Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I started reading this book last night at 8:15pm and couldn't put it down until I finished it at 4:20 this morning. I am bleary-eyed but absolutely happy that I found this gem in a bookstore in South Africa last week. It is an absolutley capitvating book and very well researched. Ms Lamb has a fascinating way of writing...you can almost see the wild animals, smell the scents, enjoy the beauty....in short, this book will mersmerize you. I was born in post-colonial Zambia and lived there for a while, that was the reason I bought the book, but I can assure you even if you haven't been out of your hometown (wherever that may be), you will love this book!!

The descriptions and pictures of the English manor house set in Africa were interesting, but what I found fascinating was the complex character of Stewart Gore-Browne. He clearly loved the beauty of the land of Africa and its people, yet he was continually frustrated and angered by both. He treated his workers extremely well, loaned them money, helped with education, yet he also beat them.

Gore-Browne was ahead of his time in understanding that the white man should and could not be the rulers of Africa, that the governments should be run by the native people. He spent much of his life trying to achieve that goal. As others have said, it is a wonder that his name is not well known. Christina Lamb shone light on a story that should be told.

Wow! What a fascinating story. I have never been to Northern Rhodesia but I felt I was at "Shiwa Ngandu" having tea with the "Chipembele" and watching this place turn into a grand estate. Ms Lamb did an excellent job in her descriptions of events as they develop at Shiwa. I was totally captivated!!

Ishmael B Laryea

Ms Lamb is a pleasure to read. From the very 1st page, I was already in love with Shiwa House and the mysterious Lake of the Royal Crocodiles. Ive never imagined such a magical place could exist!!! Gore Brown's love for Africa, its lands and peoples, is clearly evident, but I found his sometimes patronizing attitude annoying: he despaired that his servants would never appreciate opera like the white man etc. In spite of this, I highly recommend this to everyone ... not just architects and travellers. Some day I must see Shiwa Ngandu for myself!!!

Christina Lamb writes like one possessed, and her latest book takes us deep into the inner life of one of nature's gentlemen, the 20th century adventurer and baronet Sir Stewart Gore Browne, who died in 1967. Gore Browne led an exciting life, yet like the man portrayed in Werner Herzog's film FITZCARRALDO, who tried to bring garnd opera to a little town on the wrong side of a Peruvian mountain, his obsessions are hard to separate from his derangement. In the case of Fitzcarraldo, he attempted to building a Western-style opera house in the jungles of Peru; Gore Browne had similar dreams of building an old fahsioned country manor a la Walter Scott's Waverley novels in the middle of what was then Rhodesia. In both cases everythinghad to be imported for thousands of miles--in Gore-Browne's case that included a wife. And what a wife! It seems that he only married her because he had once been in love with her mother--surely a strange story, and one that you don't hear that much of any more. You'd have to turn to the magnificent Snopes trilogy (by William Faulkner) to find this quasi-incestuous story told so delicately and with such perception.

Christina Lamb did a lot of homework before writing this book, even going to the tumbledown mansion where, as she writes, she would pull a book from the library shelves and it would crumble in her hands (due to Rhodesian humidity and the family's neglect of the old estate). Her descriptions of going to this haunted mansion are almost as romantic as the first pages of REBECCA by Daphne Du Maurier ("Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again") and understanding Gore Browne's character in the light of British romantic novels will help us understand this odd old duffer, a man who championed the cause of black freedom and yet kept a cast of servant as though they were slaves.

The bad thing about the book is Lamb's reliance on cliches and the fact that her writing resembles a Harlequin romance of the 1960s. There is little or no attempt to understand the politics that shaped Gore Browne's career. It is all about the inner man.

First off, Ms. Lamb did an exceptional job writing a very complex story. She is an excellent writer and she is a vivid story teller. My three stars are based on the topic rather than the writing.

Stewart Gore-Browne was a character if one were being "Politically Correct". I found him to be a man full of contradictions and down right creepy. In today's world, he would either be a celebrity of the caliber of Donald Trump or getting lots of psychiatric care or both (given societies perverse need to follow "real housewives of wherever" or other "reality" shows. In this instance, it is most akin to "Survivor" but with lots of money.

