The Zanzibar Chest: a memoir of love and war Aidan Hartley HarperCollins, 448pp, £20 ISBN 0002570599

In the seamy world of foreign correspondents, there is nothing quite like the "old Africa hand". Often war junkies of the type who keep the shrapnel with which they have been hit enshrined in Perspex paperweights on their desks, they tend to be expansive characters with tropical suits and leathery skins, holding court at the bar with stories of small wars and great sexual conquests.

Yet no continent has produced better in the way of memoirs. With larger-than-life tyrants such as Idi Amin, Mobutu Sese Seko and Robert Mugabe, with several of the world's longest-running civil wars, with diamonds, mercenaries, child soldiers and warlords such as those in the Congo who believe that wearing teeth round their necks will protect them from bullets - all against the backdrop of Africa's incredible landscapes - there is almost no need for fiction.

Think of Rian Malan's My Traitor's Heart, Nelson Mandela's autobiography, Donald Woods and Cry Freedom, and, recently, Alexandra Fuller's wonderful Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight. Perhaps best of all are the books by the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapuscinski - any journalist writing on Africa labours in his shadow. It is a brave man who attempts to add his name to this list, and there is no doubt from Aidan Hartley's huge memoir that he is both a passionate writer and a most courageous soul. I quickly lost count of the near misses - placed under house arrest in rebel-held Ethiopia, having three close friends torn to pieces by a mob in Somalia, coming under ambush and mortar fire in Burundi, even surviving a plane crash in Khartoum.

Hartley is the sort who volunteers to go to places that most sane people would wish to leave. He is excellent on the madness of Mogadishu, a place about which one of his friends says: "I wouldn't even send my first wife there." I laughed out loud at his meeting with the notorious warlord General Aidid, who transposed his p's and b's, and thus boasted how he would attract tourists to Somalia by its "thousands of peaches".

Of his years as a Reuters correspondent based in Nairobi, Hartley writes almost proudly: "At any one time we had six wars, a couple of famines, a coup d'etat and a natural disaster like a flood or an epidemic or volcanic eruption all within a radius of three hours flight." Sadly, few of these events get the western media attention they merit, and were it not for idealists such as Hartley risking their lives just to produce a few paragraphs of wire copy, perhaps we would not hear of them at all.

But this book isn't all "the horror, the horror". No one can cover this kind of stuff day after day without having their own demons to deal with, and Hartley tries to forget his with endless drink- and drug-fuelled sexual encounters. His partner in crime is the mad and brilliant Julian Ozanne, who preys on women, singing "Now I'm the king of the swingers, the jungle VIP".

To judge by Hartley's account, it is no surprise that most war correspondents are men whose lives are littered with broken relationships. A recent study of war correspondents by the American Journal of Psychiatry found that they have far more psychiatric problems than other journalists and drink two or three times as much alcohol.

This book is both intense and immensely readable, covering a great sweep of the continent with which so many white men have fallen in love, including Hartley's own family. His ancestors were empire builders constructing railways in Burma, planting indigo along the Ganges, running Calcutta University, fighting in Meso-potamia and on the North West Frontier. With the collapse of the empire, they all returned to Blighty, except for Hartley's parents. They met at a polo match in Aden (his father the handsome polo captain, his mother the governor's beautiful secretary) and sailed to Africa to set up a farm on the slopes of Mount Kenya.

Shortly afterwards, the Mau Mau emergency broke out. First their cattle were killed, then their neighbour was chopped into pieces while having a bath. It was clearly time to leave. They crossed the border to Tanganyika, where they established the biggest ranch in the country. When British rule ended in 1961, all farms were expropriated as part of Nyerere's nationalisation. The Hartleys stayed on as managers, but soon both money and cattle were disappearing and they fled, leaving their beautiful Arabian horses, which went on to escape and run wild. The elephants and ostriches were killed, the trees were hacked down for firewood, and the borehole machinery fell into disrepair. The once lush land returned to desert.

At this point, most reasonable people would have decided that Africa will always win and thus quit, but not Hartley Sr. He became a development official, dragging his young family round Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, until his wife presumably put her foot down and took the three children to be educated in England while he carried on the battle to help peasants grow crops and nomads keep cattle.

It is Hartley Sr who dominates this book. In every country, his son came across people with tales about him - how he single-handedly made peace between warring tribes, introduced dwarf bananas and had a canal named after him in Yemen, and traversed entire countries on foot with just one guard.

But this feels like a book that doesn't really know what it wants to be. It meanders randomly between Hartley's own derring-do, tragic events such as the Rwanda genocide (about which he writes powerfully), his overbearing father and the story of Peter Davey, his father's best friend who died in mysteri-ous circumstances and whose diaries Hartley found in the Zanzibar chest that gives the book its title.

The African people are reduced to walk-on parts, while there is far too much of what Hartley calls "feeding the beast", hanging out with the hack-pack, hitching lifts to remote places on battered Antonovs with cargoes of weapons, and exploits between the sheets, which I suspect are of more interest to other foreign correspondents than to the average reader.

Some judicious editing might have considerably reduced the 448 pages that may deter many from taking this otherwise excellent book in their luggage to Africa this summer.

Christina Lamb is a foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times. Her book on Afghanistan, The Sewing Circles of Herat, is out in paperback from HarperCollins

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