The book review:
The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream, Christina Lamb: New York, Harper-Collins, 2004. Kenyan RPCVs who lived in old European farmhouses on settlement schemes often wondered (I know I did) what toil, trouble and love went into building those dwellings and in bludgeoning the surrounding farm from the Kenyan bush. This question was also posed dramatically by Grogan’s castle; a now abandoned other world fortress perched on a promontory south of Taveta. This book retraces the quest of another such adventure, that of Lt. Colonel Stewart Gore-Browne, who built one of the biggest most outlandish homes ever. His estate, named Shiwa Ngandu, took form in the lightly populated region of Northern Rhodesia (present day Zambia) beginning in 1914. Gore-Brown came to Africa as a member of the British army demarking the British Portuguese border. He became enamored of the idea of constructing an English country estate in the wilds of Central Africa. Following the advice of his Bemba interpreter, Gore-Browne found a beautiful site, near where Livingstone died, bordering an enchanting lake (the Bemba said enchanted). Without giving up his dream, our hero fought in World War I, then took family money and his stuffy aristocratic ways to Africa in hopes of realizing his ambition. Granted 23,000 acres north of Mpika, he enrolled hundreds of laborers in a multi-year effort to construct the house of his dreams. Added to over the years, the English/Tuscan inspired edifice reached grand proportions: forty rooms, a library, a chapel, towers, porticos, gardens, etc., etc. Gore-Brown also sought to find a way to make his estate pay, but given the extreme isolation, few things were practical. He eventually settled on distilled oils from oranges, limes and eucalyptus as the best choice, but the enterprise only made a profit about a quarter of the fifty years he operated. Other years were subsidized by his aunt. Gore-Browne’s story is interesting because he was a character. A strict master, he dressed for dinner every night and surrounded himself with food, art, artifacts and music from home. A lonely man, he eventually married his first love’s orphaned daughter. It was not a successful match, in part because the real woman in the colonel’s life was his paternal aunt Ethel. They wrote each other virtually every day for sixty years! (Their collected letters provided the basis for the book.) Gore-Browne was also unusual in that he championed native rights from the very beginning. In the nineteen thirties and forties as the member of Northern Rhodesia’s Legislative Council for Native Affairs, he pressed for education, health services and improved pay and working conditions for native Zambians. He foresaw a society, including political arrangements, where blacks and whites could live together harmoniously. Colonel Gore-Browne invited Africans, including a young Kenneth Kaunda, to his gargantuan home, a practice which infuriated racist Rhodesians. As independence loomed in the fifties and sixties, Gore-Browne became a convert to African aspirations and was the first white member of Kaunda’s party. Although denied the opportunity to serve in an independent government, he was nonetheless revered as a Zambian patriot and in 1967 was buried with state and chiefly honors above the lake he loved. Christina Lamb’s recounting of Gore-Browne’s unusual life is well researched and interspersed effectively with brief quotations from his and Ethel’s letters. In many aspects it is a sad story because little works out satisfactorily for the characters involved, yet at the same time it is a compelling recitation imbued with the style and stubbornness of the transplanted aristocrat.