The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream - Hardcover

Lamb, Christina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060735872 ISBN 13: 9780060735876

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2004

Synopsis

A biography by the author of The Sewing Circles of Herat traces the establishment of Stewart Gore Browne's feudal paradise in northern Rhodesia, his marriage to the daughter of the woman he loved, his support of independence, and his contradictory nature. Reader's Guide available. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

Review

On Good Friday in 1914, a young British Army officer named Stewart Gore-Browne first glimpsed a lake in what was then Northern Rhodesia that the local Bemba tribe called Shiwa Ngandu ("Lake of the Royal Crocodiles"). At that moment, a love affair began which would last his lifetime, as the enraptured Gore-Browne set about creating a very British idyll in the African bush, complete with redbrick house and a terrace on which uniformed staff would serve champagne and cocktails. This is the complicated story of a man, his colonial vision, and the burden it became, set against the country in which he battles to realise it.

Christina Lamb has assembled the story from the mass of diaries and correspondence that lay within the now crumbling and neglected house. It is an extraordinary tale that leaps off the page with the grace of a springbok. Gore-Browne initially appears an extinct species, all Harrovian vowels, and prone to pepper with lead shot anything that moves. He is, however, infused with a liberal, humane streak that leads him in later life to support Kenneth Kaunda and the UNIP in their fight for power. Indeed, Kaunda said of him, "... he [Gore-Browne] was born an English gentleman, and died a Zambian gentleman".

Gore-Browne's personal life progressed from an unrequited love to a dramatic marriage, while still indulging in a formidably passionate correspondence with a favourite aunt. There are times when you wish for a timely swipe of the novelist's pen, but it is the nature of this beast that questions remain unanswered; what holds this engrossing chronicle in place is the Africa House itself, and the lives that unfold in and around it, perched incongruously as it is in a country that has outgrown it. --David Vincent

About the Author

Christina Lamb is an award-winning journalist who, since graduating from Oxford twelve years ago, has lived overseas as a correspondent for the Financial Times in Pakistan and Brazil, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, and correspondent for the Sunday Times in South Africa. A fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, she is an inveterate traveller. Her previous book, Waiting for Allah: Pakistan's Struggle for Democracy, was published by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin. She is currently Foreign Affairs Correspondent for the Sunday Times and lives with her husband and young son in London and Portugal.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060735872
• ISBN 13: 9780060735876
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352