stenio solinas

N.3/2000

Stenio Solinas

On the spur of the moment you think: "a madman’s house ".

Something between an old Tuscan country house and an English country house, three floors, complete with towers, arcs columns, red bricks etc.

Dust, mould and humidity dominate outside and all around and extend to the cottages in disrepair that once hosted the postal office, the hospital, the school, a tennis court now covered by grass, gardens without order anymore, wild and disquieting, giving the idea of a little village built on top of a aristocratic dwelling and then neglected.

We are not in the Kent or Surrey, but in the heart of Africa. Broken Hill, where in 1921 very important remains of skeletons belonging to the beginning of human being will be found, is 300 kilometres far; the Livingstone’s grave, the discoverer of the source of the Nile, a hundred far.

The place is named Shiwa Ngandu, that means the Royal Crocodiles Lake, and the house is just here with the sheet of water glitters in the distance.

On the main entrance there’s a date, 1923, two wooden sculptured rhinoceros and two initials, L and S. the nickname of the "madman "was "Chipendele", "rhinoceros" in the local Bemba language, but his real name was Stewart Gore-Browne.

When he died, on August 4th 1967, they made him a solemn funeral, as those reserved to heads of state, the sole white having received such an honour. The burial service, in the family chapel, there in the country house was radio and television broadcasted, and the Anglican archbishop of central Africa, two catholic archbishops, one white and the other Negro, the local Presbyterian priest were the officiants.
The leaving oration delivered by the president of the Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda, was touching: "Stewart Gore-Browne was one of the most visionary men of Africa. Born English gentleman he died Zambian gentleman. We mourn him because we loved him ".

So than "Visionary ", and not "mad" is the adjective employed by who knew him. At its independence, Zambia had the highest per-capita income all over the continent; nowadays is one of the most indebted countries all over the word, with an inflation reaching 50 per cent.

At Shiwa Ngandu today nobody lives anymore. Lorna, the ninety years old Stewart’s divorced wife, lives in London and she does not want to have nothing to do with; other relatives are spread between Africa and Europe. David and Mark, two survived descendants, dream about turning Shiwa into a museum, but the undertaking seems hard; it requires too much money, and among African nations Zambia is one of the less beaten by tourists. Distances among towns are long, few hotels, feverish the political climate, galloping the economic crisis.

They did the same the first pace this direction by opening the family archives to a reporter, Christina Lamb: her "The Africa House. The True Story of an English Gentleman and His African Dream" (Penguin editor) just published is the first and complete reconstruction of the life of Stewart Gore-Browne and the strong obsession he realized in the middle of the forest.
How does a dream start? And what does feed it? As a child, Stewart is unhappy. His father is a brilliant attorney, his mother a noblewoman whose family comes from Robert III of Scotland; she is a favourite of high society. No one has time for him, pale and thin, uneasy with schoolmates that make fun of him. As he was 23, young gunnery cadet, he must confess to himself not to have neither his father’s makings to side him in the practise, nor his grandfathers religious vocation, archbishop of Winchester, nor the military vocation of his uncle, vice admiral in India. He lacks the same her mother’s worldly talent: he is shy, asocial.

England does not satisfy him, his family does not warms him up, his future does not comfort him. He discovers that an ex schoolmate of his belongs to the committee charged to establish the limits of North Rhodesia, by then a Britain protectorate.

"I would like to belong to the committee", he tells him, "There’s no problem" the answer is "give me the time only to understand where devil we must go ".

The African adventure starts this way, for tiredness toward the motherland and thanks to a friend that deals with lands that he doesn’t not know either where they are. He stays there for three years, and then he takes advantage of the offer by the British South Africa Company that sells away lands to whites interested to a settlement in loco, he dismisses and starts searching a place to live, Shiwa Ngandu appears to him as "the most beautiful thing of all Africa, my personal paradise ".

The time for another life, even if he must wait six years before tasting it really: the Great War broke out in Europe, and he was called to arms. He will end war as a lieutenant colonel. When in 1920 he gets back to Africa, of the four thousand square metres he purchased, the half is given him since he is an ex military.

The new Stewart Gore-Browne starts now, thirty-seven years old. The unhappy boy, the lazy adolescent, the young with neither interests nor career outlooks, condemned to the golden mediocrity of so many young sons of noble lineage, fulfilled himself and his dream in Africa.

But Shiwa Ngandu is not only the superb palace of a white man in flight from the ghosts of a life till then grey, the Eden garden with Negro servants dressing white gloves, red stain trousers, brocade waistcoat and fez, crystal ware and damask tablecloths, iced champagne to drink after taking a swim in the lake, a glass of Porto to taste in the library while listening to the "Bohème", shooting parties and good reading...

The little emperor of a reign without armies but for which almost a thousand people work, he’s not a keen-eyed and rapacious colonialist. He loves this country, the people inhabiting it, he does not conceive the separatism from his country fellows, and certainly didn’t either racism. He builds a hospital, he raises a school, he is very active in policy, and he gets in touch with local friends.

Lorna knows a lot about that; she was his wife-child he married when she was 19 years old and he was 44, the daughter of the sole girl he loved, stand-in of the latter and of ant Ethel, the woman he idealized.
The marriage will end in the after war, when Lorna, back to London, will refuse to get back to live at Shiwa Ngandu.

"I remember terrible rows when I was a child ", their daughter Angela tells to Christina Lamb: "The trouble was that that was his dream and not my mother’s one ". "You built all that for you and for another woman ", she will throw in his face. By an economic point of view, furthermore, the real estate is a bottomless pit, it swallows up everything and gives nothing back, the attempts to turn it into a plantation or breeding succeeds scarcely.
The adventure endures half a century: in 1923, for the first time the English flag is hoisted on the flagstaff at the entry of the enchanted house. In 1967, the day of his funeral it will be hoisted at half-mast. Gore-Browne is the first white to give up the English citizenship and to become a Zambian citizen and the only one to be decorated with the Freedom Order of the new republic, and yet all in him, his life, his house, his tastes, recall an image, Kipling style, the burden and the pride of being Europeans.

In his wallet they found a faded post-card bought in 1918 in Venice and reproducing an Arcadian scene of an Ottocento Italian painter, Giovanni Sottocornola: a girl and a flock at the sunset.

t was entitled "Peacefulness".

SHIWA NGANDU