Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kenya. Show all posts
Friday, November 25, 2011
Tears as Kenyans suffer in slavery in Saudi Arabia
The Standard
10/09/2011
By Joe Kiarie
A fortnight ago, Asha Ali from Likoni, Mombasa, sent an SoS to her parents claiming something terrible was about to happen to her in Saudi Arabia.
The 22-year-old, who left for The Gulf in March, said she has been extremely starved, forced to work for up to six households, and that she was about to be sold out to a slave master in Dubai.
"Mama huyu baba jana aliniuliza nataka kununuliwa wala la, naogopa ataniuwa. Kama Mungu ameandika nitakufa Saudia sina cha kufanya. Mama bye," (Mum, yesterday my boss asked me if I want to be sold or not. I fear he might kill me.
Fatuma, who recently fell off a ladder while working, [PHOTOS: MAARUFU MOHAMMED]
If it is God’s plan that I die in Saudi Arabia, there is nothing I can do. Bye mum) read one of three messages sent to her mother, Mwanaisha Mohamed. Ms Asha has not communicated since, and her fate remains unknown. When contacted by The Standard On Sunday, Yusuf Ibrahim, the Mombasa branch manager of the agency that recruited Asha, could neither explain her whereabouts nor her condition.
Inhuman treatment
This is a plain illustration of the untold misery thousands of Kenyan migrant workers are facing in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and other parts of the Persian Gulf under circumstances that exemplify utter modern-day slavery.
It comes amid damning revelations of how deceitful recruitment agents have been helping promote this servitude.
With about 40, 000 Kenyan migrants working in Saudi Arabia, and over 400 of them deported in the last four months, the personal accounts of girls still in captivity abroad are disquieting. They paint a picture of a kingdom where upon entry; most workers have no choice but to surrender their travel documents along with their human rights and dignity to employers.
The most common violations include sexual assault; overwork with no pay, torture, lack of privacy and starvation. Chilling murders sum it all, with the recent discovery of a body of a Kenyan girl locked up in a freezer adding to statistics of unexplained murders of migrants in The Gulf. Fatuma Masoud, a mother of four from Kisauni, also sent an SoS to Mombasa last weekend. She recently fell off a ladder while cleaning her boss’s home at Al Khudar, Saudi Arabia and suffered a fracture to her back. But she continues to be overworked and cannot access any medical help.
"I am always locked in; eat smelly food or leftovers, one meal a day. I am a Kenyan, please help me get out of here, alert my embassy. You are my last hope," she wrote. When contacted, her employer, Hussein al Doussary, claimed to be unaware of the situation. Ms Fatuma is yet to receive any help. Most survivors make it back to Kenya with broken limbs. And although their accounts mirror scripts akin to gruesome movies, they are the reality.
Devious recruitment agents
"My boss’ family locked me in at all times and forced me to work while stark naked to ensure I neither escaped nor stole anything in the house," notes a lady who recently fled Saudi Arabia, but who seeks anonymity. As this unfolds, the Government has been busy echoing human rights activists in decrying the form of slavery and admitting its helplessness in seeking a solution, raising questions regarding whom these innocent Kenyans should turn to.
This maze of servitude starts with devious job recruitment agents, who have established complex international networks via which they rake in millions of shillings for shipping out unsuspecting workers. With average profits of between Sh300,000 and Sh400,000 per every person delivered, the agents have stood at nothing to entrap as many Kenyans as possible, whether voluntarily or by force.
To enhance efficiency, they subcontract the recruitment phase to local brokers across the country. Salma Bakari, a seasoned negotiator for various Saudi agents in Mombasa, terms the business irresistible. "I have been receiving Sh10,000 in cash for every employee delivered while others get up to Sh20,000. At some point, the girls were so many I could get 30 of them monthly," she reveals.
Ms Salma says they traverse villages countrywide to lure girls into taking up jobs abroad. "They just give us their national identity cards and those of their parents. The agents help process passports and visas. The girls are then taken to Nairobi for a medical examination before flying out, with the agents footing the bills," she notes. She divulges that a group of 20 girls departed for The Gulf last Wednesday night while another leaves on Monday.
Contrary to popular belief, majority of job-seekers who migrate to The Gulf are from middle-class income families, possess some tertiary training and do so voluntarily. Ironically, most of them play an active role, and even incur debts, trying to finance their migration.
Khalid Hussein, the Muslims for Human Rights (Muhuri) executive director, says about 80 per cent of the migrant workers are Muslim girls aged between 22 and 35 years. The girls are usually promised lucrative jobs as saleswomen, housekeepers, hotel attendants, drivers, waiters, and chefs.
"Most of them are usually employed and doing similar jobs locally, earning an average of Sh10,000 per month. But they find promises of jobs that fetch up to Sh80,000 irresistible, sign contracts and depart, oblivious of what awaits them," Khalid explains.
He says reality dawns on the migrants once they reach Dammam in Riyadh and are packed into a warehouse that serves as a ‘slave’ market.
"At this point, you must surrender your passport. You can stay here for weeks and all you get is food. The locals usually visit this warehouse to choose the persons they like and force them to serve as cleaners, nannies, cooks or gardeners. Protests of being shortchanged are futile since one has already officially agreed to be owned," Mr Khalid states.
Warehouse auction
Salma confides that while some agents usually take the girls directly to new employers, others take the girls to the warehouse and auction them for up to a month.
Once enslaved, Khalid says majority of the women are susceptible to extreme human rights violation. But with no friends, relatives of law enforcers to help them, desperate efforts to force their own deportation always prove futile.
"In a day, we receive two to three cases of enslaved Kenyans who want to return back home due to exploitation. Currently, we have 17 cases of sick women detained in Dammam awaiting deportation," notes the director, whose organisation has now opened a hotline to specifically deal with the crisis in Saudi Arabia.
With slavery outlawed, it is believed the locals subtly use contracts to legitimise and camouflage this custom. For a migrant to work in Saudi Arabia or the UAE, she must first secure a visa via a sponsorship system called kafala. This is a routine practice among Gulf Cooperation Council states used to regulate residency and employment of foreign workers. Under it, expatriate workers can only enter, work, and leave member countries with the consent of their sponsor or a local employer. A worker’s salary, stay, meals, ability to work elsewhere, and even ability to return home are thus entirely at the mercy of employers.
Khalid notes that although both the sponsor and the employee can break the contract, this apparent equality is a mere veil considering that if the worker breaks her contract; she must pay the cost of her return ticket (a fee that the employer would have otherwise paid). She may also be fined or forced to pay debts to the recruitment agency, thus forcing her to continue working.
Once at their workplaces, and without official documents in foreign land, migrants fall under the charge of female employers. Most Middle Eastern households often consist of extended families and this translates to gruelling work that normally includes tasks like cleaning, washing, cooking, tailoring, and taking care of children and the aged.
Working hours range between 11 and 18 hours a day, with the maid obliged to work day and night.
As Asha reveals, she has alongside a Philippine colleague, been working day and night for several households daily. Saudi Arabia officially banned slave trade as recently as 1962, followed by the United Arab Emirates in 1963.
The victims’ plight
The following is a list of some Kenyan girls who have faced servitude in the Gulf.
Carol Wangui
After just three weeks of torture in Saudi Arabia, Wangui forced her deportation last Monday. She is nursing serious back injuries and has stitches following abuse by her employer.
Mariam Zuberi
Has complained of working under very harsh conditions and general mistreatment since flying to Saudi Arabia eight months ago. She has also never been paid and efforts by her family to bring her back home have failed.
Makuu Morocha
Her family has lost touch with her ever since she left Kenya. Even the agent who helped her secure employment claims not to know of her contacts and whereabouts.
Bahati Ramadhan
Bahati has not received a salary for the past one and a half years and neither has she been allowed to return home. She has reported being subjected to severe physical abuse.
Amina Jundo
Has been complaining that she is unwell and not receiving any medical treatment as well as a salary for the past six months.
Binti Saidi
Ceased communicating upon arrival in Saudi Arabia over a year ago. Efforts to have her agent intervene have been futile.
Ushi Hussein
Has complained of being very sick and extremely overworked since October last year. Her pleas to be deported have failed.
Rosemay Wanjiku
Has been held incommunicado in Tabouk, Jeddah ince June this year.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Britain has moral duty to allow Mau Mau case to proceed
June 23, 2009
Caroline Elkins
Times (London)
Since the 1950s, Mau Mau has often been synonymous with atavistic savagery. It was a grassroots movement that sought to end British rule in Kenya, and with it the privileges of an African minority loyal to colonialism. Comprised almost entirely of Kikuyu – Kenya’s largest ethnic group — Mau Mau perpetrated some heinous crimes. But, so, too, did the agents of British colonialism, and on an order of magnitude that dwarfed Mau Mau acts of violence.
For the duration of the emergency (1952-60), the colonial government embarked upon a campaign to suppress Mau Mau using a two-pronged offensive. The first campaign was waged in the Mount Kenya and Aberdares forest against some 20,000 Mau Mau guerrillas, over whom British forces gained the initiative by the end of 1954.
