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The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands

aidan hartley

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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).

In his final days, Aidan Hartley’s father said to him, “We should have never come here.” Those words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back through four generations of one British family. From a great-great-grandfather who defended British settlements in nineteenth-century New Zealand, to his father, a colonial officer sent to Africa in the 1920s and who later returned to raise a family there—these were intrepid men who traveled to exotic lands to conquer, build, and bear witness. And there was Aidan, who became a journalist covering Africa in the 1990s, a decade marked by terror and genocide.

After encountering the violence in Somalia, Uganda, and Rwanda, Aidan retreated to his family’s house in Kenya where he discovered the Zanzibar chest his father left him. Intricately hand-carved, the chest contained the diaries of his father’s best friend, Peter Davey, an Englishman who had died under obscure circumstances five decades before. With the papers as his guide, Hartley embarked on a journey not only to unlock the secrets of Davey’s life, but his own.

“The finest account of a war correspondent’s psychic wracking since Michael Herr’s Dispatches.” —Rian Malan, author of My Traitor’s Heart

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1,2003
Literary awards
guardian first book award, the baillie gifford prize for non-fiction, 

This edition

Format
496 pages, Paperback
Published
August 3, 2004 by Riverhead Books
ISBN
9781594480119
ASIN
1594480117
Language
English

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About the author

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aidan hartley

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Aidan Hartley is a Kenyan/British writer and entrepreneur.
Born in Nairobi, Kenya in 1965, he was educated at Sherborne and studied English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, going on to the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS) to study African politics and history.
As a foreign correspondent for the Reuters news agency, Hartley covered Africa in the 1990s - wars in Somalia, famine in Ethiopia and genocide in Rwanda. He is the author of The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War, which was short-listed for the Samuel Johnson Prize. He made dozens of television documentaries, most of them for the Channel 4 Television award-winning current affairs series Unreported World and "Dispatches".
In 2013 he retired from mainstream journalism to focus on private business affairs and book writing. Hartley owns a ranch in Laikipia County, Kenya called Palagalan Farm. The conservation property is home to African wildlife species such as lion and elephant and these co-exist peacefully alongside the farm's herd of Boran beef cattle. Hartley is on the executive of the Boran Cattle Breeders' Society of Kenya.
In 2020, while stranded by lockdown in London, he co-founded a successful Covid-testing company, Crown Laboratories Ltd. In 2021 he co-founded Lantern Comitas, a strategic communications advisory with corporate clients across Africa, Europe and the Americas. In April 2022, the company agreed a joint venture with Mexico-based Miranda Partners.
He writes the "Wild Life" column of The Spectator.

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Community Reviews

Rating(3.9 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
30(30%)
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Profile Image for Kimberly .
lorextreme
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Absolutely crushing. Aidan Hartley details his career as a war correspondent covering stories from the Ethiopian civil war and Somalia to the brutal genocide in Rwanda. The accounts are often sickening and sometimes even funny, but as I continued reading, I realized that the story is just as much about Hartley himself - and how one copes with a life that's constantly in contact with the worst parts of humanity.

The narrative device - alternating between Hartley's own eye-witness accounts of reporting on genocide and civil war with his recap of his quest to unearth the history of his father's time as a British foreign service agent in Yemen - thankfully gives the reader a chance to catch one's breath.
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SludgyShadow
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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The author came off as racist, sexist, ignorant, and mentions sleeping with teenagers like it’s no issue. No remorse for anything and no sympathy for the victims he wrote about, besides the white Serbs he encountered (and he mentions he feels bad because they are white). I don’t understand why this book was sensationalized
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bprap
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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In the first 20 or so pages I was grumbling as I found myself drowning in adjectives. Though, as Hartley hits his stride, the prose loses the overwritten feel and develops into a very fine book.

