Prometheus 6   

A Clear-Eyed Son of Africa Totes the Continent's Pain and Despair
By RICHARD EDER

THE ZANZIBAR CHEST
A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands
By Aidan Hartley
Illustrated. 414 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $24.

oe to the land shadowing with wings, which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia," Aidan Hartley quotes from the prophet Isaiah. "Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, to a people terrible from their beginning hitherto; a nation meted out and trodden down."

That shadowed, peeled nation is Africa, Mr. Hartley writes, hitching Isaiah's prophecy to the ever more ghastly cycle of coups, famines and massacres of the past dozen years.

As for "the swift messengers," the author numbers himself among them: one of the pack of journalists who crisscrossed Africa for some of those years. He uses that epithet in an unassayable mix of irony, vainglory, passionate sympathy and despair. His book displays the same mix.

"The Zanzibar Chest" is a many-legged hybrid. In part it is a wrenching account of African horrors, particularly those of Somalia and Rwanda.

There is the Rwandan refugee camp. A starving boy "crouches like a frog with eyes clouded white as moonstones," he writes. "And the American nurse is whispering in my ear, `We say the ones like that are circling the drain. You know, like a spider in your bath?' " There is the gang of paparazzi stampeding behind Sophia Loren, on a celebrity-appeal tour of a Somalian famine camp, and stomping on the arm of a child too weak to roll away.

Further "The Zanzibar Chest" is also a loving, often evocative account of East Africa where the author grew up, the son of a British agriculture expert and would-be rural entrepreneur, and descendant of a long line of colonial administrators and army officers. (When Mr. Hartley's Boer War great-grandfather asked to marry the daughter of the writer's great-great-grandfather — a medical corps general in the war against New Zealand's Maoris — the older man replied, "Better for her to be your widow than my unwed daughter!")