from Rationalwiki
Role of Islam
Nick Griffin pointed to the religion of the rapists: "the common denominator is not their Asian ethnicity, it’s the fact that they are Muslims", he said. "Their 'good book' tells them that that's acceptable. If you doubt it, go and buy a copy and you will find verse after verse saying you can take any woman you want as long as they're not Muslim."
"These gang members select their victims from communities which they believe to be 'unbelievers' -- non-Muslims whom they view with disdain and hostility", commented Melanie Phillips. "You can see that this is not a racial but a religious animosity from the fact that, while the vast majority of the girls who are targeted are white, the victims include Sikhs and Hindus, too."
Showing posts with label england. Show all posts
Showing posts with label england. Show all posts
Sunday, February 26, 2012
Muslims in UK: 15-year-old victim told to 'Bring your younger friends next time'
Five vulnerable victims aged 13 to 15 were made to have sex with several men a day, several times a week, jury is told
Helen Carter
Guardian
Tuesday 21
February 2012 13.11 EST
A group of 11 men plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs so they could use them for sex, a court has heard.
The five victims, who were aged between 13 and 15 when the alleged abuse began, were passed around by the men "who acted together to sexually exploit the girls", a trial at Liverpool crown court was told.
All the girls were vulnerable as they were from broken homes and one was in the care of a local authority. Rachel Smith, opening the case for the prosecution, warned the jurors: "Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing. The events and circumstances described by the girls are at best saddening and at worst shocking in places. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were."
The court heard that some of the girls were raped and physically assaulted, with some forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week", in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009. Some of the defendants allegedly paid the girls and took payments from other men to whom they supplied the girls for sex.
Kabeer Hassan, 24, Abdul Aziz, 41, Abdul Rauf, 43, Mohammed Sajid, 35, Adil Khan, 42, Abdul Qayyum, 43, Mohammed Amin, 44, Qamar Shahzad, 29, Liaquat Shah, 41, and Hamid Safi, 22, are on trial at Liverpool crown court charged with conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. They have all pleaded not guilty along with a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, who also denies two rapes, aiding and abetting a rape, one sexual assault and an allegation of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.
Hassan, from Oldham, and Shahzad, from Rochdale, also deny rape. Aziz, of Rochdale, denies two counts of rape and one allegation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Khan and Rauf, of Rochdale, have also pleaded not guilty to trafficking for sexual exploitation. Sajid, also of Rochdale, denies trafficking, two counts of rape and one allegation of sexual activity with a child. Amin, from Rochdale, denies sexual assault. Shah and Safi, both of Rochdale, each denied two counts of rape and Safi has also pleaded not guilty to trafficking.
One 13-year-old victim became pregnant by Adil Khan and had an abortion, the jury was told. She said Khan attacked her when she refused to have sex with "two of four men" who were waiting at a house in Rochdale. He later denied knowing her, despite DNA proof he was the father of the baby, the court heard.
One girl said she was raped by Abdul Aziz in his taxi in December 2009 and afterwards he told her she no longer needed to pay the fare. She was also raped by Liaquat Shah while Safi watched, the jury was told. She claimed two men raped her while she was so drunk "she was vomiting over the side of the bed" after drinking spirits and beer.
She told police: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing … there was nothing I could do, I was throwing up, I just kept throwing up … And I felt like I couldn't move." When the men left, she said, she cried herself to sleep.
Another alleged victim, who was 14, said she would get "proper hammered" and, the court heard, "lost count of the number of times she had had sex with men when she did not want to do so".
The prosecutor said: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The court was told that in about August 2008 Abdul Aziz "took over" from the 59-year-old and started taking girls to various locations – including a flat in Rochdale where Sajid and Shahzad lived – where a "group of men" would always be waiting to have sex with them.
"Abdul Aziz was being paid by the various men to whom he delivered the girls for the purposes of sex," Smith said. One girl estimated that she was "having sex with several men in a day, several times a week", she said.
The court heard that on one occasion the 59-year-old man met two girls at a takeaway where they were given food and vodka.
He allegedly told a 15-year-old that he wanted sex, saying: "It's part of the deal because I bought you vodka, you have to give me something." When the girl refused, he allegedly raped her. The court was told that when the girl started crying, he said: "Don't cry, I love you."
