Africa House by Christina Lamb

Introduction

In the last decades of the British Empire, Stewart Gore-Browne built himself a feudal paradise in Northern Rhodesia; a sprawling country estate modelled on the finest homes of England, complete with uniformed servants, daily muster parades, rose gardens and lavish dinners finished off with vintage port in the library. He wanted to share it with the love of his live, the beautiful unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and fly. She, however, was nearly twenty years his senior, married and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woman he had ever really cared for, had married another many years earlier. Then he met Lorna's orphaned daughter, so like her mother that he thought he had seen a ghost. It seemed he had found companionship and maybe love - but the Africa House was his dream and it would be a hard one to share.

Christina Lamb's bestselling account of this fascinating and complicated man - a colonialist who beat his servants yet supported independence, a stiff Englishman with deep passions - is a masterpiece of biographical story-telling. It is a tale of fantasies made real, tragedy endured and lifelong love.

Reviews

'An amazing story of high hopes, lost love and ruined lives'
Sunday Times

'Generous coverage of this long, complex and contradictory life… He comes across as a thoroughly decent chap - a ramrod straight Edwardian military man by training and inclination with a fine streak of eccentricity and an admirable capacity to re-invent himself'
Penelope Lively, Daily Telegraph

Extract

Introduction

The date etched on the heavy oak front door was 1923, but the house looked much older, its sloping tiled roof and arched terraces battered by the African sun and rains. A magnificent three-storey pink-bricked mansion, with a tower in the centre, a red-tiled roof, and a line of elegant arches supporting a first-floor terrace from which a Union Jack fluttered limply. Rising behind it, a granite hill provided a dramatic backdrop. Part Tuscan manor house, part grand English ancestral home, and all completely unexpected and out of place in this remote corner of the African bush. Surely only a madman or a megalomaniac could have built such a place. […]

The main sitting-room was large and cold, with a dark Edwardian feel, missing a fire to crackle in the grate to give it some warmth and purge the dank smell. Leather armchairs stood around moth-eaten baize card-tables, and heavy velvet drapes hung at the windows, but the room was dominated by a life-sized portrait of a beautiful strawberry-haired lady holding an ostrich feather fan, the apricot tones of her long satin gown bringing out the amused blue of her watching eyes. […]

Upstairs, an embroidered panel hung over the door of the study. Inside stood a carved Zanzibari chest, the lid partly ajar and crammed with thousands of letters in neat black copperplate, most of which were addressed 'Dearest' and signed SGB with a flourish. Behind a Queen Anne desk, shelves were filled with estate books going back to 1922, and bound leather journals. Feeling half snooper, half detective, I opened one to read the inscription, Stewart Gore Browne, Harrow, July-September 1899. The same writing as the letters filled the pages, meticulously recording every detail of the owner's life. […]

Mark called me over to an Oriental lacquer cabinet, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and inside which shelves sagged with photograph albums. Black and white photographs, neatly labelled in the same handwriting as the diaries, showed the building of the house, successful hunting expeditions, visits of chieftains in flowing robes, naked African men washing each other in a river, house-parties of women in fur stoles and pearls and men in dinner-jackets, an old woman in a ludicrous hat who had clearly once been a beauty, a young girl with bobbed hair and a faraway look […]

'That's the old man,' said Mark suddenly, pointing at a fierce-looking character with a large hooked nose, bristly moustache, stiff military bearing, monocle in his right eye and black bowler hat. I studied the photograph. This then was Stewart Gore-Browne, the man who had built this incredible place in the middle of nowhere. […]

Mark opened the French windows and we walked out on to the terrace overlooking the lake, which was turning mauve and gold in the incipient sunset. Down below in the gardens, I could almost fancy hearing the clink of cocktails being served by a uniformed waiter to people wearing tennis whites, and crisp English accents, Mozart's Horn Concerto playing on the gramophone. It all seemed so serene that it was hard to believe that the lake was full of twelve-foot long crocodiles that only the previous week had eaten the wife of one of the villagers.

As always in the bush, night came quickly, a curtain visibly falling. A strange, near human cry came from somewhere not far off, a hyena perhaps, and we wandered back inside. The house had no electric light, we had brought no candles, and it was dark, full of chasing shadows, Suddenly, I wanted to leave. I thought back to the photograph and imagined what sort of man had created a place like this in the middle of nowhere. More than anywhere I had ever seen, Shiwa Ngandu seemed to symbolize the arrogance, paternalism, vision, and sheer bloody-mindedness of British colonials in Africa.

Outside, I looked back at the house, silent and secretive, mercury moonlight reflected in the windows. Above one of the doors, catching the light, I noticed the initials L and S carved in white. Shivering a little in the unexpected evening chill, I wondered what had happened to cause such a spectacular place, so lovingly built, to be abandoned.

Reader's comments

A fascinating account of one man's involvement with Africa

This is a fascinating account of one white man's involvement with Africa, showing it to be far more complex than is generally appreciated. Anyone who has travelled in that part of the world will immediately relate to why Gore-Brown wanted to build his house where he did. Gore-Brown now seems to be wholly out of date and a relic of a lost colonial age, but don't let that put you off.

A reader from UK , August 2000

An extraordinary story vividly told.

The events described in The Africa House would seem improbably unrealistic if they were not true. Christina Lamb paints a moving portrait of a courageous, if absurd endeavour in the lost world of colonial Africa. This is a hugely enjoyable book!

A reader, October 2000

A story well told

My father always had a dream to build what he called his 'Africa House'. He had a life-long affair with Africa and lived and worked in Zambia, Sierra Leone and Tanzania. Everywhere we went together he would see a hilltop or rocky outcrop overlooking a lake and exclaim. "That's an ideal place for my Africa house!".

This book is about another man's dream of building an Africa house. It is a story beautifully and honestly told. When I read it it reminded me of my father who died before he had the chance to build his Africa house. It made me cry.

A reader from London, August 2000