Poacher killed on white settler’s estate

Elizabeth A. Kennedy

NAIROBI, Kenya — A descendant of Kenya’s most famous white settlers fatally shot a black man on his vast estate simply because the man was poaching a gazelle, not because he posed any threat, a prosecutor said Monday in a case that has stirred racial tensions in East Africa.

Prosecutor Keriako Tobiko offered revenge as the motive at the start of the murder trial of Thomas Cholmondeley, 38, who says the May shooting was in self-defense. He could face the death penalty if convicted.

The case marks the second time in just over a year that Cholmondeley killed a black man on the family’s sprawling farm in the Rift Valley — a region dubbed “Happy Valley” because of the decadent lifestyles of its colonial settlers. Charges were dropped in the earlier case, prompting protests that Cholmondeley got special treatment.

“The accused attacked the deceased and his companions as retaliation or revenge for trespassing and poaching,” Tobiko said as he outlined the prosecution’s case in a hushed courtroom. “The deceased was running away when he was shot by the accused.”

Educated at Eton, one of Britain’s most exclusive schools, Cholmondeley showed no emotion as he sat with his legs crossed and hands clasped. His trial was expected to last five days.

Sitting 20 feet from Cholmondeley was Serah Njoya, the widow of 37-year-old Robert Njoya, who died en route to the hospital after being hit by a single bullet from a high-powered hunting rifle. She made no eye contact with Cholmondeley or his relatives in the courtroom.

Serah Njoya testified that she first heard her husband was missing when his companions came running from Cholmondeley’s farm after hearing gunshots and asked if he had made it home.

“I waited the whole night, but he never turned up,” she said.

One of the companions, Peter Gichuhi Njuguna, testified he and another man had accompanied Njoya to the farm to check on traps they had set for animals. Njoya was armed with a machete, a club and a small piece of metal, Njuguna said. The men also had six dogs with them, he said.

The three found a gazelle in a trap and gutted it, then heard a gunshot, Njuguna said.

“After the first one we started running,” he said, adding that he heard “three or four” shots after that. He said the men went in different directions and he never saw Njoya again.

Defense lawyer Fred Ojiambo said Cholmondeley’s estate is often invaded by trespassers and poachers, who are prosecuted lawfully — suggesting that his client would not have fired without cause.

Last year, a murder case against Cholmondeley was dropped after high-level government intervention, enraging Kenyans who say he received special treatment. Cholmondeley said he mistook an undercover game warden for a robber in that shooting.

Both cases have exposed deep tensions about the British presence in Kenya, with many citizens resentful that the best land was taken over by the British government during colonial times. After Kenya’s 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.

Cholmondeley is the great-grandson of the third Baron Delamere, one of Kenya’s first major white settlers more than a century ago. The farm, to which Cholmondeley is the only heir, is largely ungated and has been estimated to be anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 acres.

The case has received 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, often alcoholic ways of some of the early colonialists in Kenya.

White landowners in recent years have complained about increasing crime, saying they feel threatened on their isolated holdings in Kenya’s fertile plains. In January, renowned British wildlife filmmaker Joan Root was fatally shot in her home in the Rift Valley.