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2000s: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe
House of Stone
What you need to know before your trail
One bright morning Nigel Hough, one of the few remaining white farmers in Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, received the news he was dreading – a crowd were at the gate demanding he surrender his home and land. To his horror, his family’s much-loved nanny Aqui was at the head of the violent mob that then stole his homestead and imprisoned him in an outhouse
By tracing the intertwined lives of Nigel and Aqui – rich and poor, white and black, master and maid – through intimate and moving interviews, Christina Lamb captures not just the source of a terrible conflict, but also her own conviction that there is still hope for one of Africa’s most beautiful countries.
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Zimbabwe
Zhakata’s Kraal
The small village which is little more than huts in a compound.
“The biggest hut in their compound was the bedroom hut where her mother, father and surviving baby brother slept and their few belonging were kept.”
The back of the hut was considered the sacred abode of the Mudximu, the ancestral spirits that protect the family, and when Aqui’s siblings died they were laid on one of the shelves before being buried to help them cross the boundary to the spirit world.
Zhakata’s Kraal was in one of the Native Reserves, communal lands into which blacks had been shunted when the whites came, and it was a desolate place, the surrounding trees all having ben shorn of limbs for firewood”
Booktrail Boarding Pass: House of Stone
Destination: Zimbabwe Author/Guide: Christina Lamb Departure Time: 1970s
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