It's very hard for me to write about this book (which it why I'll give it a shot), as it's all a little too close to home, and any attempt to review this book will be more about just reviewing myself (and who wants to read that)?

This is a book both shallow and deep, meaningless and profound. The mixture of nostalgia and irritation that I feel with the writer, his reminiscences, and his lifestyle are of course directly linked to my feelings about my own career and life choices. I'm surprised - and both relieved and disturbed - that the stories of Africa and the Middle East still catch my imagination, and my memory, making me miss people and places I've seen, and look forward to more in the future. At the same time, the meaninglessness and downright foolishness that I see in both the author's life and (at least parts of) my own, are very uncomfortable. I feel like I've met so many people like the author during my travels, and to some degree, I feel have become him. But perhaps what's most troublesome is how conflicted I still feel towards the whole thing, and what I've done and continue to do. Aid workers, journalists, soldiers and spies - most of these would disagree with me, but I rarely see much difference between them. Some people, (and who am I to fault them?), are convinced they are doing things that need to be done, and that other people are better off for it. While others don't feel they doing odd things in far off places for any other reason than that they cannot choose to do otherwise. Still not sure which I am. All I know is that the places, and the people, still inspire me and trouble me.

All that said, in the end it's just a book and it's the writing that matters. And I've got to say he's got some great passages.

On the disintegration of Somalia: "As correspondent, I suppose my job was to excite the sympathy of the world for this forgotten and reviled people, but all I can say now is that I have felt it a privilege to observe a people who shot themselves in the foot with such accuracy and tumbled into the abyss in such style." (p.201)

On hospitals treating genocide perpetrators in Rwanda: "When you whacked a bump of ketamine into a guy he began to hallucinate right there on the slab. He swatted imaginary flies, flipped out on his own out-of-body experience, believing he'd arrived in heaven and the doe-eyed virgins were feeding him grapes for eternity. No wonder he was pissed off with the doctors when he woke up to find he was still a Hutu ax murderer except that his legs had been chopped off at the knees and all his mates were scurrying for the border." (p.408)

On going back to "normal" life: "I never suffered like that female inmate, but for years I did endure some sort of payback. I have to try every day to prevent the poison that sits in my mind to spread outward and hurt the people I love. Sometimes I can't stop it and I wonder if in some way the corruption will be passed on from me to my children." (p.428)

This book is on balance worth reading, despite its many flaws. It often seems like one giant effort from a self-obsessed son of an idealized father, wherein the son keeps trying to paint himself as an intrepid son of African adventure, who despite his being paid to report the misery and pointlessness of struggles like Somalia and Rwanda, somehow retains his little boy innocence: ex: "I had missed Operation Desert Storm, the biggest war story so far of our generation. I no longer cared. I had decided that what I was looking for was a war that I could call my own, a story that was mine, a complete experience that would define me as the son of my fathers and involve me as an insider..." [puke]. Consciously (I hope) but without credits citing to various rock and roll lines, eg (referring to a man named Celestine)"I wondered what a man with a name derived from the word 'heavenly' was doing in the mud, blood and beer of my world"--parroting Johnny Cash's famous lines in "Boy Named Sue" (although without attribution), etc

So why read the book? Manly bc it does a very good job of showing how even cynical hacks (rejecting photos of starving children because they were "Not. Thin. Enough", making up heart warming stories which were palpably not true and winning prizes for writing what the people in the distant rich world wanted to believe, he nonetheless also shows the development community, UN, and western politicians to be believably cynical, counterproductive and ignorant--perhaps spectacularly so in Somalia. Where the UN officer in charge agrees the actress they bring in to call attention to the famine was a has been, but that "they had thought about bringing in Madonna but she was too sexy for a famine...". where photographers trample and break a leg of a starving child in their rush to take photos of the actress but the reporters are asked by the UN people not to report it, because of its effect on reducing public contributions. How western democracy caused the polarization of Hutus from Tutsis and led to one of the world's worst massacres--although Hartley does at least indicate that the Holocaust, the Armenians in 1915, Stalin and Mao were right up there as well. But despite these crystal clear examples of political incompetence and hypocrisy, Hartley shows he is part of the problem, complaining about the readers who did not find "desperate enough" the stories he tried to pen to make the situation seem desperate .

