Zanzibar Chest Chronicles Continue

So at this point I have finished the Zanzibar chest and am now doing the grunt work slowly putting together my notes online before I write my book review...(hint...this book was great!)

p.137-8

In Axum Ethiopia there are said to be more churches and monasteries than anywhere else in the world. 

p.139

Here Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas  is recounted.  This story illustrates the futility of pursuing free will and one’s own personal happiness. 

p.140

Hartley recounts being curios rather than shocked at initially seeing his first dead bodies initially.  However later these ‘memories made [him] weep with guilt’

“But nobody rejoices at the sight of defeated men.”  Hartley comments upon seeing Mengistu’s soviet trained soldiers--now POWs (20K of them) and the Tigrayans somber disposition in victory.

p.141 Hartley laments concerning the child soldiers ‘being robbed of their own childhood.’ These soldiers also served as his bodyguard.  Most of them were about 15 years old.

p.142

Operation Gideon was the airlift evacuation of 15K black African jews from Addis airport.  (Tigrayan rebels held off their attack to allow it).   These jews had been there since 'antiquity'.

p.144

“He was a handsome boy, maybe 15.”  Harltey comments on one of his guards…wow, 15 years old...

p.145

Add to book list “Africa on a shoestring.”

p.146

Carlos Mavroleon appears on the scene as he bring Hartley along whilst he loots Mengistu’s  office.  Google Carlos as he has a pretty interesting life.  Cameraman. Here's an interesting article on his death as well as parts of his life...it's a fascinating one!  To get an idea check out this 10 minute tribute on his life.

p.150

Addis Ababa means new flower.  Emperor Menelik founded the city in the 19^th century so that his wife could take the hot spring waters. 

p.153

Entoto is the mountain above Addis Ababa.  At the top there is a round church where the service is in Ge’ez (antique language of the Ehtipian Orthodx Church).  Hartley fulfulls a personal promise and goes her for a blessing. 

p.160

“One day honey, one day an onion.  Or some say life is like a cucumber: one day it’s in your hand, the next its up your arse.”  Harltey’s father on the ups and downs of life. 

p.163

Hartley’s parents gave him the name in honor of the place they had fallen in love.  However, Hartley’s granddad insisted on the irish spelling. 

p.164

“The sun had set on an empire.” 1967 when the last British soldiers flew away in Marine helicopters in yemen. 

p.165

“Aden used to be the greatest city in the world apart from Cairo, now it’s a ghost town.”  Laments Omar a local Yemeni taxi driver (post '94 civil war)

p.166

Holy Koran epitath for the ancients who in their pride ignored Allah:  “And they wronged themselves, so we made them as but tales, and we tore them utterly to pieces.”

p.169
Peter Davey on Sir Geoffrey Archer (former governor of Sudan, Uganda, and Somaliland):  "When I talk to him I experience the feeling one gets when one walks out of a very stuffy room full of tobacco smoke into the open air and is greeted  by a heavy buffeting wind, which pushes one back a step but which exhilarates and invigorates."

p.170

Comments on Davey’s and Aiden's father's initial mission to “replace barbarism with civilization.”  …”in time, their ideas would change.” 

p.172

Hartley’s father’s legacy of “drawf Cavendish bananas” is mentioned in Yemen. 

p.181 FEEDING THE BEAST chapter.  This is a metaphor for feeding their own personal carnal desires as well as the equally morally bankrupt news cycle.

Harltey falls for Khadija, a “striking Somali…and a rich educated Francophone.”

p.184 Compares his friend Julian as the European version on his Zambian friend Buchizya. 

p.185

In Djibouti, they called the local weed bhang. 

p.187

In Madagascar, Hartley’s first encounters the women who will haunt him, vex him and ultimately fail him (from a relationship aspect) in the years to come.  He fails to say hi to her.  “I considered at trip into a war zone routine stuff but lacked the courage to say hello to a beautiful woman.”