The Africa House
The true story of an English gentleman and his African dream.


Penguin Books
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Extract (Taken from the 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 only obvious concessions to Africa were two carved wooden rhinoceroses acting as supports for a jutting side window, and the wooden crocodile over the top of the front door frame. The name was African too – Shiwa House, called after the lake which we could just see glimmering blue in the distance. Those details aside, the house looked like something one might find in Surrey or Hampshire, belonging to a duke or a lord.
As we moved closer, I could see gaping holes in the roof where tiles had fallen, and some of the window-panes were cracked or spider-webbed over. The main gardens were quite neat, the air perfumed by the honeysuckle and bougainvillaea winding round a tall cypress tree, in and out of which flitted bee-eaters, tiny flashes of colour and sound. But to the side, what had once been a walled rose garden was a tangled mess, and a broken pathway led to an empty swimming-pool with a cracked concrete floor. The tennis court was long overgrown, and steps down to the village through a series of arches were choked with tropical creepers, casting a strange green light. It looked as if the African bush was wilfully trying to take back the house.

Peculiar things can happen over a gin and tonic in McGinty’s Pub at the Lusaka Holiday Inn, the Friday night watering-hole for the local expat community. On such a Friday in August 1996 1 had been sitting on the hotel terrace overlooking the crocodile pool, entranced by the yellow male weaver-birds with beaks full of grass, engaged in their courtship ritual – a sort of ongoing Ideal Nest Exhibition to try to lure the female of the species by threading circular nests which dangled basket-like from the branches. As the sun cocked a final red-eyed snook at the African dusk, setting off the electric hum of cicadas, I found myself in conversation with a safari guide with a shaven head. His name was Mark Harvey, he had shaved off his hair as a Zambian mark of respect for the death of a friend, and he told me the strangest tale of an abandoned house deep in the Central African bush.

The house, he said, had been built by his grandfather, an English soldier and aristocrat, in the early part of the century when Zambia was still Northern Rhodesia and the sun never set on the British Empire. It was in a remote part of north eastern Zambia called Shiwa Ngandu, which means Lake of the Royal Crocodiles, and one of these very crocodiles had devoured Livingstone’s little dog Chitane as the explorer passed through on his ill-fated last journey in search of the source of the Nile.

Explorers, crocodiles, mysterious lakes, aristocrats building dreams in the bush . . . adventure beckoned. Livingstone is one of my heroes, and, whenever possible, I try to visit places where the great man trod. Besides, I had completed the work that had brought me to Zambia – an interview with Kenneth Kaunda for the Sunday Times, conducted over tea which he does not drink but insisted on pouring himself, holding the teapot high to form a great arc of brown liquid, his trademark white handkerchief fluttering from the other hand. A long weekend prolonged by a National Farmers’ Day holiday stretched ahead before I could get a plane out.

So it was that at dawn the next morning, while my head was still addled from gin, Mark and his friend Paul came knocking on my hotel-room door and I found myself following them down to a battered Land Rover, heading out of Lusaka. Over the bridge, past the sprawling market where giggling hair-plaiters Beauty and Precious had earlier in the week tried unsuccessfully to teach me to dance ‘like an African Mama’; along Cairo Road, past the man selling ‘Knowledge is Life’ exercise books spread over the pavement; past the stock exchange, which behind the modern black glass consisted of a few school-desks around a small blackboard; and past the post office where ancient post buses were setting off in all directions, crammed with Africans, goats and chickens, mounds of corn sacks and enormous bundles of finger bananas tied precariously on to the roof.

Abruptly, the city clutter ended and we were out in wide open veld, bumping between crater-sized potholes on the Great North Road, a red ribbon of a highway, unfurling and uncurling until eventually it would reach Nairobi. Above us the Equatorial sun beat down from an endless blue sky, and on either side stretched mile upon mile of flat savannah, pockmarked with scrubby olive-coloured bush, dreary to look upon. Everything was parched and waiting for the rains, and a film of red dust covered the road, the leaves, the bushes, Mark’s Land Rover, and soon us too.

For much of the journey there was little sign of human habitation – just occasional glimpses of smoke columns rising from a cluster of beehive huts, probably no different from what Livingstone had seen more than a century earlier, though to my disappointment there were no wild animals, just a few goats. At a checkpoint police waved us down with Uzi guns, and asked for sweets. A little further we were stopped by a bespectacled man brandishing a butterfly net. He dangled his net along the side of the jeep and across the tyres like a character from a Monty Python sketch, and I giggled at Mark’s explanation that he was looking for tsetse flies which had cadged a lift on our wheels.