On another occasion, the jury heard, he took one of the girls to Oldham where she was raped by another man, who told her: "Don't tell anyone. I'll give you money. I'll give you anything you want."
One girl, who was 15 when she met the defendants, told police she had been flattered by the attention. She said she thought it meant she was attractive and they thought she was pretty. However, she quickly began to drink heavily, became depressed and incapable of getting herself out of the situation, the court heard.
"At first I was scared," she told police. "Then after that it … just didn't bother me any more … At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn't feel anything any more." The girl was persistently coerced or forced into submission by the men, Smith said.
"When she was told that she had to have sex with the particular defendant or other men, she would submit to them, although she describes herself as lying impassively with her eyes shut or looking at the wall. She was given alcohol, which she drank heavily, not least because it numbed her thoughts to what was happening to her."
It was "common knowledge", Smith said, among the defendants that the girl was 15 and that Aziz would give her lifts to school while Rauf asked the other older girl if she "knew anyone younger". Smith told the jury that one of the older girls, who was 16 at the time, recruited younger girls for the men as well as having sex with them for money.
The 16-year-old introduced a 14-year-old girl "to a number of different men who wanted to have sex with her, with or without her consent". The younger girl was raped at a takeaway and taken by the man to other places where she was provided to other men for sex.
One girl, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began, told police that the men she met were "friends" who looked after her and "her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area".
She told police: "When you've got Asian friends, [your] number gets passed and they pass it to their friends. And they pass it to their friends, end up with a massive circle … everyone's got it."
"There were also occasions on which one or more of the girls were so incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs that they were incapable of having any control over whether or with whom they had sexual intercourse," Smith said.
The court heard the men knew each other and that two of them worked in the takeaways Tasty Bites and the Balti House, both in Heywood. Four of the other men worked as cab drivers at local taxi firms, one was a student and four were jobless.
The men were known to the girls by nicknames such as "Master" and "Tiger", the court was told. The girls would often spend their days "unsupervised by responsible adults", were not in school regularly and drank and smoked and hung around with little to do.
Smith said they were the "sort of children who were easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
The trial continues.
24th February 2012
Daily Mial (UK)
A member of an alleged child abuse ring told his teenage victims to supply him with even 'younger girls', a court heard today.
The witness, who cannot be identified, was giving evidence in the trial of 11 men accused of being part of a sexual exploitation ring operating in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009.
Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Qamar Shahzad, Liaquat Shah, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with five girls under the age of 16.
The jury at Liverpool Crown Court were today shown a third day of police interviews with one alleged victim, recorded when she was 15 years old.
Questioned by a female police officer the witness, now aged 19, said she had had sex with defendant Abdul Rauf, a taxi driver, 'about 10 times' before she turned 16.
'Did he know how old you were?' the officer asked.
'He knew my age because my friend told him,' the girl replied.
'We were in his taxi and he just asked us how old we were.
'She told him I was 15 and she was 16 and he asked if we knew anyone younger and she said she did.
'He told us to bring them next time.'
The police officer asked the girl: 'What did you think about that?'
The witness said she 'would have been glad' because the younger girls would take attention off her. But she went on to say those feelings had made her feel 'tight'.
'Because it would happen to them and I would feel bad,' she explained.
She said Rauf would pay her friend about £20 if he had sex with one of them and £40 if he had had sex with them both.
Around half that money would then go to co-defendant Abdul Aziz, accused of 'taking over' the exploitation ring, she said.
The girls were abused by the men who used alcohol, money, drugs and threats of violence to force them to have sex, the court heard earlier.
Four were from broken homes and one was in care, and they would often spend their days 'unsupervised by responsible adults', the prosecution said.
The jury were told the girls were not in school regularly and 'drank and smoked and hung around with little to do'.
Hassan, 24, Aziz, 41, Rauf, 43, Sajid, 35, Khan, 42, Qayyum, 43, Amin, 44, Shahzad, 29, Shah, 41, and Safi, 22, all live in the Greater Manchester area.
In further police interviews, recorded when she was 18, the witness said she never discussed her age with Aziz but he had dropped her off at school in his car.
'He knew that I went to school. I don’t think he knew my age but obviously he knew I was under 16,' she said.
She was asked about her emotions during this period and replied: 'I wasn’t even bothered any more, I didn’t feel anything about it.'