Initially, the story begins by establishing that Gore-Browne was not a favored child nor given much affection by his parents. In his perspective, the only attention he did receive focused on his inadequacies compared to his brother. Living in his brother's shadow caused him to seek love and attention from a childless aunt and uncle. His relationship with the aunt alludes to an illicit love and one wonders based on their extensive letter writing (daily for much of their adult lives) and the type of things written that this was not a mother/son relationship, the question remains if their sexual desires resulted in sexual intercourse, particularly when he was a young man. Their "affection" and secretiveness throughout their adult years reveal a continued attraction.

After serving in the First World War, Gore-Browne was disappointed in his status within the British military rank; although he did accomplish several promotions and gained the trust of high level officials, he felt under appreciated and deserving of more. While in the service, he was sent to do land survey work for the British Empire of Rhodesia. This began his love affair with the country. He concluded that he could become an "accomplished" man by building his own empire within Rhodesia. Spawning his relocation to a picturesque region to build his estate and fortune via farming.

He spends a fortune importing the finest things from Europe to furnish his estate. He employees many natives in the building of the estate and planted various crops. His arrogance in attempting to control the land and assuming that whatever he planted would grow, further demonstrate his folly. Although, he hired two men to manage the estate, there was friction both professionally and socially with them. He rarely listened to their advice and eventually both tired of him and left.

Throughout his years, he begs and woos his wealthy aunt to leave his uncle in Great Britain to live with him in Rhodesia; this same aunt and uncle are underwriting the financial funding of his "empire". It isn't quite clear if she is leading him on because she never says no to his requests for her relocation except later his uncle becomes infirm. Meanwhile, their affair of the heart continues - he expresses guilt for his actions but rationalizes them away, reasoning that his uncle knows about the nature of their relationship. Additionally, this same uncle also has great affection for him and has already informed Gore-Browne, that he will inherit their entire estate, thus the heir apparent, another nephew from the other side of the family has been removed from the will.

After many years of loneliness, he returns to Britain for a visit and he meets the daughter of his only true love of his youth,(she had married another when he failed to propose to her). It was a choice he always regretted. Now upon meeting her daughter, at least 20 years his junior, and a widow with two young children (and no money), Gore-Browne proposes in a few days since she is scheduled to leave the country within a week. They marry and return to Rhodesia. It was a few chapters later that I quit reading. I know people marry for a variety of reasons and he expresses some level of affection for her (they had children together). It just seemed so odd for him to be pursuing his aunt for 20 years only to propose within two or three days of meeting this young woman he didn't know.

Yes, other reviewers approve of his respect for the ways of the native Rhodesians and he had earned their admiration. This is commendable, however, his behavior with his house servants dismayed me. If one failed to uphold his standards, they were soundly ridiculed. He even beat his employees!

His behavior was very arbitrary and contradictory. His need to control his environment was almost laughable. His lack of social skills is demonstrated over and over again, which was immensely frustrating to me. Truly, he was his own worst enemy - as so many people are. Which often makes for good reading material hence all the 5 stars. If I had liked him as a person, I would have been more tolerant and finished the book. To me, he just seemed to unbalanced and strange (creepy).

If you like to read about excentrics, this is a great book.
The tenacity and adversity that on a daily basis came to challenge Stewart Gore-Brown, would destroy and give up, for many of us. But he dug in and persevered and succeeded, till Africa claimed back what he had taken, after his death.
Great story, a gem of a book.

Christina Lamb has been fortunate that the subject of her biography, Stewart Gore-Browne, was a prolific diarist and letter writer who recorded a huge amount of detail about his daily life, his feelings and attitudes, and the physical environment in which he lived. She has made brilliant and evocative use of her material.

Gore-Browne was born in 1883 into an Establishment family (father a barrister, one uncle a bishop, another a vice-admiral). He had little rapport with his parents, but a great deal with his father's younger sister, the sprightly Ethel Locke-King, whom he adored as more than a mother-figure: at one time she had gently to remind him of the Seventh Commandment. His correspondence with her is the source of much of the first part of the book: in Africa he would write to her every other day; and later he wrote a weekly letter to his friend Roy Welensky.

