The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

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Aidan Hartley. The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War

The Zanzibar Chest: A Memoir of Love and War. Aidan Hartley

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Table of Contents

Beyond the Rivers of Ethiopia

Take Me Home to Mama

Journalist Plus Plus

The Zanzibar Chest

Feeding the Beast

Going Native

The Sound of Freedom in the Air

Empty Quarter

Lazarus

One Moment, of the Well of Life to Taste

Herograms

Postscript

Profile of Aidan Hartley

SNAPSHOT

Top Twenty Favourite Reads

A Critical Eye

Journalism and Death in East Africa

If You Loved This, You’ll Like…

Find Out More

Acknowledgements

Praise

About The Publisher

Отрывок из книги

To my wife and my mother

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

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Ways of life can change gradually, or overnight. The end of British rule came in 1961. Black rule under the new president, Julius Nyerere, was intolerable to the Afrikaner settlers. En masse, they got back in their jalopies and bumped back south from where they had trekked up nearly six decades before. Visser and his wife crashed and died on the way, while old man De Wet had a heart attack two days after leaving the slopes of Meru, where he’d been raised. Many years later, as apartheid collapsed, some of the survivors joined the ranks of the white supremacist Eugene Terreblanche and his AWB brownshirts. They have never stopped running.

Meanwhile Nyerere flirted with the North Koreans, Chinese and Russians. In 1967, the president decreed a programme of African socialism. When it came down to brass tacks, this vague philosophy – promoted mainly by Nyerere himself in a series of slim volumes – was less a creed than a way of justifying national theft and vandalism, which in turn led to destitution across the board. The socialists began nationalizing white farms without any coherent plan of what should happen to the properties after they had been expropriated. Government men arrived and ordered Europeans out. The Lundgrens were given thirty minutes notice to leave a farm where they had lived for three decades. In contrast, the von Trutschlers were imprisoned in their house for days with no food but for the eggs the local peasant woman smuggled to them. Settlers’ bank accounts were frozen and they were allowed to pack only what they could transport on their one-way trip into exile. Some had been on their farms all their lives. They left behind workers, family graves, their possessions – all they had worked for and all they had loved.

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