Aiden Hartley in his book “The Zanzibar Chest” describes both his experiences as a journalist in Africa, and his sentimental journey to trace his father’s life in Africa and Arabia. To quote:

”Aden was my namesake. My parents gave me the name Aiden in tribute to the place because they had fallen in love here ( though my godfather Judge Birkett Rudd insisted on the Irish spelling)…My ancestors all knew Aden…

“Aden used to be the greatest city in the Arab world apart from Cairo,” mourned Omar, “Now it is a ghost town.”….

I had been invited to Abyan by Ahmed al-Fadhli, the son of the sultan who had presided over my parents wedding….His accommodation in Abyan was a pleasant caravan, equipped with air-conditioning and surrounded by banana groves and the grass huts of the family’s former slaves, now his friends and neighbors…

The survivors I tracked down treated my sentimental heart gently, by singing the praises of my father and showing me the dams and canals he had ordered built. Over glasses of sweet black tea they would reminisce….

An old man who had been one of the sultan’s former slaves told me my father had worked alongside the laborers. To prove it he took me to a dam works and showed me what he claimed were my father’s fingerprints in the cement. They showed me a canal that they said was named Harteli. It was even marked on the map…

Suddenly Ahmed slowed to point…

“You see that? See, see that?...Dwarf Cavendish!...Bananas!... Dwarf Cavendish bananas. It was your father who introduced them. Before, there were no bananas! But now, we have the sweetest bananas in the whole of the Middle East!”

“You should taste our papaya,” chipped in a man in the backseat, “And our grapefruits” he added.

Ahmed recalled how hundreds of farmers had taken part in building a succession of great sand barriers that would divert the floodwaters….the flood came in a roar…My father , standing on top of the dike, saw a spout of water shoot up from its base like a geyser…After that the Arabs nicknamed my father Wet Foot. They said that wherever he walked, water followed him….

“It is not about politics, you understand ?” said Ahmed. “It is people.”….

He (Aiden’s father) had persuaded the Arab peasants in the area (the Kaur escarpment) to plant fruit trees and European vegetables for sale to the ships in Aden..

“We grew such wonderful fruit,” said Abdullah, “Plums, greengages, apricots, apples, pears…”

We visited the market in the nearby village of Mukeiras to see if we could find the legacy of this. There was no fruit at all on sale…..

“Where are all the horses your father took to Africa?” he asked….

I pictured the horses, gone feral like mustangs on the plains of the abandoned farm below Kilimanjaro….

Then I asked him where were the horses of Beihan. He was more honest than I had been.

“None left. Not one” To the communists horses represented the sultans, the feudal ethos of…the chivalric code of knights, so they were considered reactionary, backward…the rest…were turned to donkeywork, driven till they collapsed.

“What has changed between life in those days and now?” I asked Shoban.

“Honor,” he replied…

“And where has honor gone”

“Down, with the value of the Yemeni rial,” quipped Shoban’s son. The group…laughed.