It was the second-prong of Britain’s offensive aimed at African civilians that was by far the largest, most violent and longest in duration. Targeted against some 1.5 million Kikuyu who were allegedly Mau Mau sympathisers, Britain’s civilian campaign grew in its intensity, systematising and brutality over time. By the end of 1955, colonial authorities had detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population in either one of some 150 detention camps – known as the Pipeline – or in one of more than 800 barbed-wired villages.
Behind the wire, British agents perpetrated unspeakable acts of violence against men, women, and children. Castrations, forced sodomies with broken bottles and vermin, tortures using fecal matter and gang rapes were but some of the tactics used to force detainees to comply.
Multimedia
Such acts were not the result of a few “bad apples”. The systematic use of violence was conceived and approved at the highest levels of British governance in Nairobi and London. There is much evidence to support this, despite the fact that British officials received, and executed, orders to purge their files at the time of decolonisation in 1963.
The years I spent trolling through documents in British and Kenyan archives revealed a story of Britain’s routine violation of international law in Kenya, and consistent efforts at cover-up, all with the knowledge of top officials in Nairobi and London. At the time, critics within and outside government demanded an end to British colonial violence. Barbara Castle, the Labour MP, condemned her country’s actions, stating: “In the heart of the British Empire there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where the murder and torture of Africans by Europeans goes unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation.”
Today, survivors of the Mau Mau camps and villages seek their day in court, and with it, reparations. Despite – or perhaps because of – the evidence, it remains to be seen whether or not the British Government of today, like that of yesteryear, will attempt to silence their efforts, this time through legal manoeuvrings.
It is morally incumbent upon the British government to allow this case to go forward, not just for the survivors, but also for the British and Kenyan public who have a right to full knowledge of their pasts as they search for new directions in the future. At the very least, the weight of the archival evidence and survivor testimony warrants an official apology as the start of a new systematic effort, this time to make amends.
Caroline Elkins is a Professor of History at Harvard University and and Pulitzer prize- winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
Caroline Elkins
Times (London)
Since the 1950s, Mau Mau has often been synonymous with atavistic savagery. It was a grassroots movement that sought to end British rule in Kenya, and with it the privileges of an African minority loyal to colonialism. Comprised almost entirely of Kikuyu – Kenya’s largest ethnic group — Mau Mau perpetrated some heinous crimes. But, so, too, did the agents of British colonialism, and on an order of magnitude that dwarfed Mau Mau acts of violence.
For the duration of the emergency (1952-60), the colonial government embarked upon a campaign to suppress Mau Mau using a two-pronged offensive. The first campaign was waged in the Mount Kenya and Aberdares forest against some 20,000 Mau Mau guerrillas, over whom British forces gained the initiative by the end of 1954.
It was the second-prong of Britain’s offensive aimed at African civilians that was by far the largest, most violent and longest in duration. Targeted against some 1.5 million Kikuyu who were allegedly Mau Mau sympathisers, Britain’s civilian campaign grew in its intensity, systematising and brutality over time. By the end of 1955, colonial authorities had detained nearly the entire Kikuyu population in either one of some 150 detention camps – known as the Pipeline – or in one of more than 800 barbed-wired villages.
Behind the wire, British agents perpetrated unspeakable acts of violence against men, women, and children. Castrations, forced sodomies with broken bottles and vermin, tortures using fecal matter and gang rapes were but some of the tactics used to force detainees to comply.
Multimedia
Such acts were not the result of a few “bad apples”. The systematic use of violence was conceived and approved at the highest levels of British governance in Nairobi and London. There is much evidence to support this, despite the fact that British officials received, and executed, orders to purge their files at the time of decolonisation in 1963.
The years I spent trolling through documents in British and Kenyan archives revealed a story of Britain’s routine violation of international law in Kenya, and consistent efforts at cover-up, all with the knowledge of top officials in Nairobi and London. At the time, critics within and outside government demanded an end to British colonial violence. Barbara Castle, the Labour MP, condemned her country’s actions, stating: “In the heart of the British Empire there is a police state where the rule of law has broken down, where the murder and torture of Africans by Europeans goes unpunished and where the authorities pledged to enforce justice regularly connive at its violation.”
Today, survivors of the Mau Mau camps and villages seek their day in court, and with it, reparations. Despite – or perhaps because of – the evidence, it remains to be seen whether or not the British Government of today, like that of yesteryear, will attempt to silence their efforts, this time through legal manoeuvrings.
It is morally incumbent upon the British government to allow this case to go forward, not just for the survivors, but also for the British and Kenyan public who have a right to full knowledge of their pasts as they search for new directions in the future. At the very least, the weight of the archival evidence and survivor testimony warrants an official apology as the start of a new systematic effort, this time to make amends.
Caroline Elkins is a Professor of History at Harvard University and and Pulitzer prize- winning author of Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya
THE TRUE FACE OF BRITISH IMPERIALISM
13 November, 2007
Andy Newman @ 2:12 pm
The following article by Mukoma Wa Ngugi appeared on the Pambazuka website, under the title “Justice for Mau Mau War Veterans”.
As the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) prepares to sue the British Government for personal injuries sustained by survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence whilst in British detention camps in Kenya, Mukoma Wa Ngugi unravels the Colonial myths of Christianisation and civilization and exposes the reality of torture, murder, slavery, landlessness, dehumanization and internment.
In February 2008, the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) will file a representative law-suit against Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) in the British High Court on behalf of the survivors of the Mau Mau war for independence.
The KHRC is suing HMG for “personal injuries sustained [by the survivors] while in detention camps of the Kenya Colonial Government which operated” under the direct authority of HMG during the State of Emergency (1952-60).
But to understand the law-suit in all its implications, we have to look at Africa’s historical relationship to the West and separate the image from the reality. The Enlightenment of the 1600’s sought to civilize Africans, introduce reason and logic to them, and equip them with the key to heaven through Christianization. The reality masked underneath this image was one of torture, murder and slavery.
Later, colonialism used the image of a gentle stewardship to guide Africans along until they were civilized. The reality, as the KHRC suit shows, was landlessness, torture and dehumanization, whole population internment, outright murder and mass killings.
For the Westerners and Africans alike who have sought comfort in the images, the reality difficult to take. But the reality has been well documented. Adam Hochschild, writing in King Leopold’s Ghost, estimates that 5 to 10 million Africans died as a direct result of Belgian colonization in the Congo in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. And chopping off hands, quite literally, was a form of public control.
And between 1904 and 1907, 65,000 Herero (80 percent of the total Herero population) were systematically eliminated by the Germans in Namibia. In Algeria, during the war of independence (1954 to 1962), the French routinely tortured and ‘disappeared’ FLN freedom fighters.
These random examples illustrate an alarmingly simple principle: One nation cannot occupy another and seek to control its resources without detaining, torturing, assassinating and terrorizing the occupied. A modern day example of this principle at work is Iraq today where torture and killings under the occupation of the United States are rampant, even though the U.S. wants to sell an image of spreading democracy.
Colonialism, Legacy and the Mau Mau
In Kenya, British colonialism followed this same principle. Caroline Elkins’ Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag and David Anderson’s Histories Of The Hanged: The Dirty War In Kenya document tortures, hangings rushed through kangaroo courts, detention camps, internments, and assassinations, not to mention psychological warfare through fear and intimidation.
Independence however did not bring justice for Kenyans - certainly not for the Mau Mau veterans. Kenyatta, even before being sworn as president in1963, had denounced the Mau Mau as terrorists. Contrary to British propaganda, Kenyatta was never a member of the Mau Mau. In an interview, Muthoni Wanyeki, Executive Director of the KHRC, said that:
“On coming to power, [Kenyatta] proceeded, through the land ownership policies(and practices) of his government (and himself), to betray everything that the Mau Mau had stood for and to entrench the landholding patterns established under the colony”[1]
It is not a surprise that Kenyatta by the early 1970’s had a few detentions and assassinations under his belt. In the words of politician J.M. Kariuki (assassinated in 1975), Kenyatta created a nation of ten millionaires and ten million beggars. He wanted the Mau Mau platform of Land and Freedom erased from Kenyan memory.
In 1978 President Moi took over when Kenyatta died and continued with the same dictatorial policies. Irony is such that in 1982, Mau Mau historian Maina Wa Kinyatti was imprisoned by the Moi government in the same Kamiti Prison where the British in 1957 hanged and buried the leader of the Mau Mau, Dedan Kimathi, in an unmarked grave.
It was not until the Kibaki government took over in 2002 that the colonial ban on the Mau Mau was removed. Finally in 2007 a statue of Kimathi stands on Kimathi Street, something unimaginable under the Kenyatta and Moi regimes.
But more important than a hero’s acre or a monument is a reckoning with the colonial legacy of torture, dehumanization and pauperization. Mau Mau veterans that are still alive, along with their children and grandchildren, live in abject poverty, landless and without formal education.
The past and current Kenyan governments have as yet to ask the British government to at the very least issue an apology for the atrocities committed against the Kenyan people. The Moi and Kenyatta governments, dependent on Western aid and while maintaining a vicious elite system, were not in a position to pressure Britain for an apology. Or even to pressure HMG to reveal the exact location of Kimathi’s grave so that his widow, Mukami Kimathi, can bury him.
