Sporting a scar running from his ankle to hip from when he was attacked by a buffalo several years ago, Hon. Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, scion of Kenya’s Delamare dynasty, sounds like something Evelyn Waugh might have invented while suffering from a particularly nasty hangover. Think of a darker version of Basil Seal. The great-grandfather of the current Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee, dear boy), Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron of Delamere, “took chunks of the Rift Valley from local (and illiterate) Masai tribesmen in the early 1900’s, turning the area into a playground for whites.”Hugh’s descendant is now on trial in Kenya for shooting dead a black man whom he took for a poacher. Emanating the mephitic whiff of old-fashioned colonialism is the fact that this is actually the second time Thomas Cholmondeley has killed a black Kenyan. In 2005 he shot dead a ranger who was, in fact, detaining some poachers on Cholmondeley’s land.
But before we damn the accused as someone who kills black Africans with the same casualness with which he picks off rabbits, let us contemplate the statements of character witnesses:
The Thomas Cholmondeley described by white friends is much different: charming, genuine, a good listener, a father involved with his two sons, the type of rancher to speak Swahili to his workers and look them in the eye.
The director of his family’s dairy and beef ranches, he is a proponent of wildlife and his efforts have increased the numbers of giraffes, zebras, pelicans and flamingoes in the area. One reason he was licensed to carry a gun was to protect that game.
‘Tom loves that land,’said Dodo Cunningham-Reid, a friend who runs an exclusive bed-and-breakfast in Naivasha.
Three things spring to mind. First, the phrase, “the type of rancher to . . . look them in the eye.” evokes a world of yes, mastah servitude. Second, can someone who answers to name “Dodo Cunningham-Reid” be taken at all seriously? And finally, if Mr. Cholmondeley is such a ‘good listener,’ why didn’t he ‘listen’ a bit to the two men before shooting them dead?
Sometimes you can almost understand where the mad Mugabe is coming from…
(Full story at The New York Times)