Asked to explain further, she went on: 'At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn’t feel anything any more.'
The officer asked: 'How did you cope?'
The girl replied: 'I don’t remember ... Most of the time I was just getting dead drunk so when it happened it didn’t feel that bad.'
Asked how she feels about it some years later, the teenager said: 'Horrible about myself that I didn’t do anything to stop it.'
The trial was adjourned until Monday at 10am.
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court earlier this week brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
The sex gang accused of grooming underage girls
The Sun
26, Feb, 2012
(top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Six of the accused ... (top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Phil Richards/ Mercury Press
By GUY PATRICK
Last Updated: 22nd February 2012
GIRLS as young as 13 got pizzas and booze for having sex with a gang of men — whose nicknames included The Ugly One, Master and Tiger, a jury heard yesterday.
Victims were chatted up and groomed by the men who then passed them around so fellow Asians could satisfy their lust, the court was told.
Prosecutor Rachel Smith said as 11 men including a 59-year-old went on trial for child-sex crimes how schoolgirls would be plied with drink until they were in a stupor.
Ms Smith said of one 14-year-old: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The youngster told cops how she was so "hammered" on one occasion that two men even had sex with her while she was being sick over the side of a bed. The girl said: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing. There was nothing I could do — I was throwing up. I felt like I couldn't move." The prosecutor said: "Afterwards they left and she cried herself to sleep."
On another occasion a man watching her being raped begged: "I want a turn, I want a turn."
The 11 men in the dock plead not guilty to plotting to have sex with underage girls in and around Rochdale, Gtr Manchester.
Several are charged with rape, which they also deny.
Four of the accused are taxi drivers and two are fast food workers.
The girls — often chatted up at kebab shops — were targeted because they were seen as having little parental supervision, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
They saw the men who seduced them as boyfriends. But before long a "pattern of abuse emerged".
Youngsters started out being rewarded for sex with treats such as food and free cab rides, it was claimed. Later they would be driven to various addresses where they were passed around to other men who would pay for sex in cash. Some of those in the dock are accused of sex trafficking, which they deny.
The charges against the 11 involve five girls — all aged between 13 and 15 at the time. The attacks are alleged to have happened between 2008 and 2010.
The jury heard that youngsters reluctant to have sex were held down and raped. Some deliberately drank themselves into oblivion to blot out what was happening.
One was said to have told police how after she was befriended a "massive circle" of Pakistani men ended up with her phone number.
Prosecutor Ms Smith described all the victims as "easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
That was partly because they spent a lot of time off school.
An older girl — who cannot be named for legal reasons — moved on from having sex with the gang to finding fresh prey, it was claimed. Ms Smith said the former victim was paid for "procuring" others. One 15-year-old was said to have told police she was having sex with "several men in a day, several times a week".
The girl said she would get drunk so "it wouldn't feel as bad" when the men raped her.
The jury was told the first to abuse her was the 59-year-old. He cannot be named for legal reasons.
After repeatedly raping her he forced her to have sex with fellow defendant Kabeer Hassan, 25, it was alleged. The court heard she told cops but no charges were brought — and the abuse went on.
Two victims — one of them just 13 — were made pregnant by members of the gang, it was claimed.
Those on trial with the 59-year-old and Hassan are: Abdul Aziz, 43, Abdul Rauf, 43, Mohammed Sajid, 35, Adil Khan, 42, Abdul Qayyum, 43, Mohammed Amin, 44, Qamar Shahzad, 29, Liaquat Shah, 41, and Hamid Safi, 22.
The case continues.
Helen Carter
Guardian
Tuesday 21
February 2012 13.11 EST
 |
| Abdul Rauf |
A group of 11 men plied girls as young as 13 with alcohol and drugs so they could use them for sex, a court has heard.
The five victims, who were aged between 13 and 15 when the alleged abuse began, were passed around by the men "who acted together to sexually exploit the girls", a trial at Liverpool crown court was told.
All the girls were vulnerable as they were from broken homes and one was in the care of a local authority. Rachel Smith, opening the case for the prosecution, warned the jurors: "Some of you may find what you are about to hear distressing. The events and circumstances described by the girls are at best saddening and at worst shocking in places. No child should be exploited as these girls say they were."
