ZimbabweZimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, has one of the strangest, most unpredictable regimes in the world. Only North Korea and Burma come near matching the chaos, terror and mindless squandering of natural resources currently taking place under Robert Mugabe's dictatorship.
Nobody would deny that the previous high-handed state of affairs which saw 4,000 white settlers own the majority of arable land in a then-colonial country ruling seven million indigenous people was wrong. But today, under Mugabe's regime, it is a fact that the country which once exported so much of its produce cannot now even feed itself.
Christina Lamb is an award-winning foreign affairs journalist for the Sunday Times and author of three other non-fiction books. Her last book, The Africa House: The True Story of an English Gentleman and his African Dream, told the extraordinary story of an eccentric, wealthy Englishman, who built a vast European mansion in a remote part of Zambia, simply because he wanted to.
House of Stone is the true story of two people in modern-day Zimbabwe: Nigel Hough, the last white farmer left in the Wenimbi Valley, and Aquinata Chingarire, who worked as nanny to his children. Lamb visited Kendor, the Hough farm, in August 2002, and wrote an article for the Sunday Telegraph about the Houghs' model farm and their close relationship with their trusted nanny of six years, Chingarire. A week after publication, the farm was violently seized by the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (Zanu-PF), with Chingarire apparently leading them on, to the Hough family's horror.
In her book, Lamb has reconstructed the life stories of both Hough and Chingarire from birth - Hough, born to privilege and private boarding schools; Chingarire, born in a hut and forced to leave school at 12 - showing how their lives and ideals eventually intertwined and clashed. It's the story of these two particular lives, but it is also a story of a country disintegrating as the two protagonists, each the same age, grew up in such different circumstances. More than anything, it's a story about power and what happens when that power is abused: of Mugabe's relentless destruction of the country he helped to liberate.
The Hough family, Nigel, Claire and their five children, still live in Zimbabwe, but they no longer farm and they now live in a small house on the campus of the school where Claire Hough teaches. Their tobacco and ostrich farm in the Wenimbi Valley has been razed, all their machinery destroyed, the orphanage they founded on their land for the children of farm workers who had died of Aids is no more, and their eight-bedroom farmhouse is occupied by Zanu-PF members, who have burnt all the furniture. And Chingarire still works as their nanny. Nothing is simple in Zimbabwe.
With the cooperation of both Hough and Chingarire, Lamb tells their stories, chronologically and by turn. Their actual quotes to her are presented in italics, so it's possible for the reader to see at once what Lamb is thinking and what her subjects are actually saying. Her narrative tracks the history of the terrible Rhodesian civil war, the independence and the country's ensuing descent into chaos. Many have since fled Zimbabwe, a country where a cup of coffee is now paid for in currency so worthless, you need a brick-sized wad of notes for the purchase. This is the compelling story of what it was like to remain living there over the last three decades, with the cost and suffering it entailed on both sides of the divide; Christina Lamb's book humanises an inhuman, ongoing war.
Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist
House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-Torn Zimbabwe By Christina Lamb HarperPress, 290pp. £14.99
