 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Zanzibar Chest
By Aidan Hartley
Harper Collins $49.95
 Raised in Kenya and back there after journalistic stints in troublespots like Rwanda and Somalia, and later Reuter's London office (which he hated), Aidan Hartley straddles two cultures.
Spotting Kenyan troops from the UN peacekeeping force in the Bosnian battlezone, - 'Their features seemed very familiar, with lop ears and handsome Maasai faces' - he greeted them in Swahili and arranged to meet later to share beers and news from 'home'.
Much, but by no means all, of Hartley's remarkable memoir comprises of behind-the-news tales about the fall of regimes, the rise of despots and the mating and drinking rituals of journalists. They range from the harrowing to the hilarious.
After telling the true story of the 'Blackhawk down' incident in Somalia, where a 'clean, surgical attack', according to a US officer, killed at least 85 civilians, he describes how correspondents shared 'romantic evenings... on the cooling concrete of the (hotel) al-Sahafi's roof, scanning Mogadishu through night-vision TV cameras so that it was all illuminated by green, ambient light.
'In the streets below, thousands of little oil lamps flickered among the tea stalls and clusters of refugees' blue plastic makeshift huts... The Reuters TV cameraman used to fire up enormous joints of Durban poison or Malawi cob to pass around.'
Another produced bottles of Wild Turkey, one brought a freshly caught tuna that he sliced into sashimi and served with wasabi, soy sauce and chopsticks.
But there is another, different theme to this book, revolving around the agricultural work done in then-British Aden (after which the author was named) and Yemen by his father, and the extraordinary life of his father's close friend, Peter Davey, a noted Arabist whose diaries Hartley found in the 'Zanzibar chest' of the title.
'I was going to tell you war stories but I've realised that if I want to make sense of them there is a wider tale that follows an arc through the generations,' he explains, describing a day in 1947, 'beneath the craggy peaks of high Arabia', where a vulture's shadow circles over three men.
'One body is that of an African, a sheikh's slave, lying riddled with bullet wounds. Nearby sprawls the figure of Davey. The translucent bone haft of a jambiya dagger protrudes from his chest and blood soaks his khaki tunic. And standing over the two of them is my father.'
How could one not read on?
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