The court heard that some of the girls were raped and physically assaulted, with some forced to have sex with "several men in a day, several times a week", in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009. Some of the defendants allegedly paid the girls and took payments from other men to whom they supplied the girls for sex.
Kabeer Hassan, 24, Abdul Aziz, 41, Abdul Rauf, 43, Mohammed Sajid, 35, Adil Khan, 42, Abdul Qayyum, 43, Mohammed Amin, 44, Qamar Shahzad, 29, Liaquat Shah, 41, and Hamid Safi, 22, are on trial at Liverpool crown court charged with conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with children under the age of 16. They have all pleaded not guilty along with a 59-year-old man who cannot be named for legal reasons, who also denies two rapes, aiding and abetting a rape, one sexual assault and an allegation of trafficking within the UK for sexual exploitation.
Hassan, from Oldham, and Shahzad, from Rochdale, also deny rape. Aziz, of Rochdale, denies two counts of rape and one allegation of trafficking for sexual exploitation. Khan and Rauf, of Rochdale, have also pleaded not guilty to trafficking for sexual exploitation. Sajid, also of Rochdale, denies trafficking, two counts of rape and one allegation of sexual activity with a child. Amin, from Rochdale, denies sexual assault. Shah and Safi, both of Rochdale, each denied two counts of rape and Safi has also pleaded not guilty to trafficking.
One 13-year-old victim became pregnant by Adil Khan and had an abortion, the jury was told. She said Khan attacked her when she refused to have sex with "two of four men" who were waiting at a house in Rochdale. He later denied knowing her, despite DNA proof he was the father of the baby, the court heard.
One girl said she was raped by Abdul Aziz in his taxi in December 2009 and afterwards he told her she no longer needed to pay the fare. She was also raped by Liaquat Shah while Safi watched, the jury was told. She claimed two men raped her while she was so drunk "she was vomiting over the side of the bed" after drinking spirits and beer.
She told police: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing … there was nothing I could do, I was throwing up, I just kept throwing up … And I felt like I couldn't move." When the men left, she said, she cried herself to sleep.
Another alleged victim, who was 14, said she would get "proper hammered" and, the court heard, "lost count of the number of times she had had sex with men when she did not want to do so".
The prosecutor said: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The court was told that in about August 2008 Abdul Aziz "took over" from the 59-year-old and started taking girls to various locations – including a flat in Rochdale where Sajid and Shahzad lived – where a "group of men" would always be waiting to have sex with them.
"Abdul Aziz was being paid by the various men to whom he delivered the girls for the purposes of sex," Smith said. One girl estimated that she was "having sex with several men in a day, several times a week", she said.
The court heard that on one occasion the 59-year-old man met two girls at a takeaway where they were given food and vodka.
He allegedly told a 15-year-old that he wanted sex, saying: "It's part of the deal because I bought you vodka, you have to give me something." When the girl refused, he allegedly raped her. The court was told that when the girl started crying, he said: "Don't cry, I love you."
On another occasion, the jury heard, he took one of the girls to Oldham where she was raped by another man, who told her: "Don't tell anyone. I'll give you money. I'll give you anything you want."
One girl, who was 15 when she met the defendants, told police she had been flattered by the attention. She said she thought it meant she was attractive and they thought she was pretty. However, she quickly began to drink heavily, became depressed and incapable of getting herself out of the situation, the court heard.
"At first I was scared," she told police. "Then after that it … just didn't bother me any more … At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn't feel anything any more." The girl was persistently coerced or forced into submission by the men, Smith said.
"When she was told that she had to have sex with the particular defendant or other men, she would submit to them, although she describes herself as lying impassively with her eyes shut or looking at the wall. She was given alcohol, which she drank heavily, not least because it numbed her thoughts to what was happening to her."
It was "common knowledge", Smith said, among the defendants that the girl was 15 and that Aziz would give her lifts to school while Rauf asked the other older girl if she "knew anyone younger". Smith told the jury that one of the older girls, who was 16 at the time, recruited younger girls for the men as well as having sex with them for money.
The 16-year-old introduced a 14-year-old girl "to a number of different men who wanted to have sex with her, with or without her consent". The younger girl was raped at a takeaway and taken by the man to other places where she was provided to other men for sex.
One girl, who was 13 when the alleged abuse began, told police that the men she met were "friends" who looked after her and "her number would be passed around amongst the Pakistani men in her area".
