In 1996, Sunday Telegraph journalist Christina Lamb stumbled on the bizarre story of Stewart Gore-Browne while she was on assignment in Zambia. In 10 years as a foreign correspondent, she felt she had never encountered such an extraordinary tale. The grandson of Gore-Browne, who was a colonial settler and former soldier, brought her to the semi-ruins of Shiwa Nandu, the house built by Gore-Browne. His goal, which became his life obsession, was essentially to create "a miniature idealised England in the middle of tropical Africa". Lamb was given access to his papers, letters and diaries spanning 40 years. Think Citizen Kane and Xanadu and you have some notion of the fascination this plot of land exerted on one man.
How and why Gore-Browne decided to become embroiled in such a task is the basis of this book. Intricately entwined with this tale of Empire in microcosm is another obsession: the story of love lost, regained and lost again.
It was on Good Friday, 1914, that Gore-Browne first saw the Lake of the Royal Crocodiles or Shiwa Nandu, the place where he would build his own personal monument to colonialism. Son of a barrister, Gore-Browne was neither academic nor sporty. With an income of £500 a year, by his own estimation he would "make little impact" in England but in then Northern Rhodesia he could "live like an Emperor". He had little alternative but to sign up for the colonial adventure. Thus Gore-Browne joined the ranks of remittance men - consigned to the margins of the upper-class at home, they were the backbone of the imperial project.
Despite the ingredients for a dramatic tale - obsession, thwarted love, the stark depiction of one man's colonial adventures - the book becomes at times tedious. The European obsession with Africa is here in microcosm. Captivated by the breathtaking landscapes, the colonial had an ambivalent relationship with the owners of the land he had settled in, veering from condescension to brutality. Gore-Browne was no exception.
The copious extracts from his diary reveal his desire to do good. "We have a duty to educate the native", he states. To this end he dressed his servants in white gloves, uniforms, patent shoes that pinched and frowned if they fumbled with the silver cutlery. We are treated to endless descriptions of lavish meals, exquisite decor and Gore-Browne's battle to tame the wilderness and reproduce the neat gardens of Surrey in the heart of the African bush.
He desired to be the envy of those back home and also to impress his stern father. Educating the native also involved force. Early on, Gore-Browne took to beating his staff to keep them in line. "I remember him smashing workers against trees or putting his hands round their necks and almost strangling them", recalled one of his staff.
Interwoven with the boy's own narrative of colonial endeavour is a convoluted love story - or is it two? Gore-Browne's devotion to his aunt, Ethel Locke King, was never articulated as romantic love and yet they write to each other like lovers.
He eventually marries Lorna Goldman, daughter of his first love, who had married another. She was a mere 19 to his 44, but even during their honeymoon he wrote daily to Ethel. He became involved in politics in 1935 and began to campaign for equality for Africans, which was radical for a man of his class and earned him the opprobrium of many of his peers.
The fairytale marriage had soured, his wife depressed at the isolation of her life at Shiwa Nandu. Politics filled the emotional void, and after their separation and divorce he became involved with the African nationalist movement in Northern Rhodesia, forming an unlikely friendship with Kenneth Kaunda, the founding father of modern Zambia. Bizarrely, Kaunda is on record as saying Gore-Browne was a visionary who had advanced the cause of racial harmony.
In the independent Zambia, Gore-Browne saw his house greatly reduced. Yet he took Zambian citizenship proudly, and acted for a time as an informal adviser to Kaunda after Independence in 1964. Indeed, when he died in 1967, at the age of 87, Kaunda insisted on a state funeral and at the graveside stated: "We mourn him because we loved him". Gore-Browne was the only Englishman to receive both an African state funeral and a chief's burial.
His daughter, Lorna, and her husband, John, were murdered at Shiwa in 1992 and his grandson, David Harvey, lives on a remote part of the land but not in the ruined mansion. It's a destructive place, the testament to one man's vanity, he says of Shiwa.
Katrina Goldstone is a researcher and critic