This dependent relationship has allowed the British to commit crimes against Kenyans with near impunity. Forty plus years since Kenya’s independence, the British Army still uses Northern Kenya for military exercises. As a result of leaving unexploded munitions behind, “hundreds of Maasai and Samburu tribes people - many of them children - are said to have been killed or maimed by unexploded bombs left by the British army at practice ranges in central Kenya over the past 50 years” the BBC reported [2] With the legal aid of Leigh Day and Co Advocates, 228 survivors took the UK government to the British High Court. In 2002, a settlement was reached in which the UK government agreed to pay 7 million dollars plus legal fees.
Economic Justice and Forgiveness
Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery[3] shows how Western economies grew at the expense of African slave labor. Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa [4] updates the argument to include colonialism –Europe developed at the direct expense of Africa. Today we find that economic giants, Barclays Bank [5], J.P. Morgan and Chase Manhattan Bank [6] are direct beneficiaries of the slave trade.
Muthoni Wanyeki argues that “it has to be recognized that the UK (and all ex-colonisers) grew at great human expense and political-economic disruption and exploitation within the ex-colonies. It is on that recognition alone that current debates on ‘aid’/'development financing’, trade and investment can shift as they need to.” The call for forgiveness and reconciliation then has to rest on the realization that colonialism was first and foremost an exploitative economic relationship.
Because the former colonizers continue to benefit from colonialism, while the victims of colonization continue to live in poverty, the governments of former colonizers have a moral duty to rectify the historical wrong in the present time. On the basis that colonialism as an investment is still paying off, the British cannot argue that they are not personally responsible for atrocities committed by their parents – they have inherited the economic well-being of a colonial system. They need to do right by this history because it is living.
The British government has as yet to issue a formal apology for the atrocities it committed. In the same way that Clinton expressed shame and sorrow for slavery without offering a formal apology, so did Blair for colonialism. One can express sorrow, regret and shame for causing an accidental death, but surely this is not enough for a systematic exploitation that causes millions to suffer and die.
It should be stated clearly that the authoritarian governments of Kenyatta and Moi are guilty of suppressing Mau Mau memory. And that there were thousands of Kenyans who collaborated with the British. But it should also be said that collaborators did not create colonialism, it is colonialism that created its functionaries. The real crime is colonialism.
And because colonialism if we are to be honest with history is a crime against humanity, the British parliament should at the very least pass a bill offering a formal apology to its victims in Africa. And the apology should also make provision for restitution.
Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation and Justice
While revolutionary in attempting to heal a wounded nation, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission undermined the very concept of forgiveness and justice it espoused because it did not demand that the perpetrators address in word and deed the question of restitution. Muthoni Wanyeki on the TRC says that:
Within the human rights movement in Kenya (and in Africa more broadly), the TRC process in SA while hailed for its reconciliation potential has always been critiqued for its enabling of impunity and its lack of direct recognition of, compensation for survivors.
Even though a desired by-product, the struggle against apartheid was not waged solely for blacks to forgive whites, or for whites to ask forgiveness, but to bring economic, social and political equality for all South Africans. So then here is the irony of the TRC – the perpetrators go home to their mansions, the victims back to the township.
To put it differently, after the TRC hearings the victims go back to a life of poverty, they remain without the means to feed, cloth or educate their children. Freedom comes without the content – it’s just a name – it has no meaning. Under these circumstances, forgiveness, healing and justice cannot exist without restitution.
The British government, which had the largest empire in the world, has cause to fear losing the Mau Mau law-suit. Once it begins where it will end? In neighboring Uganda? India? Malaysia? Or Jamaica? And if the British lose, will this set precedence for the victims of French, Belgian or Portuguese colonialism? The British government knows that losing one law-suit will open closed colonial closets all over the world.
It is precisely because this lawsuit has huge implications for the victims of colonialism all over the world that it deserves the support of all those who understand that history is still acting on us and that justice cannot exist without some form of restitution even if it comes in the form of the whole truth.
Identifying the graves of the disappeared, so that their relatives can rest; the numbers of how many killed, so that nations account for their dead; the names of the guilty, so that they may be brought to justice or forgiven; initiating the return of what was stolen: all these issues resonate with formerly colonized peoples.
For Muthoni Wanyeki says that “We see this case as being part of the process of understanding and coming to terms with our past…particularly given that our past impacts so clearly and evidently on our present.” African people in the continent and Diaspora should support the Kenya Human Rights Committee by calling on the British government to account for its torture of Mau Mau detainees.
We have to become each other’s keeper of memory and see each atrocity perpetrated on the other as part our collective memory – whether we identify as Afro-Latino, African American, or African.
We have to make common cause because ultimately the struggle for the truth will not be won because the British High Court finds it just, or because the British Government decides to come to terms with its past, it will be won because victims across Africa, the Diaspora and other survivors of colonial atrocities will make common cause with the Mau Mau struggle and vice versa. Truth will come to light because we will have demanded justice and restitution before offering forgiveness.
It is only when an apology and restitution are offered, and the victim in turn forgives that for both the perpetrator and victim true healing can take place. For me, that is the truth of justice.
Notes
1. Wanyeki, Muthoni (Kenya Human Rights Commission Executive Director). Interview by Author via e-mail. October 15th, 2007.
2. UK pay-out for Kenya bomb victims. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2139366.stm July 19th, 2002
3. Williams, Eric. Slavery and Capitalism. New York, Russell & Russell, 1961
4. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C. Howard University Press, 1981
5. Barclays admits possible link to slavery after reparation call. observer.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,,2047237,00.html April 1, 2007
6. Corporations challenged by reparations activists www.usatoday.com/money/general/2002/02/21/slave-reparations.htm February 21, 2002
* Kenyan writer Mukoma Wa Ngugi is the author of Hurling Words at Consciousness (Africa World Press, 2006) and the forthcoming New Kenyan Fiction (Ishmael Reed Publications, 2008). He is a political columnist for the BBC Focus on Africa Magazine.
Mau Mau D-Day as veterans file case against UK
Mau Mau war veterans display placards during a media briefing in Nairobi last week before they left for London to file a suit against the British Government for human rights abuses and torture. Photo/FILE
By ZARINA PATELPosted Monday,
June 22 2009 at 21:47
Nation (Kenya)
An old man with a walking stick trudges while being guided by an aide. ‘Mzee, have you been blind since childhood?,’ I curiously ask. “No,” says M’njau Ndei. “My eyes were gouged out for being a Mau Mau supporter.’
And Patrick wa Njogu, a Mau Mau general who already had one leg shot off by British troops, says after his arrest, “they would drag me around the camp by my remaining leg”.
Jane Muthoni Mara, while aged 15 at the time, used to supply food to the freedom fighters. Her brother had joined the Mau Mau and when she refused to divulge information on his whereabouts, she was tortured.
“He (a white man) filled a bottle with hot water and then pushed it into my private parts with his foot. I screamed and screamed,” she said.
Torture style
And that was not all. She and other women were made to sit with their legs stretched apart in front of white men as African guards marched over them in their army boots. After release, Jane never found her brother and had visions of torture whenever her husband approached her.
Beatings and floggings were both common and constant features of camp routine, as were forced and hard labour. Hewing rocks under the burning sun, carrying buckets on the head filled with stones or overflowing with urine and faeces; or being forcibly pushed into a cattle dip full of pesticides — all were enforced with kicks and blows from truncheons and rifle butts.
The beatings made M’Mucheke Kioru impotent. Others died. But this was not enough to break the back of the Mau Mau movement.
In face of increased defiance, British colonial officer Terence Gavaghan devised the “Dilution Technique” in which hard core detainees were exposed to violent shock. This was officially endorsed by the Colonial Government in London and first implemented in the Mwea camps in 1957.
It was later expanded to camps at Athi River, Aguthi, Mweru and Hola in order to “enforce discipline and preserve good order”. Hard core did not mean the worst killers, merely the most defiant.
Cold water
Wambugu wa Nyingi relates how Gavaghan ordered inmates to walk on gravel on their knees with their hands up for long distances. New detainees were tied upside down from their feet and beaten whilst cold water was poured on them.
Some of the detainees would start the “Mau Mau moan”, a cry of symbolic defiance which would be taken up by the rest of the camp. The leader who started it would be put on the ground, a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth and finally knocked unconscious. Many who survived the beatings died from diarrhoea and typhoid. Others went mad.
Kariuki Mungai says the screams of the detainees being beaten made it resemble a lunatic asylum. Outside the camps, large numbers of Africans were herded into “protected villages” where rape, sexual abuse, hanging and killing were rampant.
Names such as Gavaghan and Whitehouse, and the nicknames Jua Kali (burning sun), Goliath, Gatomato, Kihuga (big man) and Mapiga (one who beats) were both feared and abhorred. The state emergency for the freedom fighters was surely a hell on earth.
The concerned British voices largely went unheard. Labour MP Barbara Castle complained about the cover-ups and was kept informed by Kenya’s assistant police commissioner Duncan McPherson. The latter said conditions in the camps were far worse than anything he had experienced as a prisoner of war for four-and-a-half years under the Japanese.
A Kenyan judge, Arthur Cram, compared them to the “infamous Nazi labour camps”.
Bertrand Russell, Michel Foot and Tony Benn were some of the protesting voices. John Nottingham, who still lives in Nairobi, was posted as a young district officer to take over from Gavaghan.