His recounting of Somalia is worth putting up with his self-obsession (I think he wrote the book while still in his 30s). He captures the inanity of US and UN political leadership, quoting Madeline Albright fatuously saying "In Somalia, we are blazing a new trail for the United Nations..." and predating the Emerald City referring to aide and UN people staying behind intense security lines in "MogaDisney", never getting out and staying only for 9 months to get danger pay and launching inevitably less then precision precision strikes. Where in the midst of civilian slaughter and war lord kidnapping and hideous murders, the UN's employees safe in their walled off city wrote "reams of memos to New York, Edicts returned by satellite on how local councils were to be gender-balanced, suggesting topics for discussion at seminars on human rights and timetables for multiparty polls. Even amidst the fighting, the UN lavished money on projects to 'empower' civil society, women's groups and schools. Anything to pretend this was a society with hope".

But then he recounts with apparent jocularity how Hartley and his fellow hacks' cheated spectacularly on their expense accounts, covering litres of whiskey, drunken "orgies" with local women, and most dramatic insult or caper among the community of hacks. At the end he cites his dying father--a colonial agronomist--as concluding "We (the British colonialists) should never have come here".

But just when you feel tempted to toss the book in one of the few remaining trash cans in the airport nearest you, Hartley comes out with a memorable vignette: "I tried to ignore the anonymous masses for so long, but in the end they have all come back to haunt me: the refugees, the injured, the starving and the dead. And each and every one has a name."

Picked up because I enjoy Aidan Hartley's occasional columns for Spectator magazine, I had no idea of his history as a war correspondent reporting on Africa's many tribal wars in the 1990s. A mesmerising memoir of his experiences and of his own family's African history. I just wished it had included maps. I had to read it with an atlas at my side.

An extremely unlikable author. I could never tell if he was in Africa or Syria or whatever. Very poorly edited. Wanted to learn more about Africa, but got totally confused.

I really wanted to love this nonfiction, especially with a title like that. But it just felt very scattered to me, too many people introduced and then briefly moved past. Maybe this is my take on it because I felt the amount of information dabbled in was overwhelming.

He did a good job of making the reader feel how forgotten many of the tribes and cultures of Africa have been for some long, while being crushed and controlled and manipulated by other world powers. Pulled in all directions and the greed. One of the people introduced was Dan Eldon, a photographer that crossed paths with Aidan in the early ‘90s also documenting the extreme famine of Somalia. There’s actually a movie on Netflix currently, “ the journey is the destination “ that I watched mid book to get another take on this turbulent time in Somalia.

Með stórkostlegri bókum sem ég hef lesið sem eyðir talsvert af fáfræðinni um Afríku og ástand mála í þeirri heillandi álfu. Það er sorglegt til þess að vita að það liggur við að hinn nútíma vestræni maður með alla sína þekkingu og upplýsingar sé jafn fáfróður um Afríku og á nýlendutímabilinu...
Skyldulesning!

Heart wrenching.

I've never really considered the effect that the horrors of the world have on the press.

This is an incredible book and it has also given me a determination to travel to Africa.

I wonder what it meant that I enjoyed being a journalist but spent my time witnessing so much killing and suffering. I told myself that observing extremes gave me a heightened sense of morality, but it might have meant the opposite, that to go on like that proved one was some sort of borderline psychopath (Zanzibar Chest, p.391).

Hartley is a product of his upbringing in Africa and England, an Oxford graduate with a Master's from SOAS. He joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent covering primarily Africa, where his heart is and where he lives, in his homeland Kenya. This book is an account of both his father's and his own footsteps across these regions, with interspersed, snippets of the history of Peter Davey as drawn from his own diaries. Davey was a British diplomat, friend of his father's, who went native in Yemen and died there whilst in service.

Although to many Hartley's account seems confusing, I found his writing drew me in like a man thirsty for water in an oasis after a journey in the desert. Admittedly, his exploits and accounts of his life as a foreign correspondent are the product of a young man in search of risk and adventure induced adrenaline mingled with evenings bathed in alcohol, drugs, sex and laddish behaviours. The dichotomy between his own life and what he witnesses can cause one to feel that he never could be a real African, that this attempt at going native himself was destined from the start to be an oxymoron. But it is his love for these lands, his absolute passion for this continent that save him and that make this work and his accounts of love and war riveting for anyone that loves this continent viscerally. It is in the last section, where he covers the Rwanda genocide in 1994, perhaps entering a new phase in his life, that he really comes of age. Here, after losing many of his colleagues and friends in Somalia and the brutality of Mogadishu, he witnesses human bestiality beyond words. I didn't realise he had accompanied Kagame's RPF Tutsis as they entered Kigali after the 100 days genocide. To this day, he admits he does not have sufficient words to describe what he saw, and his story here becomes photographic, like the accounts of anyone who has experienced trauma to the core.

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.

