and the interesting story of one of his father's best friends as the glue to hold his tale together, The Zanzibar Chest is essentially a memoir of the author's own experiences as a journalist covering the century's most forgotten wars and hot spots: Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia. While other correspondents covered the glamorous European war - the Balkans - Hartley and his band of fellow cowboys lurched from country to country, hitching rides on UN cargo jets, on convoys of armed guerrillas, or travelling hundreds of miles by foot in the company of whichever militia would take them along - usually at their own expense. The descriptions of war, and in particular the unique hopelessness of African civil wars (ignored by the rest of the world), are written in flawless prose - evocative, truthful, but with a journalist's precision. The book becomes much more personal, however, as Hartley describes the deaths of his Reuters colleagues - several of whom died in a most horrific incident in Somalia. His retelling of the story of the four journalists stoned to death by an angry mob in Mogadishu will send chills down any reader's spine: it is this chapter that eventually brings the book into focus and reveals its purpose. (And it will illuminate and inform readers of Black Hawk Down.) The personal details that Hartley includes in the book - a full-blown love affair in the midst of the Rwandan genocide, his own use and abuse of drugs and alcohol to numb the pain - occasionally render him pathetic, but they also allow us to feel more than sympathy for him. Not many people could have survived the conditions that Hartley did, let alone live to write about it in such elegant prose. The futlity and senselessness of war and death in Africa is conveyed through a series of heartbreaking stories, and one can't help but take away an overwhelming sadness at the fate of most African nations and their people. By telling the story of Peter Davey - his father's best friend and an almost typical example of the 'white man in africa' in the early 20th century - Hartley manages to capture some of the inexplicable romance and allure of the continent and its people (although much of Davey's story takes place in the Yemen). Westerners will always try - and always fail - to put their finger on what it is that draws us to the 'other', whether we call it Orientalism or Colonialism or something else. Hartley's love for his home - he was born and raised and continues to live in Kenya - is obvious and contagious. His despair over his adopted home's fate is equally tangible. The Zanzibar Chest is an exceptionally graceful and stirring debut, and although one gets the feeling that Hartley has poured most of his heart and soul into this book, I can only hope that there are other stories that he has yet to tell.

35 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A vivid portrait of Africa in transition, September 30, 2003

By 

J. N. Mohlman (Barrington, RI USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands (Hardcover)

"The Zanzibar Chest" by Aidan Hartley is a beautifully written memoir of one man's Africa; from the depths of human depravity to the joy of a life lived simply and well. As the child of a British colonial officer, Hartley witnessed firsthand the remarkable changes that Africa has undergone in the latter half of the twentieth century. During his youth his ideal Africa is formed by his father's vision of the continent as a pastoral paradise, and it is through his father that his abiding love of Africa is established. However, as a reporter for Reuters, he has a front row seat to the periodic paroxysms of violence and disease that plague the continent. This dichotomy comes to manifest itself in Hartley himself, as he becomes an adrenaline junkie who, even as he craves the comfort of his native Kenya, is drawn to the brutality of Somalia and Rwanda.

In addition to being autobiographical, Hartley attempts to weave in the tale of his father's long deceased best friend, Peter Davey, into his narrative. While interesting in and of itself, this diversion never succeeds in tying in to the main body of the work. Hartley struggles valiantly to draw a comparison between himself and Davey, but the links are tenuous at best. In the end, the reader is left with the indication that if Hartley had been born fifty years earlier, he would have become a man like Davey, but this is a conclusion that is hardly supported by what is revealed about both men. Nonetheless, as I alluded to above, Davey's tale is an intriguing one, and while it is oddly disconnected from the rest of the book, it is still an interesting tale.

That said, where the book really shines is in Hartley's descriptions of his life as a journalist. An immensely gifted writer, Hartley succeeds in producing prose that is both descriptive and spare at the same time. Considering his subject matter that is exactly what was called for; the brutality of the Rwandan civil war in large part speaks for itself, Hartley thus generally confines himself to bearing witness. However, when he does offer a more personal view, it is always well chosen to distill an abomination into a single mental snapshot. For example, his description of finding a young boy alive in a mass grave captures the tragedy of central Africa far more effectively than a hundred pages of focused history.

Perhaps most compelling, however, is when Hartley turns his considerable talents to introspection. Unlike many combat reporters, he openly admits that he is drawn to the violence. It is clear that this is because Hartley can drown his own demons in the day to day danger and tragedy of combat; it strips away humanity even as it makes relationships all the more intense. Hartley describes how friendships sealed in blood seem oddly stilted and uncomfortable when the danger is removed. Particularly interesting is Hartley's relationship with a female photographer. While there is no doubt that they share a genuine love, it is utterly ruined by their shared experiences. What is necessary under fire seems contrived and selfish in the safety of home.

Finally, there is the piece that links everything together, Hartley's telling of his family history, and how they came to Africa. This remarkable tale of Britons from the colonial era offers a unique insight into the oddly disconnected lives of white Africans. No longer Europeans, but not Africans, and no loner in power, their struggle to come to grips with their place in the world parallels Hartley's struggle to reconcile the idealized Africa of his youth with the troubled continent of his present. Moreover, Africa itself is revealed by this history, as we see a continent forced into a mold determined by colonial powers, only to explode into a third, much worse, form at the end of colonial era. Nonetheless, Hartley sees hope in the warmth and beauty of the land and its people.

In "The Zanzibar Chest" Hartley has produced a memoir of remarkable power. It is a work of both despair and hope, but ultimately one of catharsis, as revealed by the afterward. While sometimes lacking in focus, the book is more than redeemed by Hartley's superb prose and keen eye. It offers keen insight into an often overlooked region, and a fresh perspective on situations that are only vaguely understood in the West. More than that though, it is one man's coming of age in a place of beauty and danger; evocative and engaging, it is not to be missed.

Jake Mohlman

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sex and drugs and atrocities..., September 17, 2003

By 

JT "ManyHands" (Chicago) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands (Hardcover)

This book is a vivid account of a young man's coming of age in Africa, a very different Africa than his forebears had inhabited for the previous 150 years. His story is woven with a narrative about his father and a close friend of the family who are admirable and fascinating in ways that brought 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' and 'Out of Africa' to mind.

In contradistinction is the life of Mr. Hartley, who begins his career as a Reuters stringer quite well educated but professionally clueless. He gradually hones his craft during long, hot, unhygenic, drug-fueled months through close friendships with more seasoned and cynical professionals. Eventually he himself becomes a seasoned and cynical professional and acts as mentor to newcomers.

Together, he and his friends bear witness to several famines, the civil war in Rwanda, as well as the battle of Mogidishu. It is the butchering in Rwanda that finally overfills his capacity for horror. He eventually retires to write this memoir.

Though he possesses the neutral eye of a journalist, Mr. Hartley does occasionally talk about the way the the events affect him and criticizes western goverments' attempts to help.

The structure of this book was the most interesting part of the book to me. I enjoyed the contrast between his progress through the 1990s horror show with his pursuit of long dead characters of another generation.

I bought this book because I enjoyed the author's interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Because of that interview, I was already familiar with the story and some of the most terrifying events, particulary in Rwanda.

I was, therefore, most shocked by his incredulous reaction to the inhumanity he witnessed in a brief assignment in Bosnia. In a way that is puzzling to me, Mr. Hartley ambles through the bloody lanes of his homeland, but can't seem to reach his mind around the violence in a European country.

All told, I enjoyed his 'voice' on the radio more than in the book, but as an artifact from the ground of some of the most Biblical destruction in the past century, this book is indispensible.