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

From Publishers Weekly
Shiwa House is a magnificent, dilapidated rural estate in Zambia: built in the early years of the 20th century and resembling an English ancestral home, it was "completely... out of place in this remote corner of the African bush," writes Lamb, a journalist and author of the highly praised Sewing Circles of Herat. Her narrative, spanning more than half of the 20th century, not only reconstructs Shiwa House's original glory but details the intimate world of its builder, the egotistical Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, whom President Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia honored with a state funeral in 1967. Concentrating on the evolution of Gore-Browne's nostalgically conceived estate in a remote outpost of British colonial Northern Rhodesia, Lamb evokes the beauty of the unspoiled countryside, its teeming wildlife, Gore-Browne's love of hunting, his friendly relations with locals and his eccentric attempt to model his estate on that of his cherished Aunt Ethel in England. Lamb recounts Gore-Browne's romantic affections for his beautiful, older married aunt and his equally perverse marriage to the much younger daughter of an old flame; his largely unsuccessful political campaigns; and his unexpectedly wholehearted support of Zambian independence. The narrative is engaging and well crafted, although Lamb's attempts at dramatizing her subjects' emotional lives sometimes read like a romance novel, and her narrow focus on the house's history obscures the wider context of waning British empire. 16 pages of b&w photos, maps. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In what is now Zambia but what was then Northern Rhodesia, Sir Stewart Gore-Browne built Shiwa House in 1923, a gorgeous, sprawling English manor that employed hundreds. With scintillating prose and a vivid imagination, Lamb re-creates Gore-Browne's life from 1914 to 1967, and what a life it was: the struggles to make the estate support itself; Gore-Browne's inexhaustible love of Africa and his work for its people, shot through always with his unbending attitudes about class and place. And within this tall, monocled Englishman, there was such personal passion: he loved a woman whose daughter he later married because she so looked like her mother. The real love of his life, however, was his aunt, to whom he wrote almost daily for decades. It is those letters and his diary that enable Lamb to re-create menus, activities, weather, and upheavals in mesmerizing detail. Today's bloggers have nothing on this first white man to become a Zambian citizen as Lamb effortlessly weaves his words into her narrative to form an absolutely compelling tapestry. Black-and-white photographs not seen. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description

A bestseller in Britain, The Africa House vividly details the life of an English officer and gentleman and his remarkable house and colony in deepest Africa.

In the ides of the British Empire, Stewart Gore Browne built himself a feudal paradise in northern Rhodesia, a sprawling country estate modeled on the finest homes in 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 life, the beautiful, unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and to 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. Then he met Lorna's orphaned daughter, so like her mother that he thought he had seen a ghost. It seemed he had at last found love -- but the Africa House was his dream, and it would be a hard one to share.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"The Africa House details the life of an English officer and gentleman and his remarkable house and colony in deepest Africa. In the ides of the British Empire, Stewart Gore Browne built himself a feudal paradise in northern Rhodesia, a sprawling country estate modeled on the finest homes in 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 life, the beautiful, unconventional Ethel Locke King, one of the first women to drive and to 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. Then he met Lorna's orphaned daughter, so like her mother that he thought he had seen a ghost. It seemed he had at last found love - but the Africa House was his dream, and it would be a hard one to share." Christina Lamb's updated account of this complicated man - a colonialist who beat his servants yet supported independence, a stiff Englishman with deep passions - is a masterpiece of biography and storytelling. Set against the backdrop of sweeping change across Africa, this is a tale of fantasies made real, tragedy endured and lifelong love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal

With the help of a three-page bibliography of books, archives, periodicals, and primary sources, Lamb (foreign affairs correspondent, London's Sunday Times; The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan) creates a fascinating "speaking" portrait of Sir Stewart Gore-Browne, honored, when he died in August 1967, as "the only white man in Central Africa to have received both a state funeral and a chief's burial." The house referred to in the title is Gore-Browne's country estate built in 1923 in Northern Rhodesia, "a magnificent three-storey pink-bricked mansion part Tuscan manor house, part grand English ancestral home." Gore-Browne himself becomes an extraordinary presence, something of the 19th-century imperial British persona that Edgar Wallace captured in novels like Sanders of the River. Kenneth Kaunda, the first president of Zambia, best summed up Gore-Browne as "one of the most visionary people in Africa-he was born an English gentleman and died a Zambian gentleman." Recommended for all libraries with a special interest in Africa and colonial history.-Robert C. Jones, Warrensburg, MO Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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