“What you are doing is wrong,” he wrote to his boss adding “I can’t accept this job”.
When in March, 1959, 11 inmates died in the Hola camp, the investigating magistrate, W. H. Goudie, blamed officially-sanctioned brutality for the deaths.
So what now? Today, the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Mau Mau War Veterans Association will file a suit in London against the British Government for human rights abuses and torture. It is expected that the British Government will present a range of legal arguments to stall the case, deny responsibility or refute the allegations. The case could drag on for years.
One of the best legal teams, Leigh Day & Co Solicitors, have been hired. The firm has previously litigated on behalf of the Maasai bomb victims and the Kenyan women who claim to have been raped by British soldiers.
The wazee are in London to make their plight known to the British public. And what will they be asking for? An apology at the very least and some form of reparation to enable them to live their sunset years with some degree of dignity, comfort and security.
Highly immoral
There can be no argument that the treatment meted out to these men and women, who were demanding their God-given right to be free, was highly immoral. But would it not be an even greater immorality to deny these veterans their right to recognition and a better life?
The Mau Mau freedom fighters are now in their eighties and nineties, many of them ailing. Kenya owes its independence to these valiant patriots who should be accorded justice.
Friday, May 8, 2009
A window into white privile in Kenya
A lost world
The furore surrounding Tom Cholmondeley, accused of shooting two black people on his land, has thrown the spotlight on Kenya's 30,000-strong white community. Despite 40 years of black rule, many white Kenyans lead hugely privileged lives - and some still own vast swathes of the country. Chris McGreal on life in 'Trigger Happy Valley'
Chris McGreal
The Guardian, Thursday 26 October 2006
After the first killing, there was a great deal of sympathy for the Honourable Tom Cholmondeley among Kenya's disparate white population. The aristocrats who own vast tracts of land, the alcohol and drug-fuelled "Kenya cowboys" living the fast life in tourism and conservation, and the middle-class suburbanites who "love Africa" but despatch their children to school in England could all understand how the 38-year-old scion of the country's most prominent white settler family, and heir to the Delamere baronetcy, shot dead a black game warden who ventured on to his ranch last year. Old white families in Kenya's Great Rift valley are so besieged by poaching, murder and crime, his sympathisers said, that life has become very difficult for the haves. It was a mistake any one could have made. The authorities agreed, and let the Eton old-boy go.
The second time, even before the evidence was heard, sympathy was in short supply. This time Cholmondeley was accused of killing a black poacher. "The sense here among both communities [white and black] is nail him," says Michael Cunningham-Reid, a stepbrother to Cholmondeley's father. "Once is forgivable, twice is inexcusable."
Cholmondeley, who is now on trial for murder - which he denies - has become a liability for Kenya's 30,000-strong white community, which, through more than 40 years of black rule, has clung on to its privileged lifestyle - and in the case of 12 or so old settler families, great swathes of land - largely by keeping its collective head down. Cholmondeley, who can expect to inherit a 100,000-acre ranch along with the title of Lord Delamere, had committed the unforgivable sin of rocking the boat.
The white community had spent decades trying to shake off the image of Kenya's Rift Valley as the "Happy Valley" playground of decadent and racist toffs, a view shaped by wartime Britain's fascination with the salacious details of adultery, drugs and debauchery provided in the trial of Sir Jock Delves Broughton (who was eventually acquitted of murdering his wife's lover, Lord Erroll). Infuriatingly, the story was given new life in the 80s by the film White Mischief, starring Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance. Now Cholmondeley's killings have prompted wags to redub the place "Trigger Happy Valley".
The trial coincides with the latest wave of doubt among white people over their future in Kenya - people who have always wondered whether they truly belonged, and whether one day they might be expelled like the Asians from Uganda and white farmers from Zimbabwe - and growing insecurity after a spate of murders of white people.
Kenya's independence came in 1963. A majority of the 60,000 white settlers were gone by the end of the decade. Those who remained generally took out Kenyan citizenship (although many secretly, and illegally under Kenyan law, keep their British passports). One who stayed was Michael Cunningham-Reid, a nephew of the late Lord Mountbatten and part of the extended Delamere clan that forged the path for aristocratic settlers into East Africa with an energetic enthusiasm for hunting, drinking and sex. Cunningham-Reid's mother, Ruth Ashley, the daughter of Lord Mount Temple, was on to her third marriage by the time she wed the Fourth Baron Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, during the second world war. When they divorced in 1955, Cholmondeley went on to marry Diana Caldwell, the by-then famous widow of Sir Jock Delves Broughton.
Today, Cunningham-Reid, 78, lives in the heart of Happy Valley, the exclusive town of Karen (named after the author Karen Blixen, who memorialised her life in Kenya in Out of Africa). "When I came out of the army in 1948, my stepfather, Lord Delamere, said, 'You've only been in the army three years. You haven't learned to do anything. No one's going to employ you in the City because you've got no training. You'd better come to Kenya and work on my farms.' That was 1948. I'm still here," he says.
The family trustees bought him an 800-acre farm and, a couple of years after that, Cunningham-Reid was successful enough to buy a 6,000-acre ranch to farm sheep and wheat. In the 1950s, during the Kenya Emergency, when Mau Mau rebels rose up against the crown, Cunningham-Reid found himself back in the army and in charge of Kenyan soldiers loyal to the UK. His views of that time - and the language he uses, redolent of old-school racism - have not changed greatly despite the recognition today of the atrocities committed by British forces. "The atrocities of the Kenya regiment were there but not on the scale of the Mau Mau," he says. "The amazing thing about the Kenyan is you could find him in the forest, shoot two of his pals, capture him and he would be working for you two days later."
At independence, much of the white population weighed up the benefits of a glorious lifestyle against what they considered the nightmare of black rule - and decided to get out.
Cunningham-Reid took a gamble. He believed that the big issue was the land, and his best hope of remaining in Kenya would be to get rid of it. "All my friends were hooking it, saying, 'We can't live with a fucking black man telling us what to do,'" he says. "I farmed happily until independence in 1963. But the British government made £22m available to buy out farmers in the Rift Valley. I was the first in the queue. Although I intended to stay, I thought all the farms would be broken up into small plots and we'd be plagued by squatters and the land would be a big political issue."
He used the money to buy a mansion in Karen, a house that was being left behind by Lady Twining, wife of the former governor of Tanganyika. "I basically liked the African and I couldn't picture myself going back to England and buying a very small farm or something," he says. The money also extended to a house on the coast and a hotel next to Lake Naivasha, which was to become the crucible of the family's future in conservation.
The gamble paid off. More than four decades later he is still installed in Lady Twining's sprawling old house, with servants to hand and the chauffeur ever ready with the Mercedes for the swift drive to his club. He has no regrets about staying. "There were times when I had serious doubts: have I been a complete fool? Am I going to lose everything? There have been moments when I considered sending my family away. Not myself though. I'd stay and go down with the ship," he says. "The white community has survived by laying low, keeping their mouths shut. We stayed out of politics. That was the big taboo. We must be no challenge to the black man's political power."
Not everyone stayed out of politics. Richard Leakey, who heads Kenya's other most prominent white family, confronted white Kenyan society's deep-seated paternalism - at times hardly removed from the views of the old colonial officers who proclaimed they had brought Christianity and civilisation to the natives - by wading into the forbidden territory of politics. Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, made the Leakey name with a multitude of anthropological finds; Richard established himself as a paleoanthropologist in his own right with the discovery of the oldest human skull yet found, before going on to make a name as head of Kenya's Wildlife Service. He saved the country's elephants by winning a worldwide ban on ivory trading and brought Kenya's 51 parks from the brink of collapse. He is also one of the few Europeans to openly distance himself from the white clan in Kenya.
"These people bore me stiff and I'm not part of that set at all," he says. "Some of them are pretty racist people deep down. They don't mix and have very negative attitudes to their fellow Kenyans. I keep them at arm's length and I find them offensive."
Leakey is unusual among white Kenyans in having sent his two daughters to a Kenyan government school where almost all the other pupils were black. "They are both real Kenyans," he says. "They speak perfect Swahili and they know all the important networks in this country because they went to school with people who are now part of them."
White Kenyans revelled in the kudos Leakey brought them until a decade ago, when he scared the hell out of them by daring to point the finger of responsibility for rampant corruption, mismanagement and cynical political violence at the man responsible - President Daniel arap Moi. He broke the taboo on white people embroiling themselves in opposition politics, launching Safina, a party that promised to combat police brutality and shambolic public services. Moi accused Leakey of being a neo-colonial racist, traitor and atheist.
Another white Kenyan who joined Leakey in Safina, Rob Shaw, also found himself under attack from the neighbours. "I had several come round to me and say, 'We've had a good life here since independence, we've kept our heads down. Why are you putting your head above the parapet?'" he says. "If I look back to my parents' generation, through independence and after there was a large element of, 'We don't know how long we've got here.' That sort of insecurity was ingrained."
