The ultimate war story

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Right at the start of The Zanzibar Chest, Aidan Hartley explains that he planned to devote this book to describing all the horrors he has seen as a roving correspondent in Africa's war zones.

This plan, he says, didn't work out because he realised that his own extremely troubled story was somehow bound up with that of another Englishman in Africa, a friend of his late father's called Peter Davey, who was murdered in Aden in 1947.

Forget all that. Davey's story is obviously important to the author, but it's really superfluous to a book that is, in reality, the ultimate war correspondent's memoir - the kind many a reporter must have daydreamed about writing as he or she nursed a beer in a bullet-riddled shack near the front line.

But Hartley has actually achieved it, filling page after page with highly charged accounts of the evil and suffering he has witnessed.

So here is all the gore and guilt you could ask for, together with lots of lurking behind rebel lines, quite a bit of hanging around dodgy bars and far, far too many atrocities and deaths (including those of close friends) for the good of anyone's psychic health.

Aidan is clearly one of those people who should have been born in the days of Britain's imperial might. After all, he comes from a long line of Hartleys who worked, fought and died 'across the crimson atlas of the British empire'. Which explains why he spent his childhood in the paradise of Tanganyika and then Kenya.

As soon as he could after he left university, he returned to Nairobi, where he joined the local bureau of Reuters news agency.

To start with, he specialised in covering conflicts in the huge parts of Africa under rebel control - and, therefore, usually cut off from the rest of the world and always unreported by the world at large.

Possibly considering such ludicrously dangerous assignments a bit too humdrum, Hartley progressed to reporting on the civil war in Ethiopia, where he was proud to be the only journalist with the victorious rebels.

But, having missed out on the first Gulf war, he badly craved another conflict of his own to cover. As luck would have it, he was sent to the hell hole of Mogadishu to report on Somalia's terrible decline into savage anarchy.

By 1991, Mogadishu under the warlords had become so chaotic and dangerous that one of Hartley's fellow reporters, a grizzled veteran, remarked: 'I wouldn't even send my first wife there.'

Hartley sent himself-and happily took daft risks. On one not particularly dramatic but instructive occasion, he heard gunfire coming from an alley. While any halfway normal person would have sprinted away at record pace, or at least taken some sort of cover, Hartley's first instinct was to yell: 'Let's go down there.'

The photographer refused and just as well, because a second or two later the alley was filled by the boom of an exploding grenade.

When the U.S. and the UN intervene in Somalia, trying to bring some order to the chaos, they only make matters worse - par for the course, Hartley judges, in the long, ignoble history of Western intervention or meddling in Africa.

Local hostility to the U.S. and the UN's blue-helmeted peacekeepers erupted into appalling violence after an incident that was almost ignored in the West when American helicopter gunships took out a villa supposedly full of gangsters and warlords, but actually full of innocent men, women and children.

In the riots that followed, the Somalis attacked U.S. Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers.

Mobs also killed the first Westerners they saw - reporters and a photographer who were Hartley's colleagues and good friends.

After the American troops withdrew, abandoning Somalia to its lawless fate, Hartley tried to recuperate with a beach holiday. Instead, he found himself listening compulsively to the BBC World Service and itching for action. So when he heard of trouble in Rwanda, he was off again, this time to witness the emerging genocidal massacre of Tutsis by Hutus.

The killing frenzy and biblical devastation in Rwanda provided Hartley with even more nightmarish scenes to be tormented and haunted by. By then, he seemed to be at breaking-point - 'poisoned', he says, by all the trauma and evil he had seen and stricken by guilt that he 'only reported instead of offering active help'.

So it comes as a real relief when he finally leaves Reuters and takes time out to write this book and thereby perhaps make some sort of sense of it all.

But this result is much more than a harrowing exercise in therapy. 'The best white writing from Africa in many, many years' is how the South African author Rian Malan describes The Zanzibar Chest, and that seems just about right.

I have a few quibbles about some overwritten passages and Hartley's penchant for long lists of impressive or appalling exotica, plus the effectively redundant storyline about Peter Davey.

But these are only quibbles because this is a truly impressive and haunting book, an impassioned and often beautifully written account of one man's journey to the heart of darkness, and his slow, painful voyage back.

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