The Zanzibar Chest was absolutely fascinating. It’s terrific reading, so good it was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. It is far more than a mere memoir or travelogue. Hartley was born in Kenya and still resides there, so he writes about events on the continent of Africa with a legitimacy an outsider could not. He actually blends three tales here: the history of his family and its generations of participation in colonial Britain; his own life from his idyllic childhood in Africa, schooling in England, and culminating with the gut-wrenching horrors of his days as a war correspondent covering Africa for Reuters news agency; plus his efforts to research the final days of Peter Davey, his father’s best friend, whose diaries Hartley’s father passed to his son.
As a journalist, he covered the world’s hotspots such as Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Croatia during the 1990s, a decade marked by violence and genocide. He witnessed inhumanity on a grand scale, much as Roméo Dallaire (UN commander during the Rwandan Genocide) describes in his memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil. I wish I had read it before I completed my own novel about genocide; it would have been a valuable resource. Harley gives a truthful picture of journalism and news networks, including how much of what is reported is falsified or twisted to draw in readers. He also shows the heroism as well as the flaws and foibles of his colleagues and depicts their heavy use of alcohol, cigarettes, caffeine, and other drugs such as heroin, codeine, and kat.
The reader will learn some things about journalism and the news networks, or perhaps have their worst suspicions confirmed: what is reported as fact is often untrue or twisted by the network in order to draw viewers or readers. He admits, though, that what he and his colleagues saw and begged to have publicized (such as the Rwandan Genocide) was largely glossed over. We saw this ourselves in American journalism in 1994 when Tanya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and O.J. Simpson received more publicity that the happenings in Rwanda did. I admit to having to read this is small chunks—I could only take so much horror at a time—but the book was well worth surviving.
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The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands (Grove Press, December 13, 2016) is available through:
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You can read my reviews of other books on genocide:
Roméo Dallaire’s Waiting for First Light and They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers
R.M. Romero’s The Dollmaker of Krakow
Ava Reid’s The Wolf and the Woodsman
Erin Litteken’s The Memory Keeper of Kyiv
Shari J Ryan’s The Doctor’s Daughter
Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse
Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin
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