The Zanzibar Chest
by Aiden Hartley
For an “Africa junkie” like me, a title like Zanzibar Chest is irresistible.
Aiden Hartley was named after the Aden Protectorates, that exotic but god-forsaken British seaport “clinging to volcanic rock” on the Indian Ocean, where his parents met, fell in love, and married in 1951. He is the latest addition to a family of British wanderers who became “rulers, civil servants, collectors, engineers and planters” in foreign lands sometime during the 29 colonial wars fought by the British, from the Ashanti conflicts in Nigeria to the Boxer Rebellion in China. In his quest to earn his place in the line, he became an African war-zone-addicted gonzo journalist for Reuters Wire Service’s Nairobi bureau, taking with him an appetite for drinks, drugs and women on the scale of the Africa continent.
But Hartley first describes his parents’ 17-year idyll on their Kenyan cattle ranch “between the snowy loaf of Kilimanjaro and the sharp, black mass of Meru” that ended in 1967 with Tanzanian president Nyerere’s experiment in African socialism, with its nationalization of white-owned businesses and disastrous collective schemes. Most of his father’s accomplishments in Africa, “withered or were swept aside or destroyed by politics.”
His parents’ loss stains his own life, and he joins other “fugitives from emotional distress at home, divorce, bereavement, career burnout or boredom” by becoming a frontline hacker, when , and where, “within three hours from Nairobi, there are six wars, several famines, a coup d’état and a natural disaster.”
Dropped into the bloodiest conflicts in Ethiopia, Somalia and Rwanda, Hartley’s compelling, original imagery, coupled with his understanding of the human and political forces at work during war, captures both places and people. Highly sensitive to the rumblings in Africa’s belly, despite the world’s attention on Desert Storm, in 1991 he sensed that inter-clan bloodletting in Somalia was about to implode as “militias liberated the nation not only from dictatorship but also from modern civilization.” They smashed statues of their own heroes, like Ahmed Gran, who defeated the forces of Christian Abyssinia in the 16 th century, and the anti-British guerilla fighter ‘Mad Mullah’ Seyyid Mohamed ibn Abdullah Hassan – the very sources of their indomitable national pride. Somalia, a country with more camels than people, and more camels than any country on earth, was a place that “when you dialed the national code 252, all you heard was electronic ether.” Yet Hartley notes that Somalia was the only conflict in Africa where the dead were carefully washed, shrouded, and buried individually, and not in mass graves. There is hope in that detail.
The withdrawal of U.S. troops from Mogadishu in March 1994 was followed by the April 7 plane crash that killed Rwanda’s Hutu president, Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi’s Cyprien Ntaryarima. The surface-to-air rocket smelled like news.
Hartley is a haunted man, whose memories of Rwanda are “encased in amber.” All the grim details are there – from the evisceration of Africa’s first female prime minister, the moderate and pregnant Hutu, Agathe Uwilingiyimana, to the Hutu refugee camps in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo – a stinking “quagmire of mud” that one nurse describes as “Woodstock without the music.”
When Hartley’s father dies in Mombasa, Kenya , at 86, he discovers a Pandora-like Zanzibar chest containing the diary of his father’s friend, Peter Davey, whose tale of love, conversion to Islam, and murder in Aden in 1947 becomes part of Hartley’s own story. Davey’s words, “I feel that I want no other life than this ,” could easily be Hartley’s own. Better yet are those of his Reuter’s bureau chief: “When you don’t know whether to do something or not, just think about what you want to look back on when you’re an old fart.”
Hartley journey includes close colleagues who died getting the news, including the three stringers murdered by mobs in Mogadishu and the two who perished in the 1996 hijacking of Ethiopian Airlines flight #961 that crashed in the waters off Grande Comore. As with any member of his family for whom, “what survives of each of them in the albums may be only a picture or an anecdote that fills a few lines,” Hartley guarantees that nobody in this book will be forgotten.
Bottom Line: A passionate and exciting read.
Criticism: I would wish for good maps of all the places discussed in order to better follow the author’s path, like his route from Uganda into Kigali, Rwanda.
Published by Grove/Atlantic; 414 pages plus photos; $16.00