Back to Reviews By Title - T

The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley
Harper Perennial
Reviewed by James O'Sullivan (Courtesy of Taranaki Daily News)

In Somalia a journalist explores the countryside looking for starving children. Severely malnourished children are held up to him but he shakes his head. The increasingly shock-proof world only buys really skinny children. Finally he reaches the really skinny children, the ones that will be dead before his story and pictures reach the intended audience.

In another part of Somalia, aging actress Sophia Loren is a UN goodwill ambassador doing a tour of the sick and dying. The Somali sun melts the makeup on her face. One of her entourage steps on a starving kid's leg and the child screams in pain. Journalist Aidan Hartley is implored not to report this.

Such is the reality of a Reuters journalist working in Africa; find the worst example of death and destruction, report it and hope the world buys enough of your copy to pay your expenses, and to start caring.

The Zanzibar Chest is Hartley's memoir, first growing up in post-colonial Africa and then reporting on the carnage that colonialism, despotic leaders and old tribal score-settling have created. Hartley was inspired to write this account after reading the diary of his father's friend, Peter Davey, a British Government employee who lived in Arabia.

Hartley went to Somalia in the early nineties before it became trendy. His account differs slightly from the Hollywood version. After that died down he took a holiday. But he cut it short when he heard of a plane being shot down in Rwanda. Suspecting something big was about to happen he made haste to the African nation in search of a story.

Bloated bodies floating down rivers, a woman with a child on her back gleefully hacking to death another woman with a child on her back, children killing children, massacres in churches, piles of bodies, and that ever-present, unique stench of rotting human flesh. These are some of the scenes Hartley reported.

The Zanzibar Chest is a personal account, bereft of media spin and Hollywood exploitation, of a man trying to come to grips with what he has witnessed. It's not a pretty read at times, but it's a reality we must all acknowledge, and to a certain extent we opulent Westerners can share Hartley's self-analysis.

Why doesn't he come out from behind his notebook and help these people? And why is this horror the source of such interest?