The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

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Aidan's work is of a brilliance of writing that few can claim. His book almost comes across as a psychoanalytic journey, with lucidity and dreamlike states mixed in with an attempt at finding a common thread from the past to the present to understand his own manhood, and what this means in the context of his genealogy. 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.” Lots Road Auctions offer an online bidding service via www.the_saleroom.com for bidders who cannot attend the sale.

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.

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b) The highest bidder shall be the buyer except in the case of a dispute. The Auctioneer may at his sole discretion determine the advance of bidding or refuse a bid. If during the auction the Auctioneer considers that a dispute has arisen, he has absolute discretion to settle it or to re-offer the lot. 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. Some of his clothes were still hanging up in there, which described a life of sadhulike simplicity: a few khaki bush shirts and shorts, the kikoi wraps we wear in Kenya like sarongs, as well as several pairs of camel-skin ­sandals. Hieronymous Bosch reincarnated as a frontline correspondent invited to the midnight banquet of Africa’s bloody horrors, that’s who Aidan Hartley seems to be, an outrageously brave and anguished heart disgorging the never-inert legacies of colonialism.”—Bob Shacochis, author of The Immaculate Invasion 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.Third Party Liability. Every person on Lots Road Auction's premises at any time shall be deemed to be there at his own risk. He shall have no claim against Lots Road Auctions in respect of any accident which may occur or injury, damage or loss howsoever caused, save in so far as the injury, damage or loss shall be caused by the direct negligence of Lots Road Auction's employees. 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). 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.” Wonderful and everywhere remarkable…Hartley writes with love and an astonishing zest.’ Allan Massie, Daily Telegraph Hartley uses crisp, to-the-point prose threaded with delicious, dark humor and a sense of the absurd that reaches its height as he details the bungled U.N. intervention in Somalia. His accounts of bloodshed and corruption are all the more effective for his refusal to sugarcoat it. . . . In the end, one can only stand as witness, and Hartley is an eloquent one.”—Claudia La Rocco, Associated Press

Mogadishu was so dangerous and out-of-this-world that Reid Miller, the veteran AP correspondent used to say, 'I wouldn't even send my first wife there.'" Hartley uses crisp, to-the-point prose threaded with delicious, dark humor and a sense of the absurd that reaches its height as he details the bungled U.N. intervention in Somalia.”—Claudia La Rocco, The Indianapolis Star Hartley was born just as the paradise whites had forged in east Africa was falling from grace. After selling their ranch in Tanzania, his family moved to Kenya, and his father went into the aid industry. From then on, the young Aidan saw him only intermittently. While his mother took her children to England, his father remained with his nomads, took an Ethiopian mistress and showed little interest in his children's schooling.

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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. What I found in the Zanzibar chest was a story of lives so utterly differ­ent from my own, so exotic, set in another part of the world and in another time. I had never believed in any great cause; I was sent to fight no wars. What I admired most about my father, Davey, and those like them is that they were men of action, whereas I was ever the observer, not the participant, which is the main reason why I’m able to be here to tell this story. The sultanate of Muscat and Oman took control of the island in the early Eighteenth Century by displacing a small Portugese post. It was helpful that, with a little careful timing, there were trade winds which carried dhows from Zanzibar over to India then there were winds which would take the dhows from India to Oman and then there were winds which would complete the triangle. At each stage, the traders could earn a fortune. Over the course of the Eighteenth Century, the Sultanate of Oman became a wealthy and powerful regional power. It was more than able to withstand European encroachment and could maintain their independence. General. Whilst Lots Road Auctions makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of their catalogues and the description of any lot:-

This remarkable book is more than the memoir of a war correspondent. It is, by turn, slam-bang adventure and shimmering poetry. It is hilarious, orgiastically bawdy, poignantly romantic, gory as war itself, and populated with census-sized number of vivid personalities. All that—plus informative and dreadfully prophetic. . . . Hartley’s book must rank with other great journalistic memoirs—Eric Severeids’s Not So Wild a Dream and Webb Miller’s I Found No Peace.”—Bart Mcdowell, The Washington Times The couple were reunited in Kenya a decade later, and, as a young graduate, their son followed them. Though an Englishman now, east Africa was still the nearest thing he had known to home. He found work with Reuters in Nairobi, just as the former cold war powers were withdrawing their aid from Africa, provoking conflict across the continent. "What I was looking for," he writes, "was a war that I could call my own - a complete experience that would define me as the son of my father and involve me as an insider." He found it in Somalia. The real, idiot-free Africa emerges in all its ultra-vivid complexity.”—Jonathan Miles, Men’s Journal My father could have made his life in almost any part of the empire. Many of his generation went overseas, including his brother Ronald. I remember Uncle Ronald, a ukulele-playing agricultural college principal in Fiji who had his singing Bulgarian wife shave him before he turned out of bed each morning. At college in Trinidad, notices went up offering jobs in everything from rubber in Malaya and tea planting in Ceylon to ranching in Australia. My father chose Africa because of his mother, Daisy, who told him stories of life in the Cape in the nineteenth century and remembered trekking across the veld in an ox wagon when she was still a little girl. My father was also inspired to live overseas by his paternal uncle Ernest, whom he loved. Ernest was a businessman in India, a keen sportsman, and a raffish character with a great sense of humor, whose daughter grew up to become the actress Vivien Leigh. During the summer of 1928, Ernest and his wife Gertrude leased the house of the Earl of Mayo in Galway and Dad went to join them for a summer’s fishing. He fell a little in love with the precocious, adolescent Vivien. “Everybody knew it,” a gossipy aunt told me. She gave him a book of poems by Banjo Paterson, signed “To my favorite cousin with love from Viv.” My father adored “The Man from Snowy River” for the rest of his life. The Shirazi chests were particularly elaborate, as Unwin describes, with “sparse heavy cast brass plating ... [and] diamond-shaped disks.” One of the rare dated examples belonged to Sayyida Salme, the daughter of the early 19th-century Omani sultan of Zanzibar Said bin Sultan al-Said, and it is now in the Sultan’s palace. Salme married a German merchant in 1866 and fled Zanzibar, which gives a probable date for the chest. Married as Emily Ruete, her autobiography, Memoirs of an Arabian Princess, published n 1907, sheds unique light on the period.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. Ironically, Hartley's best writing on Somalia describes an atrocity he didn't see. In 1992, US troops landed in Mogadishu to quell the chaos, and Hartley, thinking the story over, bailed out. But the Americans' brutal policies united Somalis against them. After helicopter gunships demolished a Mogadishu house, killing dozens of women and children, a vengeful mob killed four journalists, including three Reuters men. Hartley returned to Somalia to investigate and wrote a precise and moving account of the killings.