The Aristocrat and the Poacher: A Murder in Kenya

[BurtWorm]

I don't know if the aristocrat is the murderer, but I wonder in which of his 100,000 acres the murder occurred. I wonder how his family acquired those acres. I know how he did. He inherited them.




http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/5377076.stm


Thomas Cholmondeley
Thomas Cholmondeley is heir to a 100,000-acre Rift Valley farm

The trial has opened in Nairobi of a UK aristocrat accused of murdering a black Kenyan man he suspected of poaching on his family's 100,000-acre estate.

Thomas Cholmondeley, 38, great-grandson of one of Kenya's first white settlers, Lord Delamere, denies the murder of 37-year-old stonemason Robert Njoya.

It is the second murder charge the divorced father-of-two has faced.

He admitted shooting a Maasai ranger but denied murder last year. The case was dropped, sparking national outrage.

...


Last year, Mr Cholmondeley admitted shooting Maasai ranger Samson Ole Sisina, but said he acted in self-defence mistaking the warden for an armed robber.

That case highlighted the security fears of landowners and the resentment of the local Maasai population in the Rift Valley region.

[Ignacio Upton]

1. I'm surprised there are still white settlers there

As opposed to South Africa, which had a large white population, I don't think that Kenya had very many white settlers.

[BurtWorm]

2. Probably because the ones who settled there took hundreds of thousands

of acres.

A little research turned up this (also from the BBC):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3614808.stm


Last Updated: Wednesday, 1 September, 2004, 08:06 GMT 09:06 UK

The Maasai's century-old grievance
By Gray Phombeah
BBC, Nairobi

Maasai tribes in Kenya's district of Laikipia are demanding the return of their ancestral territory - 100 years after being driven from the land by British colonialists in 1904.

Their campaign pits them against a handful of white farmers whose families created vast ranches on the land after the expulsion of the tribes.

"We have resolved to fight this to the bitter end," says Simon ole Kaparo, a local NGO official in Laikipia, who is one of the young Maasai men leading the campaign for the return of Laikipia.

"We will fight to the last man. Our land must come back to us. We are going to fight for our land."

He says their campaign is based on a treaty signed with the British colonial government in 1904 which gave the colonial power a 100-year lease on their ancestral lands. That treaty expired on 15 August, he says.

The treaty which was later replaced with another one in 1911 took the Maasai's best land and confined them to reserves and banned from leaving them.