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.
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