House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe - Hardcover

Lamb, Christina

4.06

621 ratings by Goodreads

9781556527357: House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1556527357 ISBN 13: 9781556527357

Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books, 2007

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Blue mountains, golden fields, gin and tonics on the terrace--once it had seemed the most idyllic place on earth. But by August 2002, Marondera, in eastern Zimbabwe, had been turned into a bloody battleground, the center of a violent campaign. One bright morning, Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers, received the news he had been dreading. A crowd of war veterans was at his gates, demanding he hand over his homestead. The mob started a fire and dragged him to an outhouse. To his shock, the leader of the invaders was his family’s much-loved nanny Aqui. “Get out or we’ll kill you,” she said. “There is no place for whites in this country.”

Christina Lamb uncovered the astonishing saga she tells in House of Stone while traveling back and forth to report clandestinely on Zimbabwe. Her powerful narrative traces the history of the brutal civil war, independence, and the Mugabe years, all through the lives of two people on opposing sides. Although born within a few miles of each other, their experience growing up could not have been more different. While Nigel played cricket and piloted his own plane, Aqui grew up in a mud hut, sleeping on the floor with her brothers and sisters. “They had 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.

House of Stone (“dzimba dza mabwe” or “Zimbabwe” in Shona) is based on a remarkable series of interviews with this white farmer and black nanny, set against the backdrop of the last British colony to become independent, and the descent into madness of Robert Mugabe, one of Africa’s most respected nationalist leaders.

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About the Author:

Christina Lamb is a foreign affairs correspondent for the Sunday Times and is the author of The Africa House, The Sewing Circles of Herat, and Waiting for Allah. Please visit her website at www.christinalamb.net.

From Publishers Weekly:

Starred Review. Two very different lives run in parallel in award-winning British journalist Lamb's riveting account of Zimbabwe's brutal civil war in the 1970s, the elation of becoming the last British colony in Africa to win independence [in 1980]... and then the descent into madness. By alternating chapters from the perspectives of Aqui Shamvi, a poor black woman, and Nigel Hough, a wealthy white man, Lamb (The Africa House) brings both the personal and the political home to the reader. Her level tone and everyday language make the dramatic story all the more compelling. Though Aqui and Nigel are linked for a few years by her employment as his children's nanny, their lives mostly move along very separate paths as black Africans are dispossessed by the colonialist Land Acts, urban black quarters are demolished under President Robert Mugabe's orders and violent squatters occupy white-owned land. Lamb's indictment of Mugabe and his African enforcers and European enablers is complete; however, she achieves remarkable balance and demonstrates an extraordinary capacity to take the reader into the racism- and colonialism-torn worlds of two decent people, neither at home in their native land. (Sept.)
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