Life, Love, and Death in Africa
Concrete structures rose around me, nosing up through the slum smog: ministries, multinationals, agencies of the United Nations. From a street corner, I watched the teeming scene: office workers in their frayed shirt collars and cheap suits stepping over beggars, shoeshine boys, vendors selling spreads of newspapers. Drum magazine splashing the headline "Luo Girls are Best in Bed." the white plutocrats in their short sleeves, the youngish European females we called leatherettes because the tropical sun had aged their white skin, the hippies, the Kenya cowboys, the Somali cafe crowd, Asians in their banks and trading houses, the young black middleclass kids in their baggy trousers and wet-look coifs, the Big Shiny Men in their air-conditioned BMWs, or the processions of tourists in khaki safari has, window-shopping for taka taka souvenirs from Eden. Rising above the chaos of downtown's Uhuru Highway was a string of giant advertisement billboards. "Tusker," they read. "My Country, My Beer." - The Zanzibar Chest, Aiden Hartley 
No matter how far I get from my youth in Nairobi, I will always remember the streets. As Hartley describes, cultures zig-zag in front of you there, you are at once surrounded by poverty, wealth, beauty, hopelessness, dirt, and paradox. Life is everywhere.
I began The Zanzibar Chest on the way to Philadelphia. It is a memoir of the years that Aiden Hartley spent as a foreign correspondent covering Africa. Beyond his own story, he begins by giving an account of his family history which gives the reader a sense of who he is at his roots. He comes from a family of the colonial British order, a family of adventure and passion for people spanning not only south and eastern Africa, but also the Middle East.
Reading about Africa is always hard. I can’t turn my back on my origins but it’s hard to embrace the stories Africa will tell.
At any one time we had six wars, a couple of famines, a coup d’état, and a natural disaster like a flood or an epidemic or a volcanic eruption, all within a radius of three hours’ flight from Nairobi. You could take off at sunrise, commute to witness a battle, or hear a starving man breathe his last and be back home by nightfall, in time to file a story, take a shower, then hit the Tamarind restaurant downtown for mangrove crab and Stellanbosch…
I’d climb aboard the Cessna at first light, in my mind kissing the tarmac good-bye like the pope in reverse. The pilot throttled up, mumbled into his microphone, neck muscles bunching like a bullfrog. On take-off I used to recite the Lord’s Prayer over and over until I got stuck on a line like a mantra—“deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil, deliver us from evil” – as the earth feel away.
Hartley is harrowed, especially from his experiences covering the genocide of Rwanda and the failure that was Somalia. He is full of the types of stories that will make your heart sink and deflate your sense of reason and yet he somehow holds a sense of optimism and love for Africa that soften what would usually sound like contempt into sorrow.
His stories are dense and some of the detail is overwhelming. The stories of family history, while essential in understanding who he is as a person, can slow down the pace of the book and disorient the reader. His chapters are extremely long which gives the affect of making his story huge, dissoluble chunks. It’s a matter of style and it seems that Aiden is the type for whom a story is composed of details rather than short, quaint little summaries. But if you want something short and easy, this will put you off.
It’s strange to think that although Aiden is British, he is more African than I am. This isn’t just the case in his formative years there but also his coming of age professionally which really takes place on his first major assignment as a journalist, covering a coup in Sudan. Being African is, of course, something one can’t quantify, but it is a subject I can’t approach without apologies and parentheses.
I’ve finished about half and think it’s a great book. I’d recommend it to those with the virtues of patience and depth.
10:37:54 PM 
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