The horror! The horror!

I have to declare an interest. In the late 1980s, I travelled with the author of this book. After university we went to run the bulls in Pamplona together, while our neighing contemporaries were being strapped into their first pinstriped suits. Then we went to Africa, where his family had lived since the 1930s. That Grand Tour was the beginning of the rape of ideology by reality for both of us, a lurch to the right, an end to half-baked student leftyism. Then our paths diverged and I have not seen him for many years. But Aidan Hartley’s subsequent odyssey is much more frightening. He has continued to use his experiences to question theory but has seen, in Somalia, humanity in Hobbes’s state of nature and, in Rwanda, the utter evil of our species.

But my old travelling companion has produced a masterpiece. This is a hugely ambitious book, a history of his family’s involvement with Africa over 70 years and can be compared in quality to an equally riveting book by a white African, Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart. In the end though, it is a tragedy. Nothing good has come out of his family’s or Europe’s involvement in Africa, either in colonial times or since independence. The 1989 hopes that the post-Soviet New World Order would usher in a new era in Africa have drowned in a tide of blood.

The book tells two stories simultaneously. One is the story of his father and his closest friend, Peter Davey, both colonial officers in Africa and Arabia. The second is the story of his own psychological harrowing by the reality of Africa, which questions what future there can be for the continent. There is little in either story that gives grounds for hope.