Life on a Knife's Edge.(The Zanzibar Chest: a Story of Life. Love and Death in Foreign Lands)(Book Review)

In the charnel house that was Somalia in the early 1990s, Reuters correspondent Aidan Hartley had a strange encounter. Wandering through the nearly abandoned British Embassy in Mogadishu, Hartley stumbled into an aging government clerk named Brian Bowden, who had chosen to remain in the ruined capital while all his colleagues had fled for their lives. Bowden--"the last Englishman in Somalia," as Hartley describes him--was a man seduced by Africa, aware of its dangers yet mesmerized by its beauty and exoticism. Hartley tried desperately to persuade him to leave, knowing that it was a pointless exercise. Days later, Bowden was bringing cash to pay the salaries of his Somali employees when armed robbers surrounded him in front of his Somali wife and their children--and beat him to death.

Bowden is one of many doomed characters who drift across the pages of "The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands," Hartley's lyrical, searing memoir of his years as a roving Africa reporter. The Kenya-born son of a British soldier turned peripatetic development worker, Hartley fell into journalism in his early 20s, just as the end of the cold war, pressures for democratization and tribal rivalries were tearing apart fragile societies across the continent. He spent much of the next decade as part of a small band of nomads who risked their lives roving from conflict zone to conflict zone, documenting both the allure and horror of Africa. Hartley followed rebels into Ethiopia in their drive to oust dictator Haile Mengistu and combed the lush green hills of Rwanda during the genocide. It was a life, Hartley writes, of "all-nighters, hitching rides on tanks busting down palace gates, sipping dictators' champagne, scoops and whores and house arrests." It was also a life of near-constant peril and violence, which took a heavy toll on nearly everyone in Hartley's orbit, including the author himself.

The most vivid part of Hartley's memoir is the meltdown of Somalia in the early 1990s. One of the first foreign journalists to arrive there during the civil war that brought down dictator Mohammed Siad Barre, he was an eyewitness to the rise of the warlords, the terrible famine, the U.S. aid mission and its botched aftermath. Despite the suffering going on around him, Hartley found himself falling under Mogadishu's apocalyptic spell. "The tableau was more sublime to me than the cityscapes of Florence, or Paris, or Manhattan," he admits. "I'd hear the muezzin pipe up from a dozen mosques for... afternoon prayers, caressing the broken lines of the ...