She told police: "When you've got Asian friends, [your] number gets passed and they pass it to their friends. And they pass it to their friends, end up with a massive circle … everyone's got it."
"There were also occasions on which one or more of the girls were so incapacitated by alcohol and/or drugs that they were incapable of having any control over whether or with whom they had sexual intercourse," Smith said.
The court heard the men knew each other and that two of them worked in the takeaways Tasty Bites and the Balti House, both in Heywood. Four of the other men worked as cab drivers at local taxi firms, one was a student and four were jobless.
The men were known to the girls by nicknames such as "Master" and "Tiger", the court was told. The girls would often spend their days "unsupervised by responsible adults", were not in school regularly and drank and smoked and hung around with little to do.
Smith said they were the "sort of children who were easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
The trial continues.
- Teenager told court she had sex with taxi driver 'about 10 times' before she was 16
- 11 men are accused of being part of a child sexual exploitation ring
24th February 2012
Daily Mial (UK)
A member of an alleged child abuse ring told his teenage victims to supply him with even 'younger girls', a court heard today.
The witness, who cannot be identified, was giving evidence in the trial of 11 men accused of being part of a sexual exploitation ring operating in and around Rochdale, Greater Manchester, in 2008 and 2009.
Kabeer Hassan, Abdul Aziz, Abdul Rauf, Mohammed Sajid, Adil Khan, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Amin, Qamar Shahzad, Liaquat Shah, Hamid Safi and a 59-year-old man who cannot be named all deny conspiracy to engage in sexual activity with five girls under the age of 16.
 |
| Qamar Shahzad and Mohammed Amin |
The jury at Liverpool Crown Court were today shown a third day of police interviews with one alleged victim, recorded when she was 15 years old.
Questioned by a female police officer the witness, now aged 19, said she had had sex with defendant Abdul Rauf, a taxi driver, 'about 10 times' before she turned 16.
'Did he know how old you were?' the officer asked.
'He knew my age because my friend told him,' the girl replied.
'We were in his taxi and he just asked us how old we were.
'She told him I was 15 and she was 16 and he asked if we knew anyone younger and she said she did.
'He told us to bring them next time.'
The police officer asked the girl: 'What did you think about that?'
The witness said she 'would have been glad' because the younger girls would take attention off her. But she went on to say those feelings had made her feel 'tight'.
'Because it would happen to them and I would feel bad,' she explained.
She said Rauf would pay her friend about £20 if he had sex with one of them and £40 if he had had sex with them both.
Around half that money would then go to co-defendant Abdul Aziz, accused of 'taking over' the exploitation ring, she said.
The girls were abused by the men who used alcohol, money, drugs and threats of violence to force them to have sex, the court heard earlier.
Four were from broken homes and one was in care, and they would often spend their days 'unsupervised by responsible adults', the prosecution said.
The jury were told the girls were not in school regularly and 'drank and smoked and hung around with little to do'.
Hassan, 24, Aziz, 41, Rauf, 43, Sajid, 35, Khan, 42, Qayyum, 43, Amin, 44, Shahzad, 29, Shah, 41, and Safi, 22, all live in the Greater Manchester area.
In further police interviews, recorded when she was 18, the witness said she never discussed her age with Aziz but he had dropped her off at school in his car.
'He knew that I went to school. I don’t think he knew my age but obviously he knew I was under 16,' she said.
She was asked about her emotions during this period and replied: 'I wasn’t even bothered any more, I didn’t feel anything about it.'
Asked to explain further, she went on: 'At first I felt dead bad and horrible but then I didn’t feel anything any more.'
The officer asked: 'How did you cope?'
The girl replied: 'I don’t remember ... Most of the time I was just getting dead drunk so when it happened it didn’t feel that bad.'
Asked how she feels about it some years later, the teenager said: 'Horrible about myself that I didn’t do anything to stop it.'
The trial was adjourned until Monday at 10am.
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
A bomb alert at Liverpool Crown Court earlier this week brought proceedings to a halt during the trial of the eleven men accused of grooming young children
The Sun
26, Feb, 2012
(top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Six of the accused ... (top left to bottom right) Abdul Rauf, Liaquat Shah, Abdul Qayyum, Mohammed Sajid, Kabeer Hassan and Mohammed Amin
Phil Richards/ Mercury Press
By GUY PATRICK
Last Updated: 22nd February 2012
GIRLS as young as 13 got pizzas and booze for having sex with a gang of men — whose nicknames included The Ugly One, Master and Tiger, a jury heard yesterday.
