Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Africa House The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream by Christina Lamb The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream by Christina Lamb. From and To can't be the same language. That page is already in . Something went wrong. Check the webpage URL and try again. Sorry, that page did not respond in a timely manner. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Something went wrong, please try again. Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream. For Northern Rhodesians, Gore-Browne requires no introduction: a proponent of Zambian independence and a close friend of Harry Nkumbula and of Kenneth Kaunda, though Gore-Browne’s refusal to accept that Africans could ever manage a country as industrialised as Northern Rhodesia meant that Kaunda kept him out of the political spoils of independence. For those less intimately acquainted with or interested in the political history of Northern Rhodesia, Gore-Browne was the creator, architect, builder and owner of the remarkable - indeed, the virtually unbelievable in the heart of Rhodesian bush - Shiwa House, “like coming across a mud hut or a herd of buffalo in Piccadilly Circus”, to quote the first impression of one visitor. Civil servants were not Gore-Brown’s favourite characters, and DC’s even less so - this despite the fact that his own first choice of career had been the ICS. The tariff for his spoof guest-house for civil servants which he sent to Welensky is arguably an amusing mockery too far. There are few references to the Colonial Service in Christina Lamb’s narrative, and governors - other than his friend Sir John Maybin - are mentioned merely en passant. Either Lamb or Gore-Browne, on whose diaries and Zanzibari chestful of letters she has meticulously and skilfully based her account (with copious verbatim quotations effectively set in low profile italics), has made a bit of a booboo by mixing up Douglas Hall the DC with Richard Hall the journalist. Gore-Browne, like many a selfconscious diarist, may not have been averse to embroidering some of his entries so as to strengthen his point of view: the invention of white sergeants in the Northern Rhodesian police in the ugly racist incident described in Chapter 16 must be an invention by one of them. Steady nerves (or at least strong concentration) may be required to follow the story of the successive Lomas, so inseparable from the unease of Shiwa House. It was his aunt Ethel Locke King, the first woman in Britain to drive a car, whom Gore-Browne first had in mind to come out as chatelaine of Shiwa. His second choice, Lorna I, married someone else, while his third choice (and his wife), Loma II, turned out to be Loma I’s orphaned daughter, half his age. Her unsurprising disenchantment with Gore-Brown’s own enchanted palace ended in divorce in 1950, but not before two daughters had been born, the senior sibling being called (naturally) Loma Mark III. Loma II was the subject of a rather inferior poem by Thomas Hardy. Gore-Browne left each of his grandchildren £500, the same amount as he left to his faithful manservant Henry, along with the request in his will that Henry in the fullness of time be buried in the same grave “in accordance with Bemba custom” (in the event, he was not). But it is the house, almost tangibly described in its present derelict state by Christina Lamb in her introduction in imaginative prose that instantly recalls the description of the shuttered-up Manderley in Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, that is the heart of the matter. While Christina Lamb’s arresting story is somewhat novelistic, from time to time tacking between the light romantic and the irresistibly attractive, it is the house and not its owner that is the hero. Given Gore-Brown’s upbringing on Rider Haggard, I feel that somewhere in the megalomaniac dream that was Shiwa he must have thought of that palace in Central Africa which is the setting for John Buchan’s curious and untypical novel A Lodge in the Wilderness (1906). If, among Shiwa’s many astonishments, I am half intrigued by the heavy consumption of port from the Gore-Brown cellar in entertaining Kaunda to dinner in 1960, I was half ready for Gore-Browne’s reply to a visiting professor who asked whether Africans like port, “Do you know, I’ve never asked them’’. He himself certainly did. After Gore-Browne’s death in 1967, when the entire funeral at Shiwa was broadcast on TV, the looming sense of Greek tragedy which had seemingly haunted the house over the years culminated in the murder in 1992 of its new occupant, Gore-Brown’s daughter (Lorna III) and her husband John, gunned down on the estate. Today there is nothing to remind Zambia’s youth of who Sir Stewart Gore-Browne was, beyond a peculiarly uncommunicative hat and stick in the Lusaka National Museum. His grandchildren have it in mind to reconstruct Shiwa House as a museum, “a little piece of British history in what even today is remotest Africa”, as Christina Lamb puts it. In the end, Gore- Browne’s famous African dream was shattered by Loma II’s parting shot as she slammed the door in his face, “Africa will always defeat you”. The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream by Christina Lamb. From and To can't be the same language. That page is already in . Something went wrong. Check the webpage URL and try again. Sorry, that page did not respond in a timely manner. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Sorry, that page doesn't exist or is preventing translations. Something went wrong, please try again. Try using the Translator for the Microsoft Edge extension instead. The Africa House : The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream. In the declining years of the British Empire, in Northern Rhodesia, Stewart Gore-Browne was a proper English gentleman who built himself a sprawling country estate, complete with liveried servants, rose gardens, and lavish dinners finished off with vintage port in the library. All that was missing was a woman to share it with. He adored the beautiful aviatrix Ethel Locke King, but she was almost twenty years his senior, married, and his aunt. Lorna, the only other woman Gore-Brown cared for, was married as well, but years later her orphaned daughter would become Gore- Browne's wife. The story of a colonialist who beat his servants yet supported Rhodesian independence and who was given a chief's burial by the local elders when he died, The Africa House rescues "from oblivion the life story of an astonishing man, an astonishing marriage, and an astonishing house" (The Spectator). Отзывы - Написать отзыв. THE AFRICA HOUSE: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream. Sensitive chronicle of a complex man who came to Africa to found his own kingdom, built a castle for the woman he loved, and ruled his subjects with a firm but benevolent hand.Born in 1873, Stewart . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. I bought this book because I spent the first fourteen years of my life in Zambia (Northern Rhodesia as it was then), and Stewart Gore Browne was a friend of my father's. As a small girl I visited . Читать весь отзыв. The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African… (1999) Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. The Africa House by Christina Lamb. This book, ostensibly about a house at Shiwa Ngandu in Zambia, is really the story of the man who built the house, Stewart Gore Browne. Stewart Gore Browne was an English nobleman who visited what was then Northern Rhodesia shortly before the First World War and fell in love with an area around Lake Shiwa Ngandu (Lake of the Royal Crocodile). Following his service in WWI, Stewart Gore Browne returned to Northern Rhodesia in 1920 and set about constructing his own version of an English country estate in the midst of what was then a relatively unsettled portion of Africa. Gore Browne set about employing large numbers of the local populace and built from scratch much of what was needed to construct his ideal mansion. This including setting up a wood shop and training locals in wood working, setting up various agricultural operations, creating his own roof tile kilns, and so on. The house project is quite interesting but the extraordinary portion of the book is the portrait of Stewart Gore Browne. He started as a purely Victorian colonial throwback and was called Chipembere (meaning rhinoceros) by the local people he employed. He thought himself utterly superior to the backwards Africans and believed it was quite proper to use violence to motivate his workers. He insisted on rigid, outdated manners at all times. He sat down to formal dinners every night with African servants wearing uniforms complete with white gloves to serve him. He dressed impeccably and actually regularly wore a monocle. For much of his early life at Shiwa Ngandu he strolled about his estate alternating between Great White Hunter of the various game and harsh overseer of his African plantation.