The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

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They say we journalists ignored the story for months. We were there all the time. What’s true is that we didn’t understand at the time the full magnitude of what was happening. I was an ant walking over the rough hide of an elephant. I had no idea of the scale of what I was witnessing.” The title refers to a chest his father had with diaries and journals detailing his fathers work during the last 30 some years of British colonial rule in Africa and Yemen. At night, lions grunted and roared and the hollow volcanic hill rumbled as rhino cantered by … ��We were in a paradise,” said my father, “that we can never forget, nor equal.”

confirm that you are authorised to provide credit/debit card details to Lots Road Auctions through www.the-saleroom.com Hartley’s strength as a writer is his reporter’s eye for brutal detail and his ability to fashion blunt anecdotes from the unfinished business of recent history.”—Ken Foster, The San Francisco Chronicle Callaghan & Newbury (recommended carrier) 07903 299810/07794 751445. Deliveries to the Home Counties and has a storage facility. Un carissimo amico del padre ha lasciato un diario del suo lungo soggiorno ad Aden e Hartley parte per ricostruirne le vicende, cercarne la memoria. Una bella storia che intreccia e collega tutte le altre.I suspect many of the leaders of those entities would NOT want any of us to read this book. So--please READ THIS BOOK--if you have any interest in Africa WHATSOEVER. A demonstration of how the personal can be put to good use in journalism . . . the book is fascinating.”—Wilson Wanene, Nieman Reports Hartley, despite being a professional newspaperman, had to work hard to put this book together. Parts of it aren't as smooth as he would have liked, no doubt. A splendiferous pastiche of Africa wisdom, youthful exuberance, nostalgia, love, adventure and despair set in a world of constant and seldom-positive change. . . . Cynicism wrestles with idealism throughout the book. . . . Hartley’s stories, told here, are an act of bravery. They should be read.”—Roy Durfee, The Santa Fe New Mexican

The book recounts his travels and experiences during the Ethiopian famine, the Hutu-Tutsi genocide in Rwanda and the conflict in Somalia. Hartley and his friend actually coined the term "Warlords" to describe the militia tribal leaders. Given such powerful stories, the "other" narrative he weaves throughout the book - his attempt to piece together the life of his father's friend - pales in comparison. I'm sure it was an important journey for him personally, but it is difficult to connect with. Our women certainly led hard lives. At Mabel’s wedding, her seventeen-year-old sister Ethel was one of the bridesmaids. Ethel caught the eye of the best man, another army officer named Beames. Beames was a friend of Rudyard Kipling, who based The Story of the Gadsbys, his 1899 Indian “tale without a plot,” on their courtship. They married and immigrated to Canada, where they became pioneers. Beames turned to drink, abandoning Ethel to raise three children in a remote log cabin. One of her sons grew up to become a sculptor and moved to the United States, where one of his commissions was a monument to the American Indian wars that stands in Washington. My grandfather Colonel Reginald Sanders proposed to my grandmother Eileen after meeting her on home leave at a piano recital before returning to duty in India. By the time her ship arrived in Bombay she had forgotten what he looked like. They met up somehow and married within hours. He took her into the hills to his new married-officer’s quarters, carried her across the threshold, and proudly asked her what she thought of it. She burst into tears. The Auctioneers reserve the right to cancel any sale at any time, should they deem it necessary, this will be at Hannam’s Auctioneers Ltd discretion. Almost all but the most impoverished women would bring with them the basics needed to set up house. Giving money to enable girls to marry has been a charitable act in much of the Muslim as well as the Christian worlds, and, indeed, the custom of Santa Claus and Christmas gift-giving is thought to have originated with St. Nicholas of Myra (modern Demre in Turkey), who secretly provided money to dowry-less girls.

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Riveting. . . . This haunting book is both enlightening and heartbreaking. Like Hartley, you will be forever changed by this time in Africa.”—Susan Larson, The New Orleans Times-Picayune And there are hundreds of other moving/funny/incredible/horrifying sentences in this book-the above are entirely random. A deeply affecting memoir of a childhood in Africa and the continent's horrendous wars, which Hartley witnessed at first hand as a journalist in the 1990s. Shortlisted for the prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction, this is a masterpiece of autobiographical journalism. On those flights I’d look down from the sky at takeoffs and landings and see the silhouette of our little aircraft ripple over pulverized cities, refugee camps, the acetylene-white flashes of antiaircraft fire, and countries rich only in lost hopes and broken dreams. What comes to mind when I think of that time in my life are the words of Isaiah 18, which I’d read in Gideons Bibles I’d found in dozens of seedy hotel rooms where I spent so much of my life on the road: “Woe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. . . . Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down.” That passage makes me think of my circle of friends, the journalists I knew in those years. We were like the swift messengers in Africa.

In the Nineteenth Century, Europeans were attracted to the wealth of the tiny island. It was such an obvious trading entrepot and was one of the few places in Africa that had plenty of cash. It was also helpful that the island climate was more accommodating to Europeans and there were less nasty diseases to afflict them than in most of the rest of the continent. It was a natural hub of civilisations, even if much of the wealth was a by-product of slavery. Davey was in love with Arabia. He converted to Islam and married a local woman, before being forced to cast her off. The tale is beautifully told, but barely illuminates Hartley's war stories. There is little to suggest Davey's death was his father's defining moment. Nor, despite a throwaway reference to a breakdown, does it seem plausible that Hartley's own experiences have changed him as he claims. If the dual narrative works - it just about does - it is bound together by his desire to enter the lost world of his father's emotions. The Zanzibar Chest is several stories rolled into one. Included are the adventures of Hartley’s father, Hartley’s experiences reporting some of Africa’s bloodiest fighting and the intriguing mystery of the long dead Davey. Events depicted can be disturbing but are never boring.”—Kathleen Hipson, Tampa Tribune Note: Hannam’s Auctioneers Ltd reserves the right to alter these Terms and Conditions without notification to clients. Note: Due to Coronavirus Restrictions collections are by appointment only and therefore cannot be facilitated during an auction at this time.

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It is a complicated book. A white Kenyan, born of a line of colonial adventurers, Hartley is less concerned with the wars he reported, in Ethiopia, Somalia, Burundi and Rwanda, than with his place in them. In journalism, he saw 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.