White people were, however, welcome to serve the government. Leakey's brother, Philip, was an MP for the ruling party for 15 years and briefly a minister. He led 88 white Kenyans to pay homage to President Moi on bended knee and distance the white community from Richard. "Some were starting to think of us as a potential target," says Philip Leakey, "and we felt it was necessary to prevent ourselves from becoming a target by clearing the air and getting the response we got from the president - that we should carry on being good Kenyans, as we've been."
Richard Leakey says white Kenyans' fear of politics is a reflection of their failure to integrate and their desperation to hang on to privilege. "I feel sufficiently sure that Kenya is my home to be able to criticise the president," he says. "Very few Europeans have got involved in public life and politics, and that's because they haven't felt integrated. They haven't made the effort to integrate. So many of these people live a privileged life. They don't want to integrate socially. They don't speak the language. They send their children to schools in England and South Africa, and then say there's no future for them in Kenya. They must feel like fish out of water. I suppose it's because they have a very privileged life. It's very peachy."
Life is still very privileged in Happy Valley, but the whiff of scandal is never far off, and the detail is astonishingly reminiscent of another age. Cunningham-Reid's daughter, Anna, established herself as a designer whose clothes proved a hit with the likes of Kate Moss, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Jemima Khan. She married Antonio Trzebinski, an artist from one of the most prominent and long-standing white families in Kenya. He was murdered five years ago by a single shot through the heart as he drove to see his Danish mistress, Natasha Illum Berg, the only licensed female big game hunter in East Africa. Trzebinski, a surfer and big game fisherman renowned for his drinking, drug use and womanising, was killed little more than a mile from where Lord Erroll was shot.
Then, a year ago, Anna raised eyebrows by marrying a semi-nomadic warrior, Loyaban Lemarti, in a ceremony that involved the slaughter of a bull. Lemarti wore a toga and lion skin. She now divides her time between her husband's rural village, white society in Karen and fashion shows in London. Michael Cunningham-Reid describes the marriage as "an experience" that has not gone down universally well among white Kenyans. But he calls Lemarti "a very close friend of mine". "I think [racial] attitudes have changed with some families," he says. "With me it's changed. Tom Delamere was my stepfather. He considered the black man a necessary evil. You had to have him around to do the work. Since then I've found out that the black man is a human being after all," he says.
The unwelcome attention caused by Tom Cholmondeley aside, the old family names are increasingly an irrelevance in Kenya. They have largely ceased to matter. The white community is now better represented by a comfortable middle class that has carved out a future in tourism and conservation. New white immigrants continue to arrive. Arabella Akerhielm, who hails from a wealthy family in Chelsea and was part of the Sloane Ranger set in the 80s, first came to Kenya in 1990. Four years later she married Baron Carl-Gustav Akerhielm, a member of one of the first Swedish families to settle in East Africa.
"I'm here to stay," she says at her relatively small home in a Nairobi suburb. "I was in financial advertising in the City in London. To me the quality of life is better here, although we're not as rich financially. I suppose it's somewhat colonial. Our husbands do the work. There are moments of insecurity, but there's the freedom. Life's wilder here, more cavalier. It's not so materialistic. In England I came from a very privileged background. I like being away from the City boys talking about their cars."
Baroness Akerhielm - as she says she does not like to be known - says there is not much racism but recognises there is not much integration either. "Some people are quite scathing [about Kenyans], but as a general rule I don't think there's much racism. If anything there's racism against whites in getting jobs," she says. "But we are quite tribalistic. I suppose I don't have a lot of black friends. My husband, even being brought up here, does not have a lot of black friends, but I believe my daughter will mix more freely. A lot more children educate their children here or in South Africa than in the past. There are still the school flights to England, but fewer go." Nonetheless Akerhielm has already put her own seven-year-old daughter down for a place in 2011 at her old Catholic private school in Ascot.
Ask Michael Cunningham-Reid if his family will still be in Kenya in two or three generations and he is doubtful. "My feeling of 100% belonging here may not be right for my children and grandchildren. I am completely sure I will die here peacefully rather than have a panga in the back of the neck. I don't know about my children," he says.
Others are already making plans to leave. Barry Gaymer is a professional big game hunter who lives on an island in Lake Naivasha. Since hunting is banned in Kenya, he takes his rich American clients to Tanzania. "People say we're racist, but we've never been comparable with anywhere south [Rhodesia or South Africa] in the way we treated the blacks," he says. "I think the majority of blacks in my area like me. I drink with them. I get along with them. Generally, I think they like the old-time whites. In this country, the word for respect is fear. Because they fear me, they respect me."
Gaymer's father was one of those who came on a grant after the war and became a ranch manager. Gaymer bought land but sold up in the late 70s and turned to tourism. Today he is chairman of the Naivasha wildlife conservancy that has 23 members who own or farm a combined total of 380,000 acres that is home to 55,000 head of wildlife. About half of them are white. "I didn't even think of myself as coming from England. I could hardly imagine the place. But now, very recently, I've been thinking about moving, leaving Kenya. It's getting too much," he says.
Naivasha is not the happy place that the white population once imagined. Seven white people have been murdered in the area in the past two years (no one can tell you how many black people have been murdered). In January, a renowned British conservationist, Joan Root, 69, was killed at her home on the banks of Lake Naivasha where she had lived for decades. Root had been trying to put an end to the illegal fishing on the lake that has caused a collapse in the fish population over the past five years. The water level is falling alarmingly, and the lake is increasingly polluted by pesticides and sewage.
The established families blame the sprawling flower farms that provide roses and carnations to Marks & Spencer and other European stores. The farms tap into the lake and spew out waste. They have also caused an influx of black Kenyans to Naivasha to work, or in search of work, that has seen the population of the town rise tenfold to 300,000 people, many living in considerable poverty. With that have come the killings and other crimes.
Gaymer also believes that Kenya's wildlife will be wiped out in the coming years unless there is a dramatic change in government policy to permit licensed hunting. "I'm looking at Tanzania now," he says. "I've bought 2m hectares there with antelopes, hippo, buffalo, zebra. The country was a mess because of socialism, but the one thing they did was get rid of tribalism. I think it has a future".
The furore surrounding Tom Cholmondeley, accused of shooting two black people on his land, has thrown the spotlight on Kenya's 30,000-strong white community. Despite 40 years of black rule, many white Kenyans lead hugely privileged lives - and some still own vast swathes of the country. Chris McGreal on life in 'Trigger Happy Valley'
Chris McGreal
The Guardian, Thursday 26 October 2006
After the first killing, there was a great deal of sympathy for the Honourable Tom Cholmondeley among Kenya's disparate white population. The aristocrats who own vast tracts of land, the alcohol and drug-fuelled "Kenya cowboys" living the fast life in tourism and conservation, and the middle-class suburbanites who "love Africa" but despatch their children to school in England could all understand how the 38-year-old scion of the country's most prominent white settler family, and heir to the Delamere baronetcy, shot dead a black game warden who ventured on to his ranch last year. Old white families in Kenya's Great Rift valley are so besieged by poaching, murder and crime, his sympathisers said, that life has become very difficult for the haves. It was a mistake any one could have made. The authorities agreed, and let the Eton old-boy go.
The second time, even before the evidence was heard, sympathy was in short supply. This time Cholmondeley was accused of killing a black poacher. "The sense here among both communities [white and black] is nail him," says Michael Cunningham-Reid, a stepbrother to Cholmondeley's father. "Once is forgivable, twice is inexcusable."
Cholmondeley, who is now on trial for murder - which he denies - has become a liability for Kenya's 30,000-strong white community, which, through more than 40 years of black rule, has clung on to its privileged lifestyle - and in the case of 12 or so old settler families, great swathes of land - largely by keeping its collective head down. Cholmondeley, who can expect to inherit a 100,000-acre ranch along with the title of Lord Delamere, had committed the unforgivable sin of rocking the boat.
The white community had spent decades trying to shake off the image of Kenya's Rift Valley as the "Happy Valley" playground of decadent and racist toffs, a view shaped by wartime Britain's fascination with the salacious details of adultery, drugs and debauchery provided in the trial of Sir Jock Delves Broughton (who was eventually acquitted of murdering his wife's lover, Lord Erroll). Infuriatingly, the story was given new life in the 80s by the film White Mischief, starring Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance. Now Cholmondeley's killings have prompted wags to redub the place "Trigger Happy Valley".
The trial coincides with the latest wave of doubt among white people over their future in Kenya - people who have always wondered whether they truly belonged, and whether one day they might be expelled like the Asians from Uganda and white farmers from Zimbabwe - and growing insecurity after a spate of murders of white people.
Kenya's independence came in 1963. A majority of the 60,000 white settlers were gone by the end of the decade. Those who remained generally took out Kenyan citizenship (although many secretly, and illegally under Kenyan law, keep their British passports). One who stayed was Michael Cunningham-Reid, a nephew of the late Lord Mountbatten and part of the extended Delamere clan that forged the path for aristocratic settlers into East Africa with an energetic enthusiasm for hunting, drinking and sex. Cunningham-Reid's mother, Ruth Ashley, the daughter of Lord Mount Temple, was on to her third marriage by the time she wed the Fourth Baron Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, during the second world war. When they divorced in 1955, Cholmondeley went on to marry Diana Caldwell, the by-then famous widow of Sir Jock Delves Broughton.
