When Aidan Hartley's wife finished reading the manuscript of his book, The Zanzibar Chest , she remarked: "I thought you were a bastard because of Rwanda, but now I realize you're just a bastard!" And it's true that the book details much laddish bad behavior - much drunken and drug-fuelled carousing and casual sex - indulged in by Hartley during his time as a war correspondent in Africa.
The Zanzibar Chest also chronicles the experiences of Hartley and his fellow journalists reporting on some of the bloodiest conflicts and most horrific humanitarian disasters of the late 20th century, not least of which was the Rwandan genocide.

In part, the book was written as a tribute to the many colleagues who died covering wars, including the three Reuters correspondents murdered by a Somalian crowd after a US bombing raid that killed dozens of civilians. In narrating and intricately recording such events, Hartley reveals why journalism is often considered "the first draft of history".

Hartley, who was a guest at The Age Melbourne Writers' Festival last month, has a restless, almost impatient, manner and fiddles constantly during our conversation with the pens he carries, in timeless reporter style, in the top pocket of his shirt. You get the sense that he would probably be happier firing the questions.
Not that he's uncomfortable talking about his book, delivering a seamless volley of information about it. He's much practiced, having been promoting The Zanzibar Chest on and off for more than a year on three continents.

This is his first trip to Australia and his only regret is that finances prevented him bringing his family with him - he says he's hanging out for a royalty cheque as the time spent writing the book was a drain on resources.

The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley tells me, took 61/2 years to complete. It was clearly a tortuous process, not only because he had to recall scenes of humanity in extremis, but also because after Rwanda Hartley seems to have had some kind of breakdown.

He refers to this enigmatically during the interview and in his book, where he writes of a time when "I can no longer determine if certain events that still haunt me are either real or imagined, or just excuses for drinking too much, or my yelling rages, or not bothering to get out of bed in the mornings. And sometimes there are mornings when I get up just so that I can stare at the wall of the room all day."

Hartley doesn't want to make too much of the psychological traumas of war reporting, he says, recognizing that others, doctors and nurses for instance, witness human suffering every day. Moreover, combat journalists are supposed to be steely observers renowned for their emotional detachment and who, says Hartley, would never admit they wrote a book as a catharsis.

Upon the book's completion, Hartley swallowed his pride and circulated it to several journalist friends and was reassured by their reaction. "I thought in a sense you might be considered a bit of a sissy if you expressed distress, but the collective response was 'yes, it distressed us as well'. I don't know anyone who covered Rwanda, either as a journalist or as an aid worker, not least the Rwandans themselves, who wasn't deeply, deeply affected by what happened there."

The aftermath of Rwanda was intimately linked for Hartley with his father's death in 1996 and perhaps it was this personal tragedy that ultimately precipitated his slide into the abyss. "My father's death was the final event that seemed to focus a lot of other vague fears and emotions."

Brian Hartley was for his son "an heroic figure", a man who had devoted his life to working in Africa as a colonial officer, agriculturist, UN development worker and finally, in his 80s, as a charity worker.

Rummaging through his father's papers after his death, Hartley stumbled upon the diaries of Peter Davey in the family's Zanzibar chest. Davey was his father's best friend when they were both in the colonial service in Arabia and Davey's murder there in 1947 had always haunted Brian Hartley. Intrigued by Davey's story, Hartley decided to travel to Yemen and retrace Davey's life and, in doing so, began his own journey to recovery.

"I really needed a break from Africa at that point and I got it in Yemen. These people seemed to know that I was slightly distressed but were terribly polite and incredibly welcoming."

When asked why he was there, he said he was following in his father's footsteps and those of Peter Davey.

"They said what a wonderful thing, that you are honoring your father by doing that . . . I've talked about Yemen being my methadone treatment."

Davey's diaries and that restful period in Yemen gave Hartley the inspiration and the will to start writing his book.

"I thought there would be some interest in the Davey story and I tried to write that, but I had all of these other bits of paper that I'd written - like the riff at the beginning (of the book) that I'd written almost the day after coming back from Rwanda.

"I realized that I couldn't write the Davey story because all of this other stuff started to intrude, so the book kind of grew organically and then it came to a point where I had all of this journalism stuff and I tried to chuck out the Davey stuff to simplify it. It just didn't seem to work, because it just didn't seem to reflect the experience as I'd had it."

