Killing in Kenya stirs up past

GILGIL, Kenya — Serah Waithera Njoya gets up from the fire where she is cooking dinner and welcomes the latest visitors to her mud-brick home set deep in Kenya's Great Rift Valley.

Government ministers, MPs, church officials and tribal leaders have all stopped by recently.

There, over plates of steaming rice and potatoes, Njoya tells visitors how her life has changed since her husband was shot dead earlier this month by one of Kenya's most prominent white landowners.

"He is a heartless, merciless man. He is 'mnyama,' " she charges, using the Swahili word for animal. "He has left me with four young children and no breadwinner."

The target of her anger is the Honorable Thomas Cholmondeley, her neighbor and sole heir to the fifth Baron Delamere.

Cholmondeley, great-grandson of the country's most famous British settler, has admitted to shooting her husband, Robert Njoya Mbugua, whom he believed to be poaching on the 100,000-acre Delamere estate near Lake Naivasha in central Kenya.

Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-ley) pleaded not guilty to murder last week. His attorney, Fred Ojiambo, said Cholmondeley shot the victim inadvertently in self defense while aiming for dogs that the victim unleashed on Cholmondeley after the man was caught poaching an impala.

Ojiambo has expressed concerns about getting a fair trial due to publicity and fears that it has revived bitter memories of British colonialism.

"In this case the lies are being orchestrated to make him look like the guy who shoots Africans for sport," Ojiambo said.

It is the second time in little more than a year that the bespectacled aristocrat has admitted killing a suspected black trespasser.

The last time, he was charged with the murder of an undercover wildlife ranger. Cholmondeley said he fired in self-defense and was released after a month on the orders of the attorney general, who said there was no case. This sparked demonstrations against the government.

The second killing has reawakened feelings of resentment toward the descendants of white settlers who still own swaths of Kenya four decades after independence from Britain.

"It is like we are living in neocolonial times," says Njoroge Weidener, a field monitor for the Kenya Human Rights Commission, as he listens to Njoya's story. "People like Cholmondeley think they can do what they want because it is their land and they make rules."

Njoya's funeral, held May 18 at the family home near Gilgil, beside the Delamere estate, attracted about 1,500 mourners and a handful of politicians.

"It is time for these white settlers who are killing our sons to be kicked out of the country as they are of no assistance," Stephen Tarus, deputy local government minister, told the crowd.

Newspaper columnists have written with envy of Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe, reviled by most of the world, has seized land from white farmers and distributed it to his supporters — with disastrous effects for agricultural production.

Nowhere is the anger in Kenya more evident than this part of the Rift Valley, where whites run flower farms, cattle ranches and tourist lodges.

It was here that the third Baron Delamere arrived at the end of the 19th century and bought up tracts of land. He encouraged other Europeans to follow and the area became known as the Happy Valley.

The case has gotten such intense media scrutiny because of Cholmondeley's aristocratic heritage and his grandfather's place in Kenyan lore. The fourth Baron Delamere was married to Diana Broughton, whose lover was shot in the head on the outskirts of Nairobi in the 1940s.

Broughton's first husband, Jock Broughton, was tried for murder and acquitted, an episode that inspired the book "White Mischief," which also was made into a 1987 film starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi. The book highlighted the free-spending — and often alcoholic — ways of much of the early colonial set in Kenya.

Will Knocker, a friend of Cholmondeley's who was in court Wednesday, said the family's history is playing a part in the legal troubles.

"There's a lot of background that deals with white ownership of land in Kenya," he said. "Nothing good ever came of the colonial legacy in Kenya."

After independence in 1963, many departing settlers transferred land to Africans, with Britain underwriting some of the costs.

Some settlers, including Cholmondeley's family, kept their land and became Kenyan citizens. But now, an increasing number of Kenyans are saying the land simply doesn't belong to whites. Kenya's minister for immigration has even raised the prospect of deportation.

"We have to go onto the land to collect firewood, but we get chased," says Serah. "We aren't allowed there, but people who have been tell us that their house is big and that they have horses and everything for a good life."

White-owned farms have been invaded several times in recent years by members of the Masai ethnic group, who claim the land was taken from them illegally. And the area has seen a spate of killings. In the past couple of years, two European flower-farm managers and a hotelier have been murdered by intruders. Earlier this year Joan Root, a British filmmaker and conservationist, was killed in her home close to Lake Naivasha.

Residents often travel in convoy at night and have compiled a database of blood types so that transfusions are available quickly in the event of an attack.

"Everybody here knows people who have been carjacked or worse so there was quite a bit of sympathy for Tom last year. When you are confronted by a stranger on your land, the most likely explanation is that something very bad is about to happen," says one white resident.

Additional information from

The Associated Press