Trapped in Africa's deadly embrace

Since Mungo Park's first stumblings around the west of the continent in the 18th century, Europeans in general, and Englishmen in particular, have swarmed to Africa like flies to a Venus flytrap. Drawn in and seduced by its wild beauty and infinite riches, the wazungu (whites) find too late that its embrace is the death of them.

That death is sometimes moral. Africa today is still littered with the alcohol-soaked remains of men like Conrad's Kurtz; carpetbaggers, mercenaries and murderers flourish almost as well as Cecil Rhodes and Roland "Tiny" Rowland once did.

It has also often been literal. War and pestilence have taken many romantics to a tropical grave, still dreaming of King Solomon's Mines, or of bettering the lot of ordinary Africans.

Few families have survived so well as Aidan Hartley's clan, which continues to cling on in farms in Zambia and borrowed land in Kenya, where Hartley now lives amid cattle-thieving nomads and the last remnants of Kenya's polo-playing white settlers.

The persistence of the family's pursuit of colonial ambitions, and more altruistic efforts, is staggering. Not least because, as Hartley's-dying father said before expiring not long ago: "We should never have come."

But they did. Four generations ago, led by Hartley's great-great grandfather, who had won a VC fighting in New Zealand, the clan settled into Africa, made fortunes and lost them to the incompetent buffoons of Africa's anti-imperial struggle, like Tanzania's Julius Nyerere. But they soldiered on, like faithful, dogged lovers, sure in the knowledge that the object of their affections would ultimately betray them - all the more heroic for their own fidelity.

In search of the adventure that took his father to the Yemen, Tanzania, and Ethiopia (where he sired a secret son by a local woman), Hartley chose the path of journalism. But, after five years of war and famine in Somalia, Ethiopia and the Congo, and the horrors of the genocide in Rwanda, by the mid-1990s he found himself burned out, close to mental collapse.

His father left him the contents of a camphor chest. In it he found the papers and diaries of his father's best friend, Peter Davey. Armed with the musings of a man who was killed in a mysterious clash in the barren hills of the Yemen 50 years ago, Hartley sets out on a quest to unravel the tale of a British officer who fell in love with a Yemeni girl, converted to Islam, and quite probably engineered his own tragic demise.

The result is a breathtaking work, an epic part-autobiography, and part-biography. As he unravels Davey's story, Hartley turns out passages of aching beauty which, inevitably, will invite comparisons-with that other desert love story, Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient.

Hartley's engagement with his central character, Davey, is so rich in detail and affection that the pages slip by far too fast.

Hartley's own saga is no less compelling, as he struggles to maintain love for, and of, a colleague. The staggering brutality of Africa's war zones - which, in the illusive safety of Mogadishu's al Sahafi Hotel, can make for great, life-affirming sex - none the less blunt emotions.

In the days when we ran together through the Mad Max atmosphere of downtown Mogadishu, Hartley loved to misquote Michael Herr's Dispatches, in saying, "Mogadishu is what we have instead of happy childhoods."

His passion for the place didn't wear off, even when four of his close friends and colleagues were torn apart by a Somali mob which had been enraged by an American massacre of their clansmen. But by 1994, after walking close to 100 miles (in gym shoes) from Uganda into Rwanda with Tutsi rebels, and finding the mass graves left by Hutu killers (sometimes with living children hidden amid the gore), Hartley grows up.

His adventure has turned into a nightmare. Very little seems to make any sense.

Just as Davey was betrayed by the colonial masters whom he served, so Hartley is heartbroken by a continent he loves and believes he is a part of.

But, like his ancestors, and like his fellow Africans, he soldiers on.