The sun climbed higher, and we headed towards the Equator. Through Kabwe, where Broken Hill Man was discovered back in 1921 – the first clue that man’s origins lay in Africa; past Kapiri Mposhi, one of Africa’s rail and lorry hubs, crowded with motels where locals joke wryly that Aids comes free with the room charge. Beyond Kapiri, the potholes became so large it was hard to spot any road at all. Some had been partly filled with mud and grass by enterprising children who stretched brown hands out for almost worthless kwacha notes as we passed. Others were so deep that a car wheel could be lost in them and driving required all the skill of one of those video-games where virtual obstacles keep coming faster and furiouser until the virtual car is driven off the virtual road.
Eventually we emerged on to the Muchinga escarpment, a harsher land of ravines and grey boulders in strange moon-like piles. Small children appeared from nowhere to sell us wild honeycomb. I tasted it gingerly, unaccustomed to sucking from the wax, but found it so much like a liquefied version of my favourite Crunchie bars that I could not get enough, and it was soon dripping down my face.

The sun was lighting the undersides of leaves by the time we started climbing Danger Hill, into a far greener colour- scheme. A pastoral valley unfolded to our left, beyond which rose the soft blur of blue mountains, hiding what was then Mobutu’s Zaire. We turned off the road into the bush, following a mud track through a grove of blue gum trees. ‘Look,’ said Mark, stopping the jeep. Rousing myself from the stupor of thirteen hone hours of travel, I followed his gaze across row upon row of trees in every shade of green and red, : to see, far below, a lake shining blue-silver, encircled by purple hills. Through the open window the rush of the wind in the leaves of the gum trees was surprisingly loud, like waves crashing on an invisible shore. We carried on along the track through the trees, bumping over ridges and roots, and eventually came to a clearing.
In the undergrowth to the left, a black-painted steam-engine lay on its side like a sleeping donkey, jungle creepers wound round its body, and a brass ‘Fowler of Leeds’ plate gleaming in the fading sun. To the right, a road-sign marked ‘School’ and ‘Hospital’ pointed towards another track. In front of us the trail widened into a clearing dotted with red-brick buildings. I gasped. Were it not for the fiery blossoms of the flamboyant trees and that strange African smell of hot dust and woodsmoke, we could have been in an English village.

The first building on the left had a sign hanging over the door, painted ‘Post Office’. Next to that was the ‘Village Store’, and after that the ‘Estate Office’, all solidly built with red bricks and tiled roofs. Beyond these was an impressive gatehouse with a clocktower, the hands apparently stuck for ever at ten to four. Across the road were a series of farm buildings and an abandoned sawmill. Further on were more red-brick cottages, clearly inhabited judging by the smoke from the chimneys and the runny-nosed African children watching silent and wide-eyed from the doorsteps.
The clocktower stood over an archway, decorated with a carved black rhino and the date 1920. We drove through and up a long steep drive bordered by Italian cypress trees, of all things to find in Africa, passing terraced gardens ablaze with colours – blue morning glory, deep pink bougainvillaea, violet jacaranda. A great stillness seemed to hang on the air. And then there it was. The House. I drew in my breath. In all my travels in ten years as a foreign correspondent in Africa, Asia and South America, I had never seen anything like it.

We entered through the double front door, which creaked resentfully as Mark pushed, and somewhere deep inside another door banged. There was something terribly silent about the place and we kept our voices hushed as we stepped into an entrance hail hung with Shiraz carpets, leading on to a grand wooden staircase guarded by two spear-bearing warriors. Off to the right was a dining-room the size of a small banqueting-hall, a heavy chandelier bearing hundreds of crystal droplets hanging over a long table. I ran my index finger across its surface and drew lines in the dust. Gilt-framed oil-paintings of various stiff-necked Victorian gentlemen and lace-ruffled women stared down with the disapproving eyes of ancestors. Three sets of enormous horns protruded from the wall above the vast fireplace, and there were animal droppings on the flagstone floor.

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, the apricot tones of her long silk suit bringing out the amused blue of her watching eyes.