Today, Cunningham-Reid, 78, lives in the heart of Happy Valley, the exclusive town of Karen (named after the author Karen Blixen, who memorialised her life in Kenya in Out of Africa). "When I came out of the army in 1948, my stepfather, Lord Delamere, said, 'You've only been in the army three years. You haven't learned to do anything. No one's going to employ you in the City because you've got no training. You'd better come to Kenya and work on my farms.' That was 1948. I'm still here," he says.
The family trustees bought him an 800-acre farm and, a couple of years after that, Cunningham-Reid was successful enough to buy a 6,000-acre ranch to farm sheep and wheat. In the 1950s, during the Kenya Emergency, when Mau Mau rebels rose up against the crown, Cunningham-Reid found himself back in the army and in charge of Kenyan soldiers loyal to the UK. His views of that time - and the language he uses, redolent of old-school racism - have not changed greatly despite the recognition today of the atrocities committed by British forces. "The atrocities of the Kenya regiment were there but not on the scale of the Mau Mau," he says. "The amazing thing about the Kenyan is you could find him in the forest, shoot two of his pals, capture him and he would be working for you two days later."
At independence, much of the white population weighed up the benefits of a glorious lifestyle against what they considered the nightmare of black rule - and decided to get out.
Cunningham-Reid took a gamble. He believed that the big issue was the land, and his best hope of remaining in Kenya would be to get rid of it. "All my friends were hooking it, saying, 'We can't live with a fucking black man telling us what to do,'" he says. "I farmed happily until independence in 1963. But the British government made £22m available to buy out farmers in the Rift Valley. I was the first in the queue. Although I intended to stay, I thought all the farms would be broken up into small plots and we'd be plagued by squatters and the land would be a big political issue."
He used the money to buy a mansion in Karen, a house that was being left behind by Lady Twining, wife of the former governor of Tanganyika. "I basically liked the African and I couldn't picture myself going back to England and buying a very small farm or something," he says. The money also extended to a house on the coast and a hotel next to Lake Naivasha, which was to become the crucible of the family's future in conservation.
The gamble paid off. More than four decades later he is still installed in Lady Twining's sprawling old house, with servants to hand and the chauffeur ever ready with the Mercedes for the swift drive to his club. He has no regrets about staying. "There were times when I had serious doubts: have I been a complete fool? Am I going to lose everything? There have been moments when I considered sending my family away. Not myself though. I'd stay and go down with the ship," he says. "The white community has survived by laying low, keeping their mouths shut. We stayed out of politics. That was the big taboo. We must be no challenge to the black man's political power."
Not everyone stayed out of politics. Richard Leakey, who heads Kenya's other most prominent white family, confronted white Kenyan society's deep-seated paternalism - at times hardly removed from the views of the old colonial officers who proclaimed they had brought Christianity and civilisation to the natives - by wading into the forbidden territory of politics. Leakey's parents, Louis and Mary, made the Leakey name with a multitude of anthropological finds; Richard established himself as a paleoanthropologist in his own right with the discovery of the oldest human skull yet found, before going on to make a name as head of Kenya's Wildlife Service. He saved the country's elephants by winning a worldwide ban on ivory trading and brought Kenya's 51 parks from the brink of collapse. He is also one of the few Europeans to openly distance himself from the white clan in Kenya.
"These people bore me stiff and I'm not part of that set at all," he says. "Some of them are pretty racist people deep down. They don't mix and have very negative attitudes to their fellow Kenyans. I keep them at arm's length and I find them offensive."
Leakey is unusual among white Kenyans in having sent his two daughters to a Kenyan government school where almost all the other pupils were black. "They are both real Kenyans," he says. "They speak perfect Swahili and they know all the important networks in this country because they went to school with people who are now part of them."
White Kenyans revelled in the kudos Leakey brought them until a decade ago, when he scared the hell out of them by daring to point the finger of responsibility for rampant corruption, mismanagement and cynical political violence at the man responsible - President Daniel arap Moi. He broke the taboo on white people embroiling themselves in opposition politics, launching Safina, a party that promised to combat police brutality and shambolic public services. Moi accused Leakey of being a neo-colonial racist, traitor and atheist.
Another white Kenyan who joined Leakey in Safina, Rob Shaw, also found himself under attack from the neighbours. "I had several come round to me and say, 'We've had a good life here since independence, we've kept our heads down. Why are you putting your head above the parapet?'" he says. "If I look back to my parents' generation, through independence and after there was a large element of, 'We don't know how long we've got here.' That sort of insecurity was ingrained."
White people were, however, welcome to serve the government. Leakey's brother, Philip, was an MP for the ruling party for 15 years and briefly a minister. He led 88 white Kenyans to pay homage to President Moi on bended knee and distance the white community from Richard. "Some were starting to think of us as a potential target," says Philip Leakey, "and we felt it was necessary to prevent ourselves from becoming a target by clearing the air and getting the response we got from the president - that we should carry on being good Kenyans, as we've been."
Richard Leakey says white Kenyans' fear of politics is a reflection of their failure to integrate and their desperation to hang on to privilege. "I feel sufficiently sure that Kenya is my home to be able to criticise the president," he says. "Very few Europeans have got involved in public life and politics, and that's because they haven't felt integrated. They haven't made the effort to integrate. So many of these people live a privileged life. They don't want to integrate socially. They don't speak the language. They send their children to schools in England and South Africa, and then say there's no future for them in Kenya. They must feel like fish out of water. I suppose it's because they have a very privileged life. It's very peachy."
Life is still very privileged in Happy Valley, but the whiff of scandal is never far off, and the detail is astonishingly reminiscent of another age. Cunningham-Reid's daughter, Anna, established herself as a designer whose clothes proved a hit with the likes of Kate Moss, Princess Caroline of Monaco and Jemima Khan. She married Antonio Trzebinski, an artist from one of the most prominent and long-standing white families in Kenya. He was murdered five years ago by a single shot through the heart as he drove to see his Danish mistress, Natasha Illum Berg, the only licensed female big game hunter in East Africa. Trzebinski, a surfer and big game fisherman renowned for his drinking, drug use and womanising, was killed little more than a mile from where Lord Erroll was shot.
Then, a year ago, Anna raised eyebrows by marrying a semi-nomadic warrior, Loyaban Lemarti, in a ceremony that involved the slaughter of a bull. Lemarti wore a toga and lion skin. She now divides her time between her husband's rural village, white society in Karen and fashion shows in London. Michael Cunningham-Reid describes the marriage as "an experience" that has not gone down universally well among white Kenyans. But he calls Lemarti "a very close friend of mine". "I think [racial] attitudes have changed with some families," he says. "With me it's changed. Tom Delamere was my stepfather. He considered the black man a necessary evil. You had to have him around to do the work. Since then I've found out that the black man is a human being after all," he says.
The unwelcome attention caused by Tom Cholmondeley aside, the old family names are increasingly an irrelevance in Kenya. They have largely ceased to matter. The white community is now better represented by a comfortable middle class that has carved out a future in tourism and conservation. New white immigrants continue to arrive. Arabella Akerhielm, who hails from a wealthy family in Chelsea and was part of the Sloane Ranger set in the 80s, first came to Kenya in 1990. Four years later she married Baron Carl-Gustav Akerhielm, a member of one of the first Swedish families to settle in East Africa.
"I'm here to stay," she says at her relatively small home in a Nairobi suburb. "I was in financial advertising in the City in London. To me the quality of life is better here, although we're not as rich financially. I suppose it's somewhat colonial. Our husbands do the work. There are moments of insecurity, but there's the freedom. Life's wilder here, more cavalier. It's not so materialistic. In England I came from a very privileged background. I like being away from the City boys talking about their cars."
Baroness Akerhielm - as she says she does not like to be known - says there is not much racism but recognises there is not much integration either. "Some people are quite scathing [about Kenyans], but as a general rule I don't think there's much racism. If anything there's racism against whites in getting jobs," she says. "But we are quite tribalistic. I suppose I don't have a lot of black friends. My husband, even being brought up here, does not have a lot of black friends, but I believe my daughter will mix more freely. A lot more children educate their children here or in South Africa than in the past. There are still the school flights to England, but fewer go." Nonetheless Akerhielm has already put her own seven-year-old daughter down for a place in 2011 at her old Catholic private school in Ascot.
Ask Michael Cunningham-Reid if his family will still be in Kenya in two or three generations and he is doubtful. "My feeling of 100% belonging here may not be right for my children and grandchildren. I am completely sure I will die here peacefully rather than have a panga in the back of the neck. I don't know about my children," he says.
Others are already making plans to leave. Barry Gaymer is a professional big game hunter who lives on an island in Lake Naivasha. Since hunting is banned in Kenya, he takes his rich American clients to Tanzania. "People say we're racist, but we've never been comparable with anywhere south [Rhodesia or South Africa] in the way we treated the blacks," he says. "I think the majority of blacks in my area like me. I drink with them. I get along with them. Generally, I think they like the old-time whites. In this country, the word for respect is fear. Because they fear me, they respect me."
Gaymer's father was one of those who came on a grant after the war and became a ranch manager. Gaymer bought land but sold up in the late 70s and turned to tourism. Today he is chairman of the Naivasha wildlife conservancy that has 23 members who own or farm a combined total of 380,000 acres that is home to 55,000 head of wildlife. About half of them are white. "I didn't even think of myself as coming from England. I could hardly imagine the place. But now, very recently, I've been thinking about moving, leaving Kenya. It's getting too much," he says.
