This is the story about Stewart Gore-Brown and his dream of an English manor, in the back of beyond of Northern Rhodesia. Gore-Brown first came to N Rhodesia in 1914 to work for the British Border Commission and to get away from England where his first love had married an older man. He starts looking for land to buy, where he can build a manor (something he is unlikely to be able to do in England, considering his family being wealthy, but not enough and his a bit unorthodox career).
By Shiwa N’Gandu Lake (Lake of the Royal Crocodiles), a three-week trek or 400 miles from the nearest railway station, he finds his paradise and in 1920 he starts to build Shiwa N’Gandu – well, rather has it built, based on sketches he has been drawing since childhood. And he doesn’t stop with the house itself. Bit by bit Gore-Brown builds almost a kingdom with himself as the benevolent despot. Gore-Brown pursues a self-sustaining estate or model village, with orchards, tile making, stables, butchery and milk processing, schools, a health clinic etc. The house is managed like an English manor, with uniformed servants, rose gardens, and three-course dinners finished off by an old port in the library. The book continues to tell Gore-Brown’s story, his marriage (to the orphaned daughter of his first love), his incessant work to make Shiwa N’Gandu profitable, and his gradual involvement in the politics of the region.
The book is a fascinating portrait of a man torn between his conservative upbringing in Queen Victoria’s England and his in those times quite progressive ideas on the colonial government, “the natives” and independence for Northern Rhodesia. It’s easy to dislike the man who hits his workers, who gives his servants a glass of wine after they have served dinner, without ever questioning whether they like it or not. But it’s is also easy to be impressed by the man who stands up for the rights of a black man in a bar in Lusaka, who offers scholarships to young, promising men and who gets involved and plays a major role in the transition to an independent Zambia. When he died at the age of 84, he received both a state funeral and a chief’s funeral. A few items of Gore-Brown’s can supposedly be found at the National Museum in Lusaka.
By reading much of his correspondence and talking to the heirs of Shiwa N’Gandu, Lamb has written an interesting book, describing the estate, the surroundings and life at Shiwa N’Gandu in detail, as well as trying to explain the complex, almost bi-polar man Gore-Brown himself. The book also gives us a glimpse of the history of Northern Rhodesia and Zambia, and new perspectives on the Britain as a colonial power and background to the Zambian struggle for independence. I thus recommend it to everyone who spends more than a short vacation in Zambia. Among other places, the book can be bought in the Book Cellar, Manda Hill for appr. 100,000 zmk.
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