The Zanzibar Chest

In his final days, Aidan Hartley’s father said to him “we never should have come.” Those words spoke of a colonial legacy that stretched back through four generations of one British family. In The Zanzibar Chest, Hartley, a frontline reporter who covered the atrocities of 1990s Africa, embarks on a journey to unlock the mysteries and secrets of that legacy, and delivers a beautiful, sometimes harrowing memoir of intrepid young men cut down before their prime, of forbidden love and its fatal consequences, of family and history—and the collision of cultures that defined them both.