An Africa of heat but little light

In the years since the end of the Cold War, no part of the world has suffered more cruelly than the arc of war-battered nations in East and Central Africa. The genocide in Rwanda in 1994, in which more than a half-million ethnic Tutsis were massacred in three months, was but the most infamous in a chain of calamities from the Indian Ocean to the mountain lakes in the continent’s heart.

Famine and rampant warlordism in Somalia; a border war between Ethiopia and Eritrea; yet another decade of seemingly endless war in Sudan in which 2 million have perished; the long-smoldering, scarcely noticed quasi-genocide in Burundi; and now Congo, where 3 million may have died in just four years of fighting and famine -- the numbers are so huge and the horror so profound as to defy comprehension even among eyewitnesses.

Among them was Aidan Hartley, a young British journalist for Reuters who was one of the small band of intrepid foreign correspondents who covered a great deal of this monumental tragedy at close quarters, often at considerable personal risk, in the first half of the 1990s.

In “The Zanzibar Chest,” Hartley has given us an unusually personal account of what it looks and smells and feels like to venture time and again into the belly of the beast. He also seeks, with less success, to convey a broader context that includes the history of his own family. The book stretches back over 150 years, through four generations of Hartley’s family, from a great-great-grandfather who defended British settlements in 19th century New Zealand; through generations of colonial officers, tax collectors, engineers and planters who witnessed or fought in the Indian Mutiny, the Boer War, the Boxer Rebellion and two World Wars; to Hartley’s father, a colonial officer who was sent to Africa in the 1920s, then to the Arabian Peninsula in the 1940s to build bridges and dams. He returned to Kenya in the 1960s to raise a family, including young Aidan.

Beginning in his early 20s as a stringer in Nairobi, Hartley rode everything from cargo planes to bush taxis into one war zone after another: Sudan, Ethiopia, Burundi, Somalia and Rwanda. At his best, Hartley offers up a vivid and often harrowing eyewitness account. Especially in Somalia, during the worst period of famine and violent anarchy in 1992 and 1993, he shows us in ever grimmer detail the frightening scale of violence and the venality of some of the criminals and warlords who, he tells us, “swelled like ticks on the blood of the conflict.”

In Somalia, three of Hartley’s close friends and colleagues were beaten and hacked to death by a Somali mob enraged, he writes, by an American-led assault in which scores of Somalis were killed. In Rwanda, he traveled for days with Tutsi rebels as the genocide reached its climactic stage, leaving him at a loss for words and haunted for years. Exhausted and emotionally bruised, as he puts it, Hartley retreated to his family’s home in Kenya and discovered the Zanzibar chest of the book’s title, left to him by his father, containing the diaries of his father’s best friend, Peter Davey, an English colonial officer who was murdered under mysterious circumstances a half-century earlier. Tucking the diaries under his arm, Hartley traveled to southern Arabia in an effort to unlock the secrets of Davey’s life as well as, he hoped, his own.

Hartley is a gifted wordsmith, and he certainly delivers fine descriptive accounts of life on the ground under the extremities of war. Unfortunately, he seems to be mostly eyes and no ears. By the evidence of this account, he conducted hardly any in-depth interviews. Very few black Africans emerge as three-dimensional characters. Most are stick figures, caricatures or sad victims. The narrative races headlong through firefights, massacres and famines, yielding chilling images of severed limbs, putrid corpses, bloated bodies floating down rivers. This can be powerful stuff. But in the absence of articulate African characters, there is finally an opacity to the larger picture. The great questions raised by mass slaughter in all parts of the world throughout history are completely missing. If anything has happened in any of these countries since “the story went cold,” we are never told of it.

Part of the problem is the familiar inability of a daily news reporter to sustain a narrative thread for more than a paragraph or two at a stretch. The book is chock-full of arresting anecdotes, snappy quotes and page after page of the proverbial “telling” details, but in the end they don’t actually tell us much that helps us understand what is happening. There is abundant heat but little light.

The author’s seeming incuriosity about larger questions of cause and responsibility is doubly disappointing because he did manage to meet some interesting political figures in his travels: Gen. Omar al-Bashir in Sudan, Prime Minister Meles Zenawi in Ethiopia, even the late Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, whose Hutu-dominated military regime plotted the genocide and whose still-unexplained murder in April 1994 triggered the bloodshed. But he quotes none of them.

The danger in such purely “show, don’t tell” reporting is that it reinforces a widespread perception of Africa’s troubles as being devoid of recognizable logic. Hartley writes: “The memory of Rwanda sits like a tumour leaking poison into the back of my head. We have history to explain why events happen. But how do you explain events of such evil as we saw in the green hills of that nation in 1994? How does history apply to the sight of one woman with a baby tied to her back gleefully using a machete to hack up another woman with a baby tied to her back?”

These are good questions, and they are not easily answered in Africa any more than elsewhere, including at the height of Western civilization in the heart of Central Europe in the middle of the last century. From the evidence of this account, though, Hartley made little effort to find such answers. He certainly found no Rwandans, Tutsi or Hutu who had anything to say on the subject.

“The conflicts I have seen tell me that most men are no different from a Serb killer or a Hutu or Somali militiaman,” he writes. “Most of us are entirely capable of torching a village, executing the men, raping their daughters, and bashing their grannies’ heads in. As far as the killing of Jews or Armenians or Aboriginals goes, most people barely need the incitement of their leaders. They engage in it with enthusiasm.” That’s a strong statement to make about “most people.” Certainly the circumstances in which many ordinary men have been reduced to barbarism raise profound questions that have bedeviled thoughtful people for centuries, yielding any number of searching if inconclusive inquiries. This isn’t one of them.

“The Zanzibar Chest” is, finally, an ironic elegy to the bittersweet thrill of covering the continent’s wars for the small community of “hacks” who did so in the early 1990s. “I was having the time of my life,” Hartley concedes at the end of an arduous two-month journey from Khartoum to Addis Ababa and the taking of the capital by Meles Zenawi’s rebel army. He winds up in bed with a German communist. “Life this good, I thought, should be forbidden.” After months amid the “extravagant barbarism” of Somalia in 1992, Hartley writes: “When the fear subsided I felt this delicious exhaustion and it wasn’t long before I wanted to do it again.... “

Rampant sex, drugs and booze seem to occupy an inordinately large portion of those journalists’ lives, conveyed here with chest-thumping bravado that seems more than a little inappropriate in this context. Worse, in a book chronicling the death of tens of thousands of black Africans, the one murder he investigates in detail is that of his father’s white friend Davey in 1947 in what is now Yemen, a search that the author says provided him with a “golden thread that guided me out of the labyrinth where I had been lost.”

But the connection between what happened in Arabia a half-century ago and what Hartley witnessed in Africa seems tenuous. The central character, Davey, is neither compellingly drawn nor even admirable. In the end, after converting to Islam so that he can marry a native woman, he wound up abandoning her rather than give up his position in the colonial service. When he was murdered, this reader didn’t much care. The result feels like two books shoehorned into one. The corruptions of colonialism would seem to be Hartley’s connective thread, but in fact he makes little effort to examine the ways in which colonial history set the context for the conflicts of the 1990s, not least the very creation and codification of tribal identities and the various stratagems of divide-and-rule that fueled resentments, stereotypes and disputes that were ripe for exploitation decades later.

Instead he winds up with a bottom line that is characteristically not about history or even Africa but about himself: “At the root of it all, there’s the question, ‘what is to be done?’ ... The more I know of Africa, the less I seem to know. I am baffled, but moved. What I know is that I wouldn’t have chosen another life on this earth than to have observed this drama being played out.”