The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
Aidan Hartley, 2003
Penguin Group USA
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594480119
Summary
Hartley, a frontline reporter who covered the atrocities of 1990s Africa, embarks on a journey to unlock the mysteries and secrets of his own family's 150-year-colonial legacy in Africa, and delivers a beautiful, sometimes harrowing memoir of intrepid young men cut down in their prime, of forbidden love and its fatal consequences, and of family and history, and the collision of cultures that defined them both. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1965
• Where—Nairobi, Kenya
• Education—Oxford University
• Currently—lives in Kenya
Aidan Hartley is a Kenyan journalist. He was born in Nairobi in 1965. From age 7-12 he attended Ravenswood School, a boarding school near Tiverton in Devon, England. He graduated from Oxford and the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) with a degree in Area Studies.
As a foreign correspondent for Reuters news agency, Hartley covered Africa in the 1990s—wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He is currently a columnist for the Spectator, and a correspondent for Unreported World. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
The former Reuters correspondent has written the most startling memoir of Africa for a generation. It is a complicated book. A white Kenyan, born of a line of colonial adventurers...he saw [in journalism] an opportunity to re-engage with the continent of his birth, yet his experience of Africa's postcolonial dismantling seems only to confirm he doesn't belong.... As a quest for belonging, his years on the road seem more likely to have been a failure. Yet his recollection of them is gripping, and often intensely moving
Guardian (UK)
A lyrical, passionate memoir of this dark continent. On the surface, Hartley's book professes to explore why his father and so many other Englishmen of his generation turned time and time again to Africa. Its real aim is far more ambitious: to explore the motives of many generations of white people—good and bad, but mostly confused—who have washed up on Africa's wilder shores of love. His judgement of the foreign politicians who have involved themselves in the continent is tough without being hysterical. And he has a sure pen for character! he writes best about the dichotemies within himself—his ache for Africa, his rage at its horrors, his longing for peace.
Economist
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.
Publishers Weekly
Only a person who truly understands Africa, having been born, raised and nurtured by the continent, could be as honest a reporter of its glories and horrors as Aidan Hartley. He worked as a reporter during the '90s and was witness to some of the terrible massacres, famines and suffering; but as an African native himself, though one with Western eyes, he reveals an Africa rarely seen by Americans. Contrasting with his own adventures are those of his father's friend, Peter Davey, who experienced different trials in East Africa a generation before Hartley, an honest and vivid writer. Much of what he writes is not pretty, but everything is insightful. (Ages 15 to adult.)
KLIATT
Hartley, a journalist and British subject...offers a startlingly refreshing perspective on the political, social, and cultural impact of British colonialism in Africa and Arabia.... 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.
Booklist
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for for The Zanzibar Chest:
1. Is Aidan Hartley Kenyan or British? What does he consider himself?
2. Describe the era into which Hartley was born—the changes in Africa as it moved from colonialism to post-colonialism? How does Hartley see the impact of European colonialism on Africa as its nations attempt to become stable, productive sovereign states?
3. What do you make of Hartley's father? What does Hartley make of him?
4. The Zanzibar Chest is in many ways a quest story. Why does Hartley want to connect with the past generations of his family? What does he hope for? Does he ever "find" what he's looking for?
5. As a follow-up to Question 3: Hartley says, "What I was looking for was a war that I could call my own—a complete experience that would define me as the son of my father and involve me as an insider." What does he mean?
6. How did the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States affect Africa? What happened to the continent once the cold war "cooled off"?
7. What does being a journalist mean to Hartley? What did he hope to accomplish as a journalist—in Somalia and elsewhere?
8. Describe the conditions in Somalia when Hartley arrived: the "Dionysian orgy of destruction." Hartley says it was a privilege to have witnessed "a people who tumbled into the abyss with such style." What does he mean?
9. To what does Hartley attribute the Somalian U.S. military disaster? Does his depiction of events square with accounts you might have read, or seen, before, say, in Black Hawk Down?
10. Hartley is open and frank about his drug and alcohol abuse. Were you sympathetic, or not, to his reasons?
11. Why is Hartley drawn to violence? How does it affect his relationships to both men and women?
12. Talk about the horrors of Rwanda. How did it affect Hartley? How does his account of the bloodshed and tragedy compare with other accounts you might have read of or seen?
13. Hartley writes about Rwanda, "Like everything else in Africa, the truth lies somewhere in between." Can you explain what he means?
14. How does Hartley portray some of his fellow correspondents?
15. How does Peter Davey's story compare to Hartley's own story? What does Hartley see in Davey's story that resonates with his own life?
16. How did Davey's death represent the loss of innocence of Hartley's father?
17. Talk about the ways in which Hartley criticizes both the United States and the United Nations? How does he feel they have failed Africa? Are his criticisms fair?
18. What did you find most disturbing, or chilling, as you read this book? What was most difficult to read about?
19. What solutions exist for Africa to participate fully in the 21st century? What does Africa need to do...and what is required of the international community?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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