Victims were chatted up and groomed by the men who then passed them around so fellow Asians could satisfy their lust, the court was told.
Prosecutor Rachel Smith said as 11 men including a 59-year-old went on trial for child-sex crimes how schoolgirls would be plied with drink until they were in a stupor.
Ms Smith said of one 14-year-old: "She was unable to describe all of the men but said she would regularly find herself drunk to near-unconsciousness, waking up with men having sex with her."
The youngster told cops how she was so "hammered" on one occasion that two men even had sex with her while she was being sick over the side of a bed. The girl said: "They were just having it in turns sort of thing. There was nothing I could do — I was throwing up. I felt like I couldn't move." The prosecutor said: "Afterwards they left and she cried herself to sleep."
On another occasion a man watching her being raped begged: "I want a turn, I want a turn."
The 11 men in the dock plead not guilty to plotting to have sex with underage girls in and around Rochdale, Gtr Manchester.
Several are charged with rape, which they also deny.
Four of the accused are taxi drivers and two are fast food workers.
The girls — often chatted up at kebab shops — were targeted because they were seen as having little parental supervision, Liverpool Crown Court heard.
They saw the men who seduced them as boyfriends. But before long a "pattern of abuse emerged".
Youngsters started out being rewarded for sex with treats such as food and free cab rides, it was claimed. Later they would be driven to various addresses where they were passed around to other men who would pay for sex in cash. Some of those in the dock are accused of sex trafficking, which they deny.
The charges against the 11 involve five girls — all aged between 13 and 15 at the time. The attacks are alleged to have happened between 2008 and 2010.
The jury heard that youngsters reluctant to have sex were held down and raped. Some deliberately drank themselves into oblivion to blot out what was happening.
One was said to have told police how after she was befriended a "massive circle" of Pakistani men ended up with her phone number.
Prosecutor Ms Smith described all the victims as "easy to identify, target and exploit for the sexual gratification of these men".
That was partly because they spent a lot of time off school.
An older girl — who cannot be named for legal reasons — moved on from having sex with the gang to finding fresh prey, it was claimed. Ms Smith said the former victim was paid for "procuring" others. One 15-year-old was said to have told police she was having sex with "several men in a day, several times a week".
The girl said she would get drunk so "it wouldn't feel as bad" when the men raped her.
The jury was told the first to abuse her was the 59-year-old. He cannot be named for legal reasons.
After repeatedly raping her he forced her to have sex with fellow defendant Kabeer Hassan, 25, it was alleged. The court heard she told cops but no charges were brought — and the abuse went on.
Two victims — one of them just 13 — were made pregnant by members of the gang, it was claimed.
Those on trial with the 59-year-old and Hassan are: Abdul Aziz, 43, Abdul Rauf, 43, Mohammed Sajid, 35, Adil Khan, 42, Abdul Qayyum, 43, Mohammed Amin, 44, Qamar Shahzad, 29, Liaquat Shah, 41, and Hamid Safi, 22.
The case continues.
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Vamps, victims and videotapes
By: Paromita Vohra
2010-10-03
MidDay Mumbai
Last week a YouTube video called VAMP Protests 'Prostitutes of God' went viral. Produced by Vaishya Anyaya Mukti Parishad (VAMP), a sex worker rights organisation in Sangli, it features some very pi**ed off folk calmly addressing a British filmmaker, Sarah Harris, director of a documentary Prostitutes of God, featuring them and
playing on the VBS network's website.
The film is about sex work around the cult of Goddess Yellamma--linked to the Devdasi tradition.
VAMP's video is nothing fancy but it is power-packed. One after another, the interviewees ask the filmmaker why she betrayed their trust by insulting their gods, misinterpreting their culture and portraying them as craven victims.
It's not the first time people have felt this way about a documentary made by a first world filmmaker/network about an 'Indian problem'. The producers usually have two responses: we are people who care, and some things have to be 'simplified' so that our audiences can understand the unfamiliar.
The VAMP video, as a direct testimony of the people the film is about, is hard to ignore as carping. In the flabby verbiage about the power of digital media, this stands out as a politically creative moment. It also throws a light on how documentaries work, and so, how not to make them.
