Morning:
14°c
Yesterday, after three years on remand, the Hon Tom Cholmondeley was sentenced to eight months for the manslaughter of Robert Njoya. The heir to the Delamere title has offered great dollops of class-riddled prurience to the press.
Cholmondeley, an Old Etonian, is burdened with an absurdly pompous surname and is the grandson of Diana Delamere, the society beauty over whom her then husband, Sir Jock Delves-Broughton, shot the Earl of Errol, her handsome lover, in 1941.
The case was never proved but Delves-Broughton returned to England and committed suicide, and Diana, in turn, went on to marry Lord Delamere, one of Kenya's oldest established grandee landowners.
Even 70 years on it is a case that still haunts Kenyan expatriate society exposing, as it did, a spoilt existence of feckless people in an impoverished country while the rest of Europe was suffering the privations of war.
If this bloodline wasn't exciting enough, at 6ft 5in, with thin lips and chilly blue eyes, Cholmondeley has the look of an Edwardian rake who might just give someone in the lower orders a damned good hiding with a swagger stick.
Tragically, Cholmondeley was fond of carrying a gun and, in May 2006, this resulted in the death of the 38-year-old stonemason, caught poaching game on Cholmondeley's father's Soysambu estate.
Njoya was killed by a rifle shot while hiding in a thicket. It makes for potent imagery when a rich man ends a poor man's life; renders children fatherless for the sake of some small antelope. Njoya was not stealing the silverware; he was trying to feed his family.
The shooting was some sort of blood-drenched Groundhog Day for Cholmondeley. Almost exactly a year earlier he had shot and killed Samson Ole Sasini, who he also thought was robbing him.
Sasini turned out to be an undercover ranger from the Kenya Wildlife Service investigating suspected illegal bush meat trading.
There was a national outcry when the Attorney General dismissed the case, having taken Cholmondeley's word that he was fired upon first, without warning. The collapse of the case caused tensions along racial lines across the country.
While fellow white farmers kept their heads down, in private they were furious that Cholmondeley had made life more dangerous for them all. It was probably nervousness about reprisals that persuaded him to stay armed.
After the second death, Cholmondeley was remanded in Nairobi's Kamiti jail with the trial proceeding at a glacial pace.
Thanks to there being no stenographers in Kenyan courts, the judge took down every word uttered in long hand. On occasion, the lawyers spoke so slowly as to render arguments unintelligible.
Cholmondeley's girlfriend, Sally Dudmesh, found her love life turned into something like a plot line from Bedazzled.
Even though they had been together only for a year, for the next three years of his imprisonment she acted as a dogged campaigner on Cholmondeley's behalf.
When the Njoya case finally came to trial, Cholmondeley's lawyers worked hard to cast doubt upon whether it was Cholmondeley who had fired the fatal shot.
When Cholmondeley took the stand, he pointed the finger at his friend Carl Tundo, who had accompanied him when they stumbled across Njoya.
For anyone following proceedings, this chimed an odd note. Would someone who had got away with killing one man and now stood accused of another really take three years to say this? Cholmondeley had stayed inexplicably quiet.
Four years after the first death, Kenyans can feel some relief that justice has finally been done.
Reader views (3)
Why the extreme prejudice against this man? He is not responsible for his surname, any more than he is for his height or eye colour.
The first death took place because undercover officers arrived on his estate and held a number of his staff at gunpoint and did not identify themselves as police officers.
The second death, like the first, was a tragedy, but also happened by accident, even the prosecution went for a manslaughter charge rather than murder!
The question of who fired the fatal shot could have been resolved by the use of forensics evidence. The man killed was in a bush so there is no way to prove that there was an intention to kill.
I have no idea about the guilt of the man, but an article like this does justice no service at all.
- Manny Goldstein, London, UK
The otther side of the story in Africa is that the poachers are often armed with AK47's and are utterly ruthless and dangerous. It does not excuse this man's reckless shooting into a thicket with little evidence at all that he was under fire.
- James Ritchie, Oyster Bay Cove, NY
No wonder we are hated
- Hatchet, Newcastle Australia