Naivasha is not the happy place that the white population once imagined. Seven white people have been murdered in the area in the past two years (no one can tell you how many black people have been murdered). In January, a renowned British conservationist, Joan Root, 69, was killed at her home on the banks of Lake Naivasha where she had lived for decades. Root had been trying to put an end to the illegal fishing on the lake that has caused a collapse in the fish population over the past five years. The water level is falling alarmingly, and the lake is increasingly polluted by pesticides and sewage.
The established families blame the sprawling flower farms that provide roses and carnations to Marks & Spencer and other European stores. The farms tap into the lake and spew out waste. They have also caused an influx of black Kenyans to Naivasha to work, or in search of work, that has seen the population of the town rise tenfold to 300,000 people, many living in considerable poverty. With that have come the killings and other crimes.
Gaymer also believes that Kenya's wildlife will be wiped out in the coming years unless there is a dramatic change in government policy to permit licensed hunting. "I'm looking at Tanzania now," he says. "I've bought 2m hectares there with antelopes, hippo, buffalo, zebra. The country was a mess because of socialism, but the one thing they did was get rid of tribalism. I think it has a future".
Kenya: the shooting that reignited land ownership tensions
Descendant of British settler dynasty Thomas Cholmondeley had shot dead two black men in two years
Xan Rice in Nairobi
guardian
Thursday 7 May 2009 12.05 BST
White man accused of killing black man: even stripped of its details the murder trial was bound to cause a stir in Kenya.
But the defendant was no ordinary white man. He was the cravat-wearing only son of Kenya's best-known British settler dynasty, the Delameres, whose colonial-era exploits invited admiration, scandal and resentment and who continue to divide opinion across the racial spectrum today.
What's more, Thomas Cholmondeley – the 40-year-old Etonian and heir to the fifth Baron Delamere, who was today found guilty of the manslaugher of a poor poacher on the family estate – was no stranger to the police when he was arrested in May 2006. He had shot dead another black man on the farm just a year before.
In April 2005, Cholmondeley shot Samson Ole Sisina, a Masai game warden with the Kenya wildlife service who was conducting an undercover investigation into the illegal bushmeat trade on the Delameres' 19,000-hectare (48,000-acre) Soysambu ranch. Cholmondeley admitted shooting Ole Sisina but said he was acting in self-defence after being fired upon first. The attorney general decided to drop the case before it came to court, causing a furore.
Masai leaders – who blame the original British settlers, including the third Baron Delamere, for moving them off their land a century ago – threatened to invade the Delamere farm, situated between the well-known tourist destinations of Nakuru and Naivasha, 55 miles west of Nairobi. Media commentators wondered how the country's notoriously slow justice system had functioned so swiftly. One newspaper headline read: "Why Cholmondeley is the luckiest Kenyan in penal code history."
The luck lasted a year.
On the evening of 10 May 2006, Cholmondeley was driving around Soysambu with a white acquaintance, Carl Tundo, whose rally driving exploits had earned him the nickname Flash. According to his court testimony, Cholmondeley encountered a group of black men who had been poaching and were carrying a dead impala. He shot three of the poachers' dogs, two fatally, with his Winchester bolt-action rifle. One of the men, Robert Njoya, a 37-year-old stonemason, was hit by a bullet and died soon afterwards in hospital.
Cholmondeley called the police, who arrested him and Tundo. Though Tundo was soon released, Cholmondeley was sent to the Kamiti maximum security prison in Nairobi after telling police he had shot Njoya by accident.
To Kenyans who thought that he had got off easily for the first shooting, this seemed only fair. Among the 30,000 or so whites living permanently in Kenya there was also little sympathy. Most still live a privileged existence – a few in a manner barely unchanged from colonial days – but they stay out of politics and try not to draw undue attention to themselves.
While individual white property holdings, even the Delameres', are dwarfed by those of a few Kenyan families, including those of the country's first two presidents, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, the country's vast inequalities mean that land ownership is a highly emotive issue.
Even those who defended Cholmondeley the first time – pointing out that whites living in the Rift Valley felt on edge due to increasing crime, poaching and even murders – offered few excuses this time.
"The sense here among both communities [white and black] is nail him," Michael Cunningham-Reid, a stepbrother to Cholmondeley's father, told the Guardian in 2006. "Once is forgivable, twice is inexcusable."
Considering his family were once described as the "Kennedys of Kenya" by the Spectator magazine, Cholmondeley's incarceration in Kamiti represented a huge fall from grace. Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere (each generation of heirs is alternately called Hugh or Thomas), had arrived in Kenya in 1903, and through his work in farming and politics is credited with doing more than any other settler to found the colony.
Legend has it that he used to ride his horse into the dining room of Nairobi's Norfolk hotel, where the bar bears the family name. He is credited with helping found the so-called Happy Valley set, where wealthy British colonial settlers passed the nights swapping partners and taking drugs.
The fourth Baron Delamere, Thomas, kept the family in the gossip press by marrying Diana Broughton. Her earlier love affair with the Earl of Errol, who was subsequently murdered, scandalised society and was turned into the book and film White Mischief.
Since Kenya's independence, Hugh Cholmondeley, the fifth baron, has led a less colourful but scarcely less comfortable life with his wife, Ann, on the Soysambu ranch, hosting tourists and producing dairy products under the Delamere name.
Thomas, or Tom to his friends, was born in 1968 and is their only son. After attending the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, he returned to Kenya to work on Soysambu ranch. A keen outdoorsman, he was gored by a buffalo while walking to a paragliding launch site in the Masai Mara in 1997. He has two children, Hugh and Henry, with wife Sally, from whom he split after the first shooting. From the beginning of the trial in September 2006, Cholmondeley's parents maintained a constant presence in the courtroom, alongside Sally Dudmesh, his current partner, and a revolving cast of other white friends.
Susan Njoya, the widow of the man he killed, was regularly in court, often seated just a row or two away.
Cholmondeley, a tall man who was always smartly dressed, remained impassive throughout. In his testimony last year he denied shooting Njoya and suggested that Tundo might have fired the fatal shot. During his court appearance Tundo strongly denied having a weapon at the scene.
As the case dragged on and it appeared that shoddy police work might make it difficult to link the bullet that struck Njoya to a specific weapon, other events in the country, especially the post-election violence and subsequent political wranglings, pushed the trial into the background.
*****************************
May 8, 2009
White mischief Cholmondeley gets its comeuppance
By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter
The Independent
For more than a century, the name of Cholmondeley has gone unchallenged as one of the most powerful in Kenya, epitomising the white settlers' colonial lifestyle of privilege and earthly excess.
But to audible gasps of astonishment in Nairobi's High Court yesterday, the family's standing among its one-time colonial subjects was changed for ever when Tom Cholmondeley – great-grandson of Lord Delamere, one of the first British colonists of Kenya's fertile highlands – was found guilty of the manslaughter of a poacher on his ranch.
The Eton-educated divorcé betrayed no emotion as Judge Muga Apondi threw out his defence that the fatal shot may have been fired by a friend. He warned Cholmondeley that he could face life imprisonment for killing Robert Njoya, a 37-year-old stonemason, in 2006.
In Kenya, the long-running case has encapsulated the country's colonial legacy and simmering resentment at the large landholdings still controlled by some of its 30,000 white citizens.
Cholmondeley, a dapper, besuited figure, who will become the 6th Lord Delamere and has spent the last three years in Nairobi's notorious Kamiti Prison, became a focus for bitter complaints of racial inequality in 2005 when he was cleared of killing an undercover Masai bush ranger, Samson Ole Sisina.
This time, Judge Apondi threw out a murder charge against Cholmondeley because there had been no "malice aforethought" in his actions, but said he was in no doubt that the landowner had fired the shot which killed Mr Njoya with his bolt-action Winchester rifle.
The court heard that Cholmondeley had come across the poacher, who was carrying a dead impala, after dark on his 55,000-acre Soysambu ranch, in the Rift Valley 55 miles west of Nairobi. He shot at his three dogs, killing two of them.
The judge said he had some sympathy with Cholmondeley's claim to have acted in self-defence but dismissed as an "afterthought" the farmer's claim that the fatal shot was fired by Carl Tundo, a white friend accompanying him on the night, whose exploits as a rally driver earned him the nickname "Flash".
The verdict overturns an earlier not-guilty finding by a lay assessment panel, the Kenyan equivalent of a jury, which is intended to advise the presiding judge. Fred Ojiambo, the lawyer representing Cholmondeley said after the verdict: "I am shocked, amazed and dumbstruck. This is not acceptable. We will appeal."
The squalid cells of Kamiti, built by the British to house 1,400 inmates but which currently hold 3,600 prisoners, are a far cry from the luxury of Cholmondeley's upbringing in Eton and on the lands awarded to Lord Delamere by Kenya's British rulers following his arrival in 1903. Hugh Cholmondeley, the 3rd Baron Delamere, became a figurehead for the colonial occupation after being granted a swathe of Kenya's highlands and devoting himself to developing the country's farming economy. At the same time, he became synonymous with the culture of excess cultivated in the lake-studded region known as Happy Valley for its riotous parties, wife-swapping sessions and drug taking. This lifestyle inspired the book and film, White Mischief, based on the story of Tom Cholmondeley's step-grandmother Diana, whose lover was murdered and her first husband accused of the killing.
