The Zanzibar Chest
A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An examination of colonialism and its consequences. “A sweeping, poetic homage to Africa, a continent made vivid by Hartley’s capable, stunning prose” (Publishers Weekly).
In his final days, Aidan Hartley’s father said to him, “We should have never come here.” Those words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back through four generations of one British family. From a great-great-grandfather who defended British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer sent to Africa in the 1920s and who later returned to raise a family there—these were intrepid men who traveled to exotic lands to conquer, build, and bear witness. And there was Aidan, who became a journalist covering Africa in the 1990s, a decade marked by terror and genocide.
After encountering the violence in Somalia, Uganda, and Rwanda, Aidan retreated to his family’s house in Kenya where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved, the chest contained the diaries of his father’s best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who had died under obscure circumstances five decades before. With the papers as his guide, Hartley embarked on a journey not only to unlock the secrets of Davey’s life, but his own.
“The finest account of a war correspondent’s psychic wracking since Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” —Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Toward the end of this mesmerizing chronicle, Hartley writes simply of Rwanda, "Like everything in Africa, the truth 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. B&w photos not seen by PW.
Customer Reviews
Compelling
This is a personal story of bravery and commitment wrapped in a family story of the same. Beautifully, brutally and poetically written. I wish there were fewer glimpses of the beauty and tragedy and more detailed stories. It’s an inchoate story of a young boy in school, Julie ward, a father’s absence, a venture into alcohol and drugs. It’s impact on a young white boys life in Africa could have been transcendent. Instead, it’s confusing and disappointing given the obvious talent and life experience of the author.