The Zanzibar Chest
Jan. 14th, 2015 11:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfbiterAidan Hartley - The Zanzibar Chest
Aidan Hartley (named after Aden) is one of those British colonials who never actually returned to Britain, even if they could regard it as "home". But they still mostly stayed where their ancestors had moved. Hartley himself became a war correspondent and wittnessed number of African conflicts, not only the most famous ones.
The chapters alternate with Hartley’s own experiences as a war correspondent and chapters based on what he had found out about his colonial-era grandfather, originally based on what he found in his father's Zanzibar chest after his death. His father had been a colonial official in AFrica and Arabia and decided to stay after British colonies gained independence.
He ended up reporting about various attempts of Africans to solve their problems with firearms rather than any kind of political process. Not that anything else would have ever reached the European media. He writes a lot about western colonial impact to Africa, lots of it not that positive.
Hartley witnessed the start of the constant warfare in Somalia after collapse of Sian Barre’s government and his point of view of the combatants is essentially that of homicidal maniacs who mainly compete on each other raiding humanitarian supplies. Only his opinion of Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil War is bleaker, due to amount of atrocities cetniks even boasted about. Especially harrowing is his description of the massacre of journalists and westerners by locals after American naval barrage in Mogadishu.
Being a war correspondent also put its mark on his psyche, with his own version of battle fatigue. After seeing all that conflict the "first-world problems" seemed less than trivial to him. It's hard to keep oneself detached in all that.
Aidan Hartley (named after Aden) is one of those British colonials who never actually returned to Britain, even if they could regard it as "home". But they still mostly stayed where their ancestors had moved. Hartley himself became a war correspondent and wittnessed number of African conflicts, not only the most famous ones.
The chapters alternate with Hartley’s own experiences as a war correspondent and chapters based on what he had found out about his colonial-era grandfather, originally based on what he found in his father's Zanzibar chest after his death. His father had been a colonial official in AFrica and Arabia and decided to stay after British colonies gained independence.
He ended up reporting about various attempts of Africans to solve their problems with firearms rather than any kind of political process. Not that anything else would have ever reached the European media. He writes a lot about western colonial impact to Africa, lots of it not that positive.
Hartley witnessed the start of the constant warfare in Somalia after collapse of Sian Barre’s government and his point of view of the combatants is essentially that of homicidal maniacs who mainly compete on each other raiding humanitarian supplies. Only his opinion of Serbs during the Yugoslav Civil War is bleaker, due to amount of atrocities cetniks even boasted about. Especially harrowing is his description of the massacre of journalists and westerners by locals after American naval barrage in Mogadishu.
Being a war correspondent also put its mark on his psyche, with his own version of battle fatigue. After seeing all that conflict the "first-world problems" seemed less than trivial to him. It's hard to keep oneself detached in all that.
