Every few hours, a prison officer counts the 3,643 inmates of Kamiti maximum
security prison on the outskirts of Nairobi. One of them needs no counting,
however. Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley is the only white man in Kamiti
jail.
Prisoner number 651/06 stands out not just for his skin colour or his Eton
education. A tall, rangy-limbed man with receding strawberry-blond hair and
rimless glasses, he is also the scion of Kenya’s most prominent white
settler family. Cholmondeley is the 39-year-old son of the ailing 5th Lord
Delamere and heir to Soysambu, the biggest estate in the Great Rift Valley.
As guards bring him to the visitors’ area for his first interview since being
locked up 20 months ago, accused of shooting dead a black man on his estate
for the second time in just over a year, Cholmondeley admits he is worried
about speaking out. But he is determined to protest his innocence.
“I’ve been portrayed as this great monster who goes round shooting black men
for sport when my whole life I’ve striven to move away from racist
behaviour,” he said, wearily putting his head in his large hands.
With his soft voice, impeccable manners and bracelet of Buddhist prayer beads,
Cholmondeley is hard to equate to the womanising, trigger- happy character
portrayed in the local and international press.
The public clamour against him has included a blockade of the highway from
Nairobi that leads to the Delamere lands and a call for a boycott of
Delamere dairy products. MPs publicly demanded that Cholmondeley be “strung
up”.
The last case so to grip Kenyan society was the 1941 trial of Sir “Jock”
Delves Broughton. He was accused of murdering the playboy Earl of Erroll,
who had planned to run off with his young wife Diana. Broughton was
acquitted but committed suicide a year later. Diana went on to marry the 4th
Lord Delamere, becoming Tom Cholmondeley’s step-grandmother.
The scandal exposed the alcohol and drug-fuelled wife-swapping of Kenyan
whites, known as the Happy Valley set, and was dramatised in the film White
Mischief, starring Greta Scacchi.
To the outsider, accounts of Tom Cholmondeley seemed like reliving Happy
Valley.
Partly to change this image, he has decided to speak out and family and
friends have set up a website www.justicefortom.com.
“The problem is I’m a very easy target,” he said. “I’m a white man,
toffee-nosed, titled and, on top of that, a white man in Africa . . . you
know these are really bad things.”
With a remarkable lack of self-pity he describes adjusting from a lifetime of
privilege to trying to fit his 6ft 6in body inside a 7ft by 9ft cell. “It’s
unparalleled luxury,” he joked, before going on to describe it as “like
living in a grey greasy saucepan” infested by rats and cockroaches.
“The only exercise I can do is walking in circles and yoga.”
He writes to his two sons, Hugh, 9, and Henry, 7, whom he hasn’t seen for 20
months since his former wife took them to Sussex to avoid unkind comments at
school in Kenya after his arrest.
Nor does he know when or if his nightmare will be over.
Other remand prisoners have been waiting 5Å years for trial. “Everyone in
Kamiti knows the story of the gecko man,” he said. “He was lost in remand
after 12 years and went crazy and would walk round and snatch geckos off the
walls and eat them live.”
What it must be like to go from having the run of a 58,000-acre estate to a
9ft by 7ft cell is hard to imagine. I got some sense when I took a taxi out
of Nairobi, up the pine-fringed Kikuyu escarpment to see the spectacular
stone-ridged Rift Valley spread out below. “That’s all the Delamere empire,”
said the driver, gesturing as far as the eye could see.
About 100 miles northwest of the capital we came to the turn off to the
Soysambu ranch. Zebra, eland and buffalo grazed amid sweeping grasslands
dotted with acacia trees. Hundreds of flamingos paddled in the shallows of a
large soda lake.
Not far from the lake is Jersey Hall, the seven-bedroom converted cowshed
where Cholmondeley and Sally Dudmesh, his girlfriend, set up home in 2005.
It was from here that Cholmondeley set off for a walk on May 10 last year
with a white neighbour, Carl Tundo, a safari rally driver also known as
Flash.
“It was the first time I’d carried a gun for a year,” said Cholmondeley. He’d
taken his Winchester hunting rifle from the safe at the insistence of
Dudmesh, who feared attack from buffalos. A friend’s husband had been killed
by a buffalo the previous year. “I would not have been carrying a gun if
Sally hadn’t begged me.”
Around the same time that day, a local man called Robert Njoya set off with
two friends and five dogs from the village of Kiongururia and illegally
entered the Soysambu estate.
After a while Njoya’s companions returned, telling his wife they had heard
shots and had fled, not knowing what had happened to him.
The next morning she went to the police and discovered he was dead.
