From the Dir Valley in northern Pakistan, this chest is carved from Himalayan cedar. Its pieces are joined, not nailed. Its legs are part of its design, and their rise above the lid is characteristic of the region’s style. The wooden tab on the right is used to pull open a front panel. My father’s ancestors were Yorkshire farmers. My great-grandparent Hartleys, remembered chiefly for their habit of sitting up in bed together at home in the seaside town of Bridlington and arguing loudly over the morning newspapers, refused even to set foot outside Yorkshire. I sense the Hartleys’ love of home was as important to them as not meddling in the affairs of other peoples overseas. A Hartley was among those who initiated the debate on the abolition of slavery. And David Hartley, a staunch opponent of the American Revolutionary War and a friend of Benjamin Franklin, was Britain’s minister plenipotentiary and signed the Treaty of Paris in the autumn of 1783. Mogadishu was so dangerous and out-of-this-world that Reid Miller, the veteran AP correspondent used to say, 'I wouldn't even send my first wife there.'" Insurance:The Auctioneers will insure lots at the lower end of their pre-sale estimate or initial agreed reserve, whichever is the greater value, if the items have not been sold. Hannam’s Auctioneers Ltd will not be responsible for loss or damage to the exterior features of Paintings (frames or glass), Prints or Watercolours, or for loss or damage to any property caused by temperature change, handing errors or humidity changes. d) Any claim under any Statute must be received in writing by the Auctioneers within ten days of the day of the sale.

Truly 5 stars. Such a beautiful, interesting, absorbing book, hard to believe that it didn't win every possible medal/prize for Non-Fiction. I know why it didn't--because it unflinchingly tells the truth about the UN and USA, the UK and their actions in Africa. I remember how an American dropped his trousers for a group of us at the bar and boasted how he’d lost his left testicle in a Balkans mine blast, which he claimed hadn’t prevented him from seducing a nurse during his recovery in a Budapest hospital.”

Thank you for reading Nation.Africa

This was a fantastic book, though I must admit parts of it are very tough to get through- more on that later. It is also really multiple stories combined into one book. It is the buyer’s responsibility to advise if there has been any additional transactions (e.g. bidding live in the auction, leaving a hard copy fixed bid, etc.)

Hannam’s Auctioneers Ltd will not release goods to any buyer in the saleroom, until cheques have been cleared. A period of five working days will be needed to clear the cheques, and a period of 2 days for bank transfers. Large chests for dowries and other uses of course also existed, but relatively few have survived. There are numerous mentions of them in Arabic literature, and they also appear among documents in the Cairo Genizah. (See sidebar) The 14th-century Mamluk-era historian Al-Maqrizi describes the chests available at the specialized market in Cairo. Some combined chest and taht, or a daybed (like those still being made in Java during the early 20th century), while others, also called muqaddimah, were made of leather or sometimes bamboo, and they seem to have been in use as cosmetics boxes. Mesmerizing. . . . A Sweeping, poetic homage to Africa, a continent made vivid by Hartley’s capable, stunning prose.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review) Aidan Hartley’s The Zanzibar Chest is a stunning piece of work. There is an amazing depth, breadth and grace of fine writing in this book. It will reside permanently in my memory. No one should dare say the word ‘Africa’ without reading it.”—Jim Harrison, author of Off to the Side Aidan Hartley, a foreign correspondent, burned-out from the horror of covering the terrifying micro wars of the 1990s, from Rwanda to Bosnia, seeks solace and solitude in the remote mountains and deserts of southern Arabia and the Yemen, following his father’s death. While there, he finds himself on the trail of the tragic story of an old friend of his father’s, who fell in love and was murdered in southern Arabia fifty years ago. As the terrible events of the past unfold, Hartley finds his own kind of deliverance.The author was a foreign correspondent in the early 1990's in Ethiopia, Somalia, Rwanda, Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan, the Balkans, and probably other countries that I can't recall. Hartley turned 30 in 1995. He was born in Kenya and raised in England and returned to Africa after Oxford, which makes his life fascinating just with those facts alone. Un carissimo amico del padre ha lasciato un diario del suo lungo soggiorno ad Aden e Hartley parte per ricostruirne le vicende, cercarne la memoria. Una bella storia che intreccia e collega tutte le altre. Hartley’s strength as a writer is his reporter’s eye for brutal detail and his ability to fashion blunt anecdotes from the unfinished business of recent history.”—Ken Foster, The San Francisco Chronicle

My father could have made his life in almost any part of the empire. Many of his generation went overseas, including his brother Ronald. I remember Uncle Ronald, a ukulele-playing agricultural college principal in Fiji who had his singing Bulgarian wife shave him before he turned out of bed each morning. At college in Trinidad, notices went up offering jobs in everything from rubber in Malaya and tea planting in Ceylon to ranching in Australia. My father chose Africa because of his mother, Daisy, who told him stories of life in the Cape in the nineteenth century and remembered trekking across the veld in an ox wagon when she was still a little girl. My father was also inspired to live overseas by his paternal uncle Ernest, whom he loved. Ernest was a businessman in India, a keen sportsman, and a raffish character with a great sense of humor, whose daughter grew up to become the actress Vivien Leigh. During the summer of 1928, Ernest and his wife Gertrude leased the house of the Earl of Mayo in Galway and Dad went to join them for a summer’s fishing. He fell a little in love with the precocious, adolescent Vivien. “Everybody knew it,” a gossipy aunt told me. She gave him a book of poems by Banjo Paterson, signed “To my favorite cousin with love from Viv.” My father adored “The Man from Snowy River” for the rest of his life.Hartley uses crisp, to-the-point prose threaded with delicious, dark humor and a sense of the absurd that reaches its height as he details the bungled U.N. intervention in Somalia. His accounts of bloodshed and corruption are all the more effective for his refusal to sugarcoat it. . . . In the end, one can only stand as witness, and Hartley is an eloquent one.”—Claudia La Rocco, Associated Press An epic narrative combining the literary reportage of Ryszard Kapuściński with a historical love story reminiscent of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Riveting. . . . This haunting book is both enlightening and heartbreaking. Like Hartley, you will be forever changed by this time in Africa.”—Susan Larson, The New Orleans Times-Picayune Un vero peccato, una grande delusione, avrebbe potuto essere un'autentica goduria: alla materia trattata darei anche mille stellette, ma al modo come Hartley scrive non se ne può dare più di una.