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House of Stone

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  • Author: Christina Lamb
  • Publisher: HarperCollins
  • EAN/ISBN: 9780007219391
  • Size: 13x20cm
  • Binding: Paperback
Blue mountains, golden fields, gin and tonics on the terrace... Once it had seemed the most idyllic place on earth. But, after Robert Mugabe's 2000 controversial land reform programme, Marondera in eastern Zimbabwe had been turned by August 2002 into a bloody battleground, the centre of a violent campaign of land invasions.

One bright morning, Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers in the valley, received the news he had been dreading. There was a crowd of war veterans at his gates demanding he hand over his homestead on Mugabe's orders. When he returned, the mob started a fire and dragged him to an outhouse, waving sticks and shouting ruling party slogans. To his horror, the leader of the invaders was the family's much-loved nanny Aqui. "Get out or we'll kill you", she spat. "There is no place for whites in this country" .

Christina Lamb uncovered the astonishing human saga told in House of Stone while travelling back and forth to report clandestinely on Zimbabwe. Her powerful narrative traces the brutal Rhodesian civil war and the hope then despair of the Mugabe years, through the lives of two people she met who find themselves on opposing sides. Although born in the same year and within a few miles of each others, their experience in growing up in a land blessed with sunshine and rich land yet plagued by divisive politics and bloodshed, could not have been more different. While Nigel played cricket for his country and piloted his own plane under Victoria Falls Bridge, Aqui grew up in a mud-and-pole hut sleeping on the floor where the food was cooked with her four brothers and sisters. "They had air conditioners and cars and went shopping in South Africa. We didn't have food and had to walk an hour each way to fetch water", she remembers.

A powerful and intensely human insight into the civil war in Zimbabwe, House of Stone ('dzimba dza mabwe' or 'Zimbabwe' in Shona words) is based on a remarkable series of interviews with a white farmer and black nanny. Through them, Christina Lamb tells the story of the last of Britain's colonies in Africa to become independent and the descent into madness of one of Africa's most respected nationalist leaders.

By tracing the intertwining lives of the Nigel and Aqui - rich and poor, white and black, master and maid - she not only presents both sides of the Zimbabwean dilemma, but captures in achingly intimate terms her own uplifting conviction that, although savaged, there is still hope for one of Africa's most beautiful countries.
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