"A blink of an eye, and a million killed"

Author Aidan Hartley talks about his new book, "The Zanzibar Chest," the horrors of Somalia and Rwanda, and when you know war has become genocide.

By Suzy Hansen

Jul 31, 2003 | Just after I got in touch with author Aidan Hartley in London by phone, he anxiously asked if I'd actually read his new book, "The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love and Death in Foreign Lands." Many authors expect interviewers to have perused the publicity information rather than the text itself, so I wasn't surprised to hear Hartley so concerned. (Yes, I'd read the whole thing -- it's hard not to.) Turns out, however, that Hartley specifically wanted to know whether I'd gotten to the optimistic last two pages. Otherwise, he explained, his memoir of growing up in East Africa and reporting on the continent's worst conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s might be too dark, and too devastating, to take.

Yet "The Zanzibar Chest," even at its most harrowing in Hartley's riveting chapters about the U.N.'s failed intervention in Somalia and the Rwandan genocide, is thrillingly charged with an undercurrent of passion. That love for Africa is in Hartley's blood; he's British, but his family has lived there for four generations. What separated Hartley and many of his Reuters colleagues from the war correspondents was that they were writing about their homes. Such intimacy lends his first book a sense that, in each disaster, the stakes were personal and therefore much, much higher.

Hartley, now in his late 30s, lives on a farm in Kenya with his wife and children, writes for the British magazine Spectator, and is working to establish Africa's first environmental news agency. He spoke to Salon about the West's failures in Somalia and Rwanda, the current fighting in Liberia, how you know when a genocide is a genocide, and why some countries might not be ready for a Western-style democracy.

Do you miss reporting on wars or conflicts? Or have you had enough?

I'm definitely over it. I worked for a think tank after I stopped working for Reuters and I had to go into the Congo. This was in 2000. It's the first scene of the book, the moment when my wife Claire phoned and she's about to have our first daughter and I realized I was very definitely over the urge to do this. I still travel all over Africa, but I would be very circumspect about doing silly stuff. I just try to avoid the conflict now.

As opposed to looking for the conflict. I was really fascinated by the idea that your editors would say "No story is worth dying for" and yet that was clearly not true. Why do you think that you were willing to risk your life for this?

Initially I didn't think this was what I wanted to do. It's the misfortune of people in East Africa to live in a troubled region. When we were growing up, we expected it to be peaceful, and it just didn't turn out that way. Living in an area that you love, you get sucked into things. At Reuters, one ended up writing about everything from football games to macroeconomics to travel agents' conferences, and it just happened that there were more wars than anything else going on. So it became a way of life.

There aren't really any "war reporters"; there are just reporters who end up covering a lot of wars. I'm horrified by people who say, "I want to be a war correspondent." That's an incredibly unpleasant thing to say. One of the things about a lot of the Western correspondents who go and cover wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that those places are not their homes. What I tried to convey in this book is that this is my home. Somalia is close to my home. I would go home to my family, and God forbid that [conflict] would engulf your own threshold, but in a very real sense it was doing that all the time. For example in Nairobi, with the whole democracy movement to overthrow [President Daniel arap] Moi ... that whole process was something that affected us all.

You write about this line between journalist and participant and how you often felt compelled to get involved in a conflict. You were advancing with rebel armies through conflict-ridden areas, for example in Ethiopia. Was there any moment where you felt yourself coming very close to getting involved?

In Kenya, as an East African of European origin -- we had a pretty checkered past there and I'm pretty ambivalent about the whole colonial project -- I felt very strongly that that was a time when I could cross the line and get involved politically. But I also felt that I have been part of the process because I reported what was happening in Kenya from 1989 until the late 1990s. One can be involved without crossing the line. One doesn't have to wear rubber gloves throughout the whole experience. By your own interest it's implicit that you're involved. But there is a journey in the book that goes from being slightly immature to being, I hope, more mature by the end of the book about wanting to cross the line.

You just said that you're "ambivalent about the colonial project." That's interesting -- especially since you're a fourth-generation Brit living in Africa. While covering Somalia, you write that for all their arrogance, the British had their feet on the ground in a way that the U.N. in the 1990s did not. What did you mean by that?

It's also reflected in the whole story about some reporters: Whether they're black, brown or white, they lived in the area and report on what is their homes. You're just simply not going to understand what is going on in a country like Somalia unless you lived there. My only point with regard to comparing the colonial ancestors with UNOSOM [the United Nations Operation in Somalia] was that people like my father might have been part of a whole superstructure that was wrong, wrong, wrong, but as individuals they lived their lives there. The U.N. gets hardship leave every six weeks, and hardship pay, whereas those colonialists who stayed are there for very often their entire lives. They could speak the language. My father could speak several vernacular languages -- Arabic, Somali, etc. -- he really made an effort because he loved the place. And that was just qualitatively different from the type of person who would just go and work in Somalia because there was a good opportunity for a bit of a thrill and a six-month contract.

Unfortunately, even for people who are very serious about the work that they do, the way we live now is not disposed to [living as my father and other British colonialists did]. We live in the modern world. It's a bit of pity you aren't stranded for a year and instead keep getting pulled out on relief flights for your R&R or whatever. That's not to say there aren't wonderful people working in those regions. But in that instance I was speaking about UNOSOM and this sort of disgusting thing that they imposed on Somalia that was so ignorant and offensive because it disregarded the Somalis entirely. It was sort of hermetically sealed from it.

Next Page: "Maybe, in the end, countries like Somalia don't want to be Western democracies"

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