Economic problems have led to a growing sense of insecurity in the Rift Valley, with many landowners arming themselves against violent robbers and poaching gangs. Cholmondeley will be sentenced at a later date. Speaking outside the court, the widow of his victim, Sarah, a mother of four, said: "The court's decision, in my opinion, is not that bad. Life has been hard without a husband and a father for my children."
Xan Rice in Nairobi
guardian
Thursday 7 May 2009 12.05 BST
White man accused of killing black man: even stripped of its details the murder trial was bound to cause a stir in Kenya.
But the defendant was no ordinary white man. He was the cravat-wearing only son of Kenya's best-known British settler dynasty, the Delameres, whose colonial-era exploits invited admiration, scandal and resentment and who continue to divide opinion across the racial spectrum today.
What's more, Thomas Cholmondeley – the 40-year-old Etonian and heir to the fifth Baron Delamere, who was today found guilty of the manslaugher of a poor poacher on the family estate – was no stranger to the police when he was arrested in May 2006. He had shot dead another black man on the farm just a year before.
In April 2005, Cholmondeley shot Samson Ole Sisina, a Masai game warden with the Kenya wildlife service who was conducting an undercover investigation into the illegal bushmeat trade on the Delameres' 19,000-hectare (48,000-acre) Soysambu ranch. Cholmondeley admitted shooting Ole Sisina but said he was acting in self-defence after being fired upon first. The attorney general decided to drop the case before it came to court, causing a furore.
Masai leaders – who blame the original British settlers, including the third Baron Delamere, for moving them off their land a century ago – threatened to invade the Delamere farm, situated between the well-known tourist destinations of Nakuru and Naivasha, 55 miles west of Nairobi. Media commentators wondered how the country's notoriously slow justice system had functioned so swiftly. One newspaper headline read: "Why Cholmondeley is the luckiest Kenyan in penal code history."
The luck lasted a year.
On the evening of 10 May 2006, Cholmondeley was driving around Soysambu with a white acquaintance, Carl Tundo, whose rally driving exploits had earned him the nickname Flash. According to his court testimony, Cholmondeley encountered a group of black men who had been poaching and were carrying a dead impala. He shot three of the poachers' dogs, two fatally, with his Winchester bolt-action rifle. One of the men, Robert Njoya, a 37-year-old stonemason, was hit by a bullet and died soon afterwards in hospital.
Cholmondeley called the police, who arrested him and Tundo. Though Tundo was soon released, Cholmondeley was sent to the Kamiti maximum security prison in Nairobi after telling police he had shot Njoya by accident.
To Kenyans who thought that he had got off easily for the first shooting, this seemed only fair. Among the 30,000 or so whites living permanently in Kenya there was also little sympathy. Most still live a privileged existence – a few in a manner barely unchanged from colonial days – but they stay out of politics and try not to draw undue attention to themselves.
While individual white property holdings, even the Delameres', are dwarfed by those of a few Kenyan families, including those of the country's first two presidents, Jomo Kenyatta and Daniel arap Moi, the country's vast inequalities mean that land ownership is a highly emotive issue.
Even those who defended Cholmondeley the first time – pointing out that whites living in the Rift Valley felt on edge due to increasing crime, poaching and even murders – offered few excuses this time.
"The sense here among both communities [white and black] is nail him," Michael Cunningham-Reid, a stepbrother to Cholmondeley's father, told the Guardian in 2006. "Once is forgivable, twice is inexcusable."
Considering his family were once described as the "Kennedys of Kenya" by the Spectator magazine, Cholmondeley's incarceration in Kamiti represented a huge fall from grace. Hugh Cholmondeley, the third Baron Delamere (each generation of heirs is alternately called Hugh or Thomas), had arrived in Kenya in 1903, and through his work in farming and politics is credited with doing more than any other settler to found the colony.
Legend has it that he used to ride his horse into the dining room of Nairobi's Norfolk hotel, where the bar bears the family name. He is credited with helping found the so-called Happy Valley set, where wealthy British colonial settlers passed the nights swapping partners and taking drugs.
The fourth Baron Delamere, Thomas, kept the family in the gossip press by marrying Diana Broughton. Her earlier love affair with the Earl of Errol, who was subsequently murdered, scandalised society and was turned into the book and film White Mischief.
Since Kenya's independence, Hugh Cholmondeley, the fifth baron, has led a less colourful but scarcely less comfortable life with his wife, Ann, on the Soysambu ranch, hosting tourists and producing dairy products under the Delamere name.
Thomas, or Tom to his friends, was born in 1968 and is their only son. After attending the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester, he returned to Kenya to work on Soysambu ranch. A keen outdoorsman, he was gored by a buffalo while walking to a paragliding launch site in the Masai Mara in 1997. He has two children, Hugh and Henry, with wife Sally, from whom he split after the first shooting. From the beginning of the trial in September 2006, Cholmondeley's parents maintained a constant presence in the courtroom, alongside Sally Dudmesh, his current partner, and a revolving cast of other white friends.
Susan Njoya, the widow of the man he killed, was regularly in court, often seated just a row or two away.
Cholmondeley, a tall man who was always smartly dressed, remained impassive throughout. In his testimony last year he denied shooting Njoya and suggested that Tundo might have fired the fatal shot. During his court appearance Tundo strongly denied having a weapon at the scene.
As the case dragged on and it appeared that shoddy police work might make it difficult to link the bullet that struck Njoya to a specific weapon, other events in the country, especially the post-election violence and subsequent political wranglings, pushed the trial into the background.
*****************************
May 8, 2009
White mischief Cholmondeley gets its comeuppance
By Cahal Milmo, Chief Reporter
The Independent
For more than a century, the name of Cholmondeley has gone unchallenged as one of the most powerful in Kenya, epitomising the white settlers' colonial lifestyle of privilege and earthly excess.
But to audible gasps of astonishment in Nairobi's High Court yesterday, the family's standing among its one-time colonial subjects was changed for ever when Tom Cholmondeley – great-grandson of Lord Delamere, one of the first British colonists of Kenya's fertile highlands – was found guilty of the manslaughter of a poacher on his ranch.
The Eton-educated divorcé betrayed no emotion as Judge Muga Apondi threw out his defence that the fatal shot may have been fired by a friend. He warned Cholmondeley that he could face life imprisonment for killing Robert Njoya, a 37-year-old stonemason, in 2006.
In Kenya, the long-running case has encapsulated the country's colonial legacy and simmering resentment at the large landholdings still controlled by some of its 30,000 white citizens.
Cholmondeley, a dapper, besuited figure, who will become the 6th Lord Delamere and has spent the last three years in Nairobi's notorious Kamiti Prison, became a focus for bitter complaints of racial inequality in 2005 when he was cleared of killing an undercover Masai bush ranger, Samson Ole Sisina.
This time, Judge Apondi threw out a murder charge against Cholmondeley because there had been no "malice aforethought" in his actions, but said he was in no doubt that the landowner had fired the shot which killed Mr Njoya with his bolt-action Winchester rifle.
The court heard that Cholmondeley had come across the poacher, who was carrying a dead impala, after dark on his 55,000-acre Soysambu ranch, in the Rift Valley 55 miles west of Nairobi. He shot at his three dogs, killing two of them.
The judge said he had some sympathy with Cholmondeley's claim to have acted in self-defence but dismissed as an "afterthought" the farmer's claim that the fatal shot was fired by Carl Tundo, a white friend accompanying him on the night, whose exploits as a rally driver earned him the nickname "Flash".
The verdict overturns an earlier not-guilty finding by a lay assessment panel, the Kenyan equivalent of a jury, which is intended to advise the presiding judge. Fred Ojiambo, the lawyer representing Cholmondeley said after the verdict: "I am shocked, amazed and dumbstruck. This is not acceptable. We will appeal."
The squalid cells of Kamiti, built by the British to house 1,400 inmates but which currently hold 3,600 prisoners, are a far cry from the luxury of Cholmondeley's upbringing in Eton and on the lands awarded to Lord Delamere by Kenya's British rulers following his arrival in 1903. Hugh Cholmondeley, the 3rd Baron Delamere, became a figurehead for the colonial occupation after being granted a swathe of Kenya's highlands and devoting himself to developing the country's farming economy. At the same time, he became synonymous with the culture of excess cultivated in the lake-studded region known as Happy Valley for its riotous parties, wife-swapping sessions and drug taking. This lifestyle inspired the book and film, White Mischief, based on the story of Tom Cholmondeley's step-grandmother Diana, whose lover was murdered and her first husband accused of the killing.
Economic problems have led to a growing sense of insecurity in the Rift Valley, with many landowners arming themselves against violent robbers and poaching gangs. Cholmondeley will be sentenced at a later date. Speaking outside the court, the widow of his victim, Sarah, a mother of four, said: "The court's decision, in my opinion, is not that bad. Life has been hard without a husband and a father for my children."
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