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

Hartley, Aidan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802125859 ISBN 13: 9780802125859

Publisher: Grove Press, 2016

Synopsis

Combining literary reportage, memoir, family history, and a quest to piece together a decades-old mystery, The Zanzibar Chest is a moving examination of colonialism and its consequences.

In his final days, Aidan Hartley’s father said to him, We should have never come.” 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 is Aidan, who becomes a journalist covering Africa in the 1990s, a decade marked by terror and genocide. After encountering the violence in Somalia, Uganda, and Rwanda, Aidan retreats to his family’s house in Kenya where he discovers 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.

About this title

About the Author:

Aidan Hartley was born in 1965 and brought up in East Africa. He read English at Oxford and studied politics at London University. He joined Reuters as a foreign correspondent and worked in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Russia. He now writes a column for the Spectator (UK). He lives with his family in Kenya.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

In the corner of the veranda was a Zanzibar chest, carved with a skill modern Swahili carpenters have forgotten. The old camphor box bore a design of lotus, paisley, and pineapple, and was studded with rivets tarnished green in the salty air. When I opened the chest lid, cobwebs tore and something scuttled into a corner.

Inside one box file were my father’s hand-written memoirs on which he had been working for years. I opened a second file and reached down to grasp the pages. The instant I touched them they began to crumble in my hands. Time, heat, and the drenching humidity had ravaged them. Mildew dusted the covers, giving off that scent of the forgotten.

I quickly realized I had stumbled on a secret that had been buried for half a century. Here were the diaries of the man named Peter Davey, my father’s good friend. Ever since I was a boy, the story of Davey crept in and out of conversation at home in vague, half-finished sentences. The tale had always been there, yet my father never properly talked about it. Davey was a silence, a shadow that moved constantly out of the corner of one’s eye. And now, as if it had been deliberately dropped into my lap, was the full and tragic rendition of Davey’s life.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0802125859
• ISBN 13: 9780802125859
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 480