He joined the Army, and in 1911, at the age of 28, went to Africa to work on the Anglo-Belgian Border Commission which was mapping the border between Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian Congo. He fell in love with the country, and in particular with a remote spot by a lake called Shiwa Ngandu, where he was determined to build for himself one day a great English-style country house at the centre of an estate. He had begun with a few huts for himself and his Bemba labourers; after three months he paid what was meant to be a short visit to England; but the War broke out, and he served on the Western Front. In 1920 he returned to Shiwa Ngandu. He had acquired 23,000 acres of land from the British South Africa Company, half as a grant to ex-soldiers and the other half at a shilling an acre. He initially had two Englishmen to work with him; but apart from them, the nearest white people at the time were a missionary couple living some sixty miles away. He was then a bachelor: for three years from the age of 21 he had been deeply in love with a girl who married someone else; and he thought he could never marry anyone else.

Much of the first half of the book, then, is taken up with his amazing undertaking, as the great house and its landscaped approach took shape. By 1926 he had a permanent staff of 356 working in the house and on the estate; sometimes more than 1,200 people worked for him. The men were paid 5d a day, the women 2d. (There were many years when the estate did not pay for itself, and he could afford the expense only by drawing on his intended inheritance as the heir of the wealthy Ethel.) His authority over the men was extensive. Though he liked and admired the Bemba for the most part and disliked the patronizing attitudes towards Africans of other settlers, he sometimes expressed these himself. He was a martinet with a short temper and occasionally beat them fiercely. The house servants wore white gloves, scarlet waistcoats over white tops, scarlet bermuda shorts and patent leather shoes when they served his meals on beautiful china brought out from England: he always dressed formally for dinner.

On a visit to England at the end of the first half of the book, he met the orphaned daughter of his first love: she seemed her mother's spitting image; he married her, and she went out to Africa with him. She was 18, he was 43. Initially she was as interested in Shiwa as he was, but eventuallly, to his great sadness, the marriage broke down.

In 1935 he was persuaded to stand for election to the (whites only) Legislative Council of Northern Rhodesia, and became a member of the Executive in 1939. For all his patriarchal behaviour on the estate and his often expressed despair at the incompetence or unreliability of his African workers, he became known not only for being (according to him) the only one of the 22 members of LegCo to be interested in African welfare and development, but for his view that Africans should be prepared for partnership in running the country and for his attacks on the colour bar in shops and public places. He scandalized his colleagues by having Africans at his dinner parties. He financed the education at Makarere University of Harry Nkumbula (later President of the Northern Rhodesian African Congress), spotted the 21 year old Kenneth Kaunda as one of the likely future leaders of black Africans, and was in correspondence with Hastings Banda, the future leader of Nyasaland (Malawi). He disapproved of the creation of the Central African Federation, though his friend Roy Welensky was its Prime Minister. It had been created to merge the small number of whites in Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland with the more numerous whites in Southern Rhodesia who were even tougher in keeping Africans in their place. Though in the early 1950s Gore-Browne had thought that the Africans were not ready for independence, by the late fifties he not only though it was inevitable, but that they could and should run the country. He dined publicly in a Lusaka hotel with Kaunda, gave funds to his increasingly militant party, joined it formally in 1961, and, after the Central African Federation had collapsed, took part in the negotiations with the British which led in 1964 to the independence of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, with Kaunda as President. When Gore-Browne died, aged 84, in 1967, Kaunda ordered a state funeral for him.

This beautiful book ends with an elegiac chapter covering the last three years of this remarkable man, who was in so many ways a typical upper-class Englishman of his time, but in many others quite unique.

Author Christina Lamb, foreign correspondent for London's Times, was on assignment in Zambia when she stumbled on a rich abandoned house deep in the bush: a house of forty rooms, rose gardens, and even a clock tower. Lamb's discovery of a chest crammed with thousands of letters, and journals, resulted in The Africa House : The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream, an intriguing biographical sketch of English gentleman Stewart Gore Browne and his African dream. THE AFRICA HOUSE first appeared in the UK: this edition updates history to include the next generation of Browne's descendants, who are trying to rescue the decaying wonder of his former estate.

If this had been a novel, publishers would reject it as implausible. It astounds me that I had not heard of Stewart Gore-Brown while growing up in Zambia. He comes across as a fascinating, complex person, whose life story boggles the mind.