So now The Zanzibar Chest blends Hartley's war correspondent memoirs with an account of Davey's experiences, bound with insights into Brian Hartley's life. It all makes for a long, baggy book, but it's consistently well written.

Although he says the book was difficult to write, Hartley makes the editing process sound almost comical. Hartley was invited by his US publisher, Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, to go on holiday with him to complete the final edit. Entrekin had a villa on the Greek island of Patmos, where St John had his revelation of the apocalypse. Mornings were spent editing the book, in sight of the Monastery of the Apocalypse, and afternoons on the island's equally famous nudist beaches.

Hartley has described his book as "a love letter to Africa", the only place, he says, he feels at home. He was born in Nairobi in 1965. His parents had already lost their farm in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency and were living in Tanganyika. They were soon to lose their land again when that country's president introduced a program of African socialism in 1967 and expropriated white farms.
Hartley's father decided to become a development aid worker, a peripatetic career choice that required him to travel frequently to new projects. Eventually the family established a base on the Kenyan coast and it was from here that Hartley was sent off to boarding school in England at the age of six, only returning to Kenya for holidays.

Hartley's father, he willingly admits, was the biggest influence on his life and instilled in him a love of Africa. He decided after university to become a foreign correspondent, since this would allow him to work in Africa and to have a life as well traveled as his father's.

"In another generation," he says, "I would have been a soldier or an administrator but now there are few areas where Europeans in Kenya are allowed to function."

Hartley sounds almost nostalgic for imperialism and the opportunities it offered Europeans, but he is unequivocal in his condemnation of the wounds that colonialism and slavery inflicted on the African continent. However, while he condemns the imperial system, he can defend certain individuals who served in it and believe many of them would compare more than favorably with the development agency personnel employed today.

"I think that modern aid workers and the UN bring very few resources to Africa in terms of knowledge and the effort they make," he says. "My father's generation were men who lived for long periods in a posting. That gap between their lifestyles and the lifestyles of the Africans around them was not actually that great.

"Compare those people who worked as district officers in Somaliland and spent whole lives there with a UN worker who is flown in to Somalia and evacuated after six weeks for R&R because they are worried about his mental state. He's on danger pay and all of these other allowances and, inevitably, I think that the modern form of imperialism, which is what it is, is very defective."

Occasionally, Hartley concedes, he still itches to return to the adrenaline-filled frontline and war journalism, partly because he thinks he was good at it ("I could write the story with my eyes closed") but also because, as indecent as it sounds, it was a compelling and exciting life. His book superbly conveys the camaraderie that develops between journalists who share the intensity of dangerous and distressing events.

Asked about the exploits that so distressed his wife, Hartley laughs. "I think most people in their 20s are probably quite excessive in terms of the chemicals they imbibe, are more promiscuous and ill-behaved, live less responsible lives.

"I wanted to convey the ebullience . . . we might just as easily have been estate agents and bankers behaving in exactly the same way, but at least we had a little bit of justification. But you'll notice in the book that by Rwanda there is none of that and there wasn't - it was just something that ceased to be important." Once again, Rwanda is cited as a defining moment in Hartley's life.

Hartley has left war reporting behind for a much quieter existence. He bought some land in the remote region of Laikipia, west of Mount Kenya, and lives there with his wife and their two children. He is in the middle of establishing a farm from scratch. They have built two huts, but there is no electricity or running water, although a water tank has recently been purchased and a long-drop latrine dug.
I start to say that it all sounds rather "basic" but Hartley jumps in to complete my sentence with "idyllic", which undoubtedly reveals our different capacities for self-sufficiency. He is charting his progress for The Spectator magazine in a column titled "Wild Life".
Although Hartley has lost the desire to cover breaking international news stories, his compulsion to write and record has not abated. At present, he has two books on the go. One is about his former colleague Carlos Mavroleon, with whom he shared many African adventures. Mavroleon was found dead in 1998 in a hotel room in Peshawar, Pakistan, while on assignment.

The other book will be about Africa again, focusing this time on Kenya, revisiting family stories and interweaving them with Kenya's history. It will also draw on Hartley's own recent experiences of putting down roots and, instead of his reporter's notebooks, he has three years worth of diaries from Laikipia.

He says it will be a much brighter book than The Zanzibar Chest . "That book was about looking for trouble and the next book will be about staying out of trouble."

The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War is published by HarperPerennial at $24.59.

 

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