Kenya’s trials
Aidan Hartley
Nairobi
Tom Cholmondeley has done it again. The scion of Kenya’s Delameres has shot dead another black African trespasser on his Rift Valley farm. This is his second in a year. Kenya’s authorities, which gave up trying to pronounce his name and settled for ‘Tom Chom’, let him go first time. That won’t matter on this occasion as I reckon Tom may be sharing his cell for a long time with a very large fellow convict who will insist on calling him Tinkerbell. That’s if he stays alive.
I don’t know how or why Tom Chom has to shoot people. I have managed to get through life in Kenya without shooting a single person. I don’t believe Cholmondeley is a psychopath. We shall have to see what happens in the courts, if he can be accorded a fair trial in today’s Kenya.
Before he was even charged, the shooting brought out the Kenyan enragés who increasingly hog the microphone on all matters. The white tribe is ‘peculiar in everything it does,’ wrote columnist Gitau Warigi. He went on, ‘What silently resonates among many Africans ... is the refusal by people like Mugabe to stomach the nonsense of settler descendants whose mindsets remain stuck in the colonial past. The fate of the Zimbabwean economy is not what matters. What does is ... selfrespect.’ Yeah right, tell that to the Zimbabweans enjoying their 1,000 per cent inflation. But long before the Cholmondeley incident, Kenyans were applauding Mugabe. ‘My government fully appreciates the positive steps being undertaken by the government of Zimbabwe, especially in the field of agriculture and land reform,’ said Kenya’s ambassador to Harare last year.
On internet chat forums, views expressed by young Kenyans — many of them students at universities in the West — are pretty alarming on the subject of whether Cholmondeley should have a fair trial. ‘I say murder the son-of-bitch Julie Ward-style.’ ‘I DON’T CARE THE OUTCOME of this investigation!!! This man needs to have his farm set on fire and the man and his kin killed in cold blood IRRESPECTIVE OF WHAT THE COURTS SAY!’ ‘We black Africans now need to show him why his grandfather’s friends fled Kenya in the Sixties and go jungle on his behind. I say we lynch him and then deal with the fall-out in the investor community.’ These enragés call white people ‘pink punks’ who should have their eyes pulled out. They should be slaughtered or expelled from Africa. Kenya wants to develop its tourism industry, mind, and mainly white Britons are its biggest market. If you thought these extremists only aired their views anonymously in blogs, let’s hear what government ministers had to say when they spurned their £2,000-amonth mileage allowances and choppered into the funeral of the latest poor man killed. ‘It is time for these white settlers [to be] kicked out the country,’ said one deputy minister. ‘If the government releases Cholmondeley ... we will take it into our hands and deal with him personally,’ declared Koigi wa Wamwere of the information ministry.
Wamwere accuses Britain of pressuring Kenya to drop the case against Cholmondeley. When Hillary Benn visited Nairobi last week, hardly anybody said thank you for the latest UK annual gift of £80 million in aid to Kenya. Instead, Benn was harassed about Tom Chom. He had to explain that Britain had no interest in the matter. Tom may be the future Baron Delamere, but he is a Kenyan citizen.
Not only the enragés but also mainstream journalists claim Cholmondeley is a ‘notorious racist’, that he killed for pleasure and that local white Kenyans live above the law. ‘What would happen if a black man had killed a white man,’ said a placard at the latest dead man’s funeral, where UK-funded ‘human rights’ NGOs were much in evidence. In the past two years, four of Cholmondeley’s white neighbours — filmmaker Joan Root, hotelier John Goldson, and farmers Martin Palmer and Lloyd Schraven — have been brutally murdered. Another had his jaw shot off, while yet others were horribly attacked. Nobody claimed this violence was racial. Rather, people saw these white deaths as the tip of an iceberg of lawlessness now gripping Kenya. The murders and rapes of countless poor Kenyans never get reported. The problem is that their leaders don’t give a damn about security because they are too busy thieving, or inciting the violence themselves. As a friend of mine says, the dwindling population of whites in Africa are becoming the continent’s kulaks, to be blamed for everything.
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