I'm not sure he needed the device of 'the Zanzibar chest' as a framing tool. It's almost insecurity. Almost like he didn't think the true stories of an intrepid reporter in the middle of the worst of the worst atrocities in Mogadishu and Rwanda would hold the reader's interest so he needed to spice it up with this fable-like construction that almost acted as a speed bump for me. I'm not exactly sure how I would've structured it differently; as I wouldn't want to lose the story of his father and Davey, but the way it wove in and out of Aidan's story was often awkward. Basically, I think he needed a better editor. The Somalia and Rwanda sections, in particular, were amazing and didn't need some cutesy narrative device.

I don't think I agree that Aidan seems disconnected from Africans; I think that's a hard argument to make after reading the book. Colonialism, on the other hand, is an interesting character throughout. While the, "we should never have come here" thread is strong; at time he waivers in Somalia, as he thinks colonialism is exactly what is necessary to end the killing. There is sincere hope that the Americans will bring with them, ultimately, ballot boxes and hospitals. After reading a book like King Leopold's Ghost, one sort of winces at any statement that's even vaguely pro-colonial, but he's certainly right. In Rwanda or Mogadishu, there is certainly a compelling moral argument for international intervention of some kind.
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UnfortunateGam3r
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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I found this book to be absolutely riveting. Hartley has actually related two tales here, one detailing his quest to shed some light on the circumstances surrounding the death of his father's friend Peter Davey; the other tale relates Hartley's own story from his education abroad to his misadventures as a foreign/war correspondent for the Reuters news agency.

As a journalist, he was dispatched to the world's hotspots: Croatia, Somalia, and Rwanda being foremost in my memory. He broke bread and rubbed shoulders with murderers and generals, nurses and nuns. He has witnessed inhumanity on such a grand scale that it's a wonder that he can even string sentences together today. He has attended far too many funerals for a man his age.

Hartley is African, born in Kenya and residing there to this day, so he can write about events on that continent with a legitimacy that a foreigner might lack. While he may be judgemental, he is compassionately so. He hides nothing from the reader, and relates his own faults and failings as readily as he points out flaws in others. He spares no detail, so the squeamish may be turned off by this book.

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. One miracle child pulled from a pile of quicklimed bodies in a mass grave in Rwanda expired that very night, but was reported alive afterward in order to generate interest and retain an audience. When one of a famous actresses' photographers stepped on the arm of a malnourished child, it was kept out of the news as bad publicity.

The book has some flaws, a bit of sloppiness perhaps. The Canadian Royal Air Force he refers to on page 372 does not exist: it's the Royal Canadian Air Force. The way Hartley wrote it makes a proud military unit seem like a subsidiary of the Royal Air Force. And I would love to know what a "short-muzzle" Enfield rifle is (p.416). Presumably he refers to the old SMLE...the "M" stands for magazine, not muzzle!

There are some photos scattered throughout the book, but regrettably none of them are captioned so I was never sure of who or what was in the photo. But while they are a minor annoyance, the flaws do not significantly detract from what is a great book written by a man who was eyewitness to some of the most horrific events in history.
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MoshiMochi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 17,2025
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Powerful, bitter, fascinating, disturbing, sad, funny and more packed into this account. When I think of excellent accounts of harrowing journalistic encounters, I think of Philip Caputo's 'Means of Escape' which I read and reviewed on Amazon (before they booted my for not paying enough into Jeff Bezos pocket) some time back. 'The Zanzibar Chest' is certainly in that league. The book covers Aidan Hartley's reporting (and much more) for Reuters from Ethiopia, Somalia, Bosnia, and Rwanda in late 1980s to mid 1990s, locations and times that few above a certain age need reminding of. It is not comfortable reading in any way but riveting and horrifying at times in the dark way in which we are all fascinated by darkness for whatever reason. The added layer that makes this a truly unique memoir is his family story. Born in Africa, son of a British colonial official in the fading days of the Empire. The story of his father's experience and that of his friend Peter Davey (from a diary he found in the Zanzibar Chest) in the colonial service is fascinating and almost alone worth the read. The descriptions of life in Kenya and Yemen back in those far-off days are wonderful. Had tough time with a final rating, as I might have preferred a 4.5, but giving the benefit of the doubt.
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