What had happened is a matter of dispute. According to Cholmondeley, a group
of men emerged from
a thicket, carrying spears and a skinned antelope. He fired on their dogs —
standard practice with poachers under Kenya Wildlife Service guidelines —
killing two of them. He was then shocked to see a wounded man, Njoya, lying
in the hedgerow.
The version told in Kiongururia is that Cholmondeley fired without warning.
What nobody disputes is that he made a tourniquet for the wounded man with a
handkerchief, yelled for a car and told the driver to take Njoya to the
nearest hospital. He also called the police.
“I don’t know what happened,” said Njoya’s widow Sarah last week. “I just know
that my husband was shot dead and someone must pay. People like Cholmondeley
think they can do what they like.”
She said Njoya only went to the estate “once a month or so” to hunt antelope
as food for their four children. Others say Njoya’s brother runs a butchery
selling illegal game.
When the trial opened last year, the prosecution was unable to establish that
bullet fragments came from Cholmondeley’s weapon.
Tundo has denied he also took a gun. But defence lawyers are expected to argue
he was carrying a pistol and that any shot from Cholmondeley’s rifle would
have caused much greater injuries than Njoya suffered. However, they will be
hampered by the fact that Cholmondeley’s initial police statement omitted to
mention Tundo was carrying a gun.
They will also argue that, rather than staunching Njoya’s bleeding, which
would have saved his life, hospital staff worsened it by administering
cardiac massage.
From the start, however, police treated the matter as murder rather than
manslaughter.
Cholmondeley said: “I behaved in an upright manner. I bandaged him and
got him to hospital. I called the police and actually showed them back to
the scene. I really tried to look after the guy.
“So to be accused of [murder] is really, really tough and I’m absolutely torn
out by this. I shot the dogs. Whatever happened was completely accidental
and certainly wasn’t a direct shot.”
It was the second time in just over a year that Cholmondeley had been accused
of shooting a black man on Soysambu. On April 19, 2005, he got a panicked
call that 10 of his workers were being held at gunpoint by robbers. He
rushed to the spot and was accosted by an unidentified gunman whom he
admitted killing. The man turned out to be an undercover Maasai game warden.
But Cholmeley argued he had acted in self-defence as the warden had fired
first, missing him by 4in.
He was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. But his release prompted
outrage among the Masais.
When news broke a year later of the Njoya shooting, the uproar was
predictable. At his funeral, Koigi wa Wamwere, deputy minister of
information, urged the crowd to “take [the law] into your own hands” if
Cholmondeley were released from prison.
Even Dudmesh couldn’t believe it when Cholmondeley called to tell her
about the shooting. “I said, ‘What have you done? You’ve destroyed our lives
together!’”
But the case goes far beyond the killing of a man, exposing years of simmering
resentment over inequalities in land ownership.
Unlike Zimbabwe, many of Kenya’s biggest farming operations are in black hands
and whites have historically held less than 3% of the land. Their property
titles have been guaranteed since independence in 1963 and a change in the
law is thought highly unlikely. But some believe prosecuting Cholmondeley on
a murder charge could unlock the title to the vast Delamere estates by
forcing his family out of Kenya or obliging it to divest its land in the
hope of more lenient treatment.
“It’s not about what Tom did, it’s about who he is,” said his lawyer, Fred
Ojiambo. “It’s about jealousy and high-placed people seeing an opportunity
to get their hands on the Delamere lands. Everyone knows that the Lord
[Delamere] is ill and Tom the only heir.”
Cholmondeley says they will not leave, whatever happens. “We’re Kenyans,” he
said. “We’re totally committed to the country.”
He added: “My case reflects a lot of deeply held bigotry post-independence
that I thought had gone but obviously hadn’t. We whites are being blamed for
the failure of post-colonial governments to provide the utopia for which
people fought for independence. The reality is that white guys in Kenya are
not some strange race of supremacists. We’re just normal guys trying to get
on.
“The trouble with land in Africa is that it’s seen as more than just a
dispassionate asset. In a country without any social security or job
creation, the way of mopping up excess population has been agrarian
socialism — ‘Here, have more land. Go and grow your own food and don’t
bother the government.’
“Yes, in the short term you might make people very happy, dividing it up
into one or two-acre plots, but it’s just dodging the issue — after a while
you’re left with a rural slum.
“People look at Soysambu and say, ‘You have the best land,’ but it’s
not. It’s the lowest rainfall and crappiest soil, which is why originally
there wasn’t huge pressure to turf us off. Now, because of all the
indigenous trees, fat cattle, lots of wildlife and piped water, it creates
jealousy. But landscapes can be destroyed very quickly. Every tree can be
chopped down and turned into charcoal, every bit of infrastructure can be
pulled down and every wild animal can be eaten.”
As he talked of his estate, a wistful look came into his eyes. “I will see
Soysambu again,” he said. “I have to believe that very strongly.”