I recommend this work to anyone who is interested in Africa, preferably an individual who has good knowledge of the continental wars and history. For this type of reader, Hartley's work provides a grassroots account of what happened to individuals mixed in this sociopolitical quagmire in the eighties and nineties, his visuals and stories providing fundamental anecdotal evidence bridging the gap between the institutionally-fed single truth and multifaceted fragmented reality on the ground.

I read this book toward the end of my trip in Tanzania and Kenya. It seemed to match up in every point in my trip. I was reading about the genocide in Rwanda while relaxing under banana trees and just imagining at any moment something like that happening to such a great place as Tanzania. I was reading about Somalia while sitting on the beach in Kenya, my camping mate talking about how he has gone to that same beach every summer and how in 1994 he could see the whole US Naval fleet on the horizon. It was very poignant while returning home and reading of Aidan's experiences returning to London after all of his great adventures, it helped me process and explain some of my feelings. This was a great book and would strongly recommend it to anyone with an adventurous spirit.

Most of this book felt like a rambling whirlwind, while some parts were coherent story-telling. Rather than write three separate accounts, the author has crammed it all into one long book. And it is long.

The most telling is the quote from his father at the very end: "We never should have come here." That about sums up colonialism in Africa (really anywhere) in one sentence.

The segment that most struck me was on the genocide in Rwanda, I think primarily because the author finally has some sort of emotion in regards to his reporting and the events he is experiencing rather than a juvenile approach to just tell a good story.

I powered through, but I don't recommend this book unless you are thoroughly interested in journalism or Africa.

This book is four things at once:

1. An elegy for a lost Africa – an entire continent rich in cultures and nations, mulched both by colonial wars and dissection into artificial boundaries, but also by naïve attempts to forcibly remake the people.

2. This recovery of two lives – Hartley’s father, a giant of a man who lived most of his life in Africa and Aden, assisting people in agricultural projects, whose last words were, “We never should have come,” and his best friend, Peter Davey, a colonial officer killed in Aden.

3. A mordant and horrifying account of some of the worst atrocities of modern times, including Somalia and Rwanda. Most notable in the book is his chapter on Somalia, which provides a very clear analysis of “why the people we came to help quickly came to kill us.” A counter-balance to the heroic, one-dimensional movie "Blackhawk Down" (Note that the book, Blackhawk Down is far more measured and complete, but even here, Hartley’s brief analysis puts America’s naiveté and arrogance in its place). Perhaps the best lesson here is a quote of Seyyid Mohamed ibn Abdullah Hassan, who fought and regularly defeated the British for over 20 years at the turn of the 20th century – “I like war,” he wrote to the British once in red ink. “You do not. God willing, I will take many more rifles from you, but I will not take your country. I have no forts or houses or cultivation, no silver or gold for you to take. I have no artificers. The country is desert and of no use. There is wood and stone and many ant heaps. But all you will get from me is war, nothing else.”

4. A searingly honest story of those most courageous of voyeurs, the war correspondents, who, on the one hand, step unarmed but for camera and pen into the most horrific of war zones, “getting the truth out,” but also hovering like vultures over carnage, looking for something new, something yet more awful to justify their presence.

This is both stomach-churning and hair-raising reportage, irritating, confounding and yes, sometimes very moving. Hartley allows himself to be seduced into the myth of the British explorers of old: the Livingston's and the Shackleton's of the Dark Continent by reading the diary of his father's best friend, Davey, and following in his footsteps.

As a result, this is a difficult book to read for two reasons: the writer finds himself in the midst of some of the most horrendous conflicts and genocidal massacres of the 20th Century - all described with deft and telling detail. And yet, Hartley chooses to return to the melee of Mogadishu after the well-known events of 'Black Hawk Down' (told in Ridley Scott's film) confiding to the reader that (breaking news:) he's never been happier in his life.

Has the reporter lost his ability to report becoming native to those parts most famous for producing terrorists, barbarism, religious extremism, and human trafficking? It appears so.

The mythic steps of Davey become like Hartley's own T.E. Lawrence, and his Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which crumble to the ground like the Walls of Jericho in the midst of tribal conflicts, warfare, starvation, plague, and endless jockeying between mercenary warlords. After all, his father's era was of the building of nations, not the Africanization of the world through global terrorism.

The result of all this is sometimes like a shaggy dog tale told by a idiot high on Qat, full of nothing but chaos, disintegration, and endless wandering. Still, Aidean Hartley has, through it all, managed to produce a document that stands by itself as a remarkable testament to the witnessing of human suffering in Africa, of which there seems to be no end.

Read it and weep.