Around the back, the kitchen was primitive and cavernous, with store-rooms, meat-holds and stairs down to a wine cellar, and it was easy to picture an army of servants at work to feed lavish house-parties. Cracked pots of dead hydrangeas decorated an inner courtyard from which more rooms led off, including a store-room crammed with dust-covered gold- rimmed crystal glasses, Meissen plates and a pink and gold Spode china tea service inside which an enormous spider had made its home, and I realized that the house was even bigger than it looked from the outside. Mark was vague but thought there were more than forty rooms. Far along the corridor to the right, with a direct entrance from outside, was a chapel, with wooden pews set into a flagstone floor, walls lined with blue and white Portuguese tiles, and a large leather-bound family bible open on the pulpit, the pages eaten away in gorgonzola pattern by white ants.
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, some pasted with newspaper cuttings of l’affaire Dreyfus. I smiled as I read the first page: First day of the Lord’s Exeant. Great excitement because my tailcoat has not arrived from home.

On the bottom shelf, a pile of cellar-books listed arrivals of fine wine, champagne, brandy, sherry and port from faraway France and Portugal via ship to Angola, rail and then road. Opening randomly on 1 July 1960, I was intrigued to read: Kaunda – 2 Port Red 2 Port White 2 red wine 29 beer 3 sherry. Quite a dinner! Many entries were typical of 13 March 1965: Hippo shot – 1 champagne, 1 port white.

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, and a middle-aged black man looking cold and uncomfortable in smart overcoat, gloves and trilby in front of the Houses of Parliament.

‘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, and clearly enjoyed the finer things in life.

I would have liked to tarry over the photographs, the battered pith-helmet hung on a peg, and the boxes of records by an old Decca wind-up gramophone, but there was little daylight left and much to see. We hurried along a corridor lined with prints of uniformed men from different military regiments and framed certificates. Some of the floorboards were rotting and had to be skipped over. We passed numerous bedrooms, each with its own dressing-room and bathroom equipped with a flush toilet mounted on a wooden box. I tried to ignore some of the fattest-bodied spiders I had ever seen, presiding over the white ceramic bathtubs. All the rooms had high ceilings and sweeping views over the bush, but many of the rafters had been eaten away by termites and there were piles of dust and plaster everywhere. In one room an oil-painting of St Mark’s Square in Venice, done in the style of Canaletto, lay on the floor, one corner of the canvas completely rotten and its gilt frame peeling. Grandest of all was the master bedroom with its canopied four-poster bed, a rhino head carved on the top of each post. Further along a covered bridge style walkway, steps led up to the tower-room where a brass telescope was set up to watch the heavens by night. Our movements disturbed some bats which flew out of a cupboard squeaking, their velvety wings brushing our faces as they flapped blindly around, and I wasn’t sorry when Mark suggested we move on.

The best surprise of all was left till last. The central part of the first floor was taken up by a splendid library that was clearly the owner’s pride and joy, a bright airy place with big french windows leading out to a terrace. Apart from a fireplace at one end and the windows on one side, every wall was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling, packed with a tempting selection of leather-bound books including the best collection of Africana I had ever seen. A coat of arms was embossed over the door with the motto ‘Spero Meliora’ (I hope for better things) and a Latin inscription over the mantelpiece read ‘Ille Terrarum Mihi Super Omnes Angulus Ridet’ in golden letters – ‘This corner of the earth smiles on me from above’.

A thick film of dust covered everything and there was a lingering smell of mildew from where the rains had evidently got in. I tried to ignore my arachnoid friends and concentrate on the books. There were biographies of every famous leader one could think of, from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, to Churchill and Napoleon. There were works of philosophy and all the classics such as Plutarch’s Moralia and Thomas More’s Utopia, many of the books in precious first editions with beautifully engraved frontispieces, their pages sadly spotted with damp. The owner liked to travel, judging from the number of books on other countries, many of which were illustrated in the fashion of the time by delicate water colours. But his biggest passion was clearly military history – three whole cases filled with volumes on subjects such as the Relief of Chitral and the Crimean War, The History of the British Army in 10 volumes by the Hon. J. W. Fortesque, as well as a much thumbed and annotated History of the 5th Division in the Great War.

Two padded-leather visitors’ books stood on a circular table by the windows. I blew off the dust and flicked through, recognizing names such as Nancy Astor, Denys Finch Hatton, Kenneth Kaunda, the Montagus of Beaulieu, and the Duke and Duchess of Montrose. Shiwa Ngandu had clearly been a glittering place once, attracting more visitors each year than there were days. Now the only inhabitants seemed to be bats and spiders.

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, descendants of those which had devoured Livingstone’s dog, and that only the previous week had eaten the wife of one of the villagers, Mark recounted with some relish.
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.

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