Watching the film, you see that Harris, like others before her, is not a bad person. But niceness does not prevent mediocre analysis or filmmaking. The hard work of questioning your assumptions might. There's little space for that in this format of filmmaking.Beginning with the never-before 'insight' that 'India is a land of extremes, ancient tradition and modern capitalism', the filmmaker 'bonds' with sex workers--giggly chapati-making and sari shopping--overlain with a commentary about how 'these people' have terrible lives, exist in a superstitious society, suffering the iniquities of tradition.
While there's truth in this, is this the only way to understand the truth?
Documentaries can explain something simply and clearly. Or they can provide a textured experience of the unknown, and by making you see people as complex individuals, not examples or types, provide a compassionate understanding and awareness about the issues, subjects and our prejudices.
Neither happens in this style of filmmaking. Despite many bonding gestures on camera--we never understand the humour, sensuality or choice of subjects as individuals--evidence of the filmmaker's connection to the people. Nor do we understand sex work differently from the common perception as a terrible fate to be rescued from, or the difference between an empowered sex worker and one who isn't.
There's a declared incomprehension about the Yellamma myth--as some bizarre story featuring 'fat gods in gold bikinis'. If the Indian informants were inarticulate (as the film makes clear by using translators who can't speak English well, and using that for feeble humour), there's Wikipedia.
Reading the entry, I found it comprehensible as a myth that's a way of legitimising courtesans/prostitutes to ensure respect and livelihood unlike the moralising which renders sex workers illegal, unorganised, improverished and vulnerable.
Responses on the film's website indicate what this kind of storytelling achieves: most comments are in the unthinkingly racist "what's wrong with these barbaric people" category. The simplification excuse-- turning people's lives into baby food to feed babies--doesn't hold, and a different filmmaking style is needed.
Noble intentions (sometimes called 'human interest stories') can be dangerous, for they absolve us of interrogating ourselves.
We must cast others as fallen victims so we can be seen as their noble saviours. Sometimes being the devil, or his advocate, may give us something to chew on and help us grow up.
Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
'Sexual predators': Gang of Pakistani men weep as they are jailed for total of 32 years for abusing white English girls as young as 12
By Paul Sims
6th November 2010
Daily Mail
A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.
The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.
One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years)
Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years)
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years) and Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years) were convicted of a string of sexually related offences against girls as young as 12
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years)
Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years)
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years) and Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years), prowled the streets looking for girls, attacking them in parks and in the back of their cars
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
The men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
They gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends. The girls were abused so frequently that after many months it ‘became a way of life’.
The girls, who were being monitored by social services, were eventually rescued by police and removed from their homes amid growing concerns for their safety.
Two of the men wept in the dock yesterday as they were jailed.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told them: ‘I’ve listened to the backdrop of some of you sobbing – I have to say your weeping cuts no ice with me at all.
‘You had what you regarded as your fun, now you will take your punishment.’
The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.
Ramzan was found guilty of raping the 16-year-old girl in her own home, and the other four were found guilty of sexual activity with a child.
Umar Razaq was jailed for four and a half years, while the judge gave Razwan Razaq 11 years.
Ramzan was jailed for nine years, and Hussain and Khan both received four years. All five were placed on the sex offenders register. Three further men were cleared.
The attacks took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during 2008, the court was told. Khan, a mortgage adviser who owned a BMW, described his victim as a ‘little stick’ who looked as if she had not reached puberty.
Despite this he told her he loved her and would spoil her like a ‘princess’.
During the seven-week trial the jury were told how the men drove around the streets looking for girls. The teenagers believed they were in relationships with the much older men.
On one occasion Umar Razaq tried to pull the clothes off one of the 13-year-olds.
When she resisted he pulled her hair and called her a ‘white bitch’.
On another occasion Umar introduced the girl to his brother Razwan who had sex with her in his car.
Afterwards he told her: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.’ When Ramzan was asked by police what age he was attracted to he later replied: ‘As long as they are not too young and they’re legal, that’s it.’
The authorities were alerted after some changes were noted in the behaviour of the victims and they were removed from their homes.
Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham’s children and young people’s services, said the girls were under child protection plans following family breakdowns or other issues with their behaviour.
‘When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move these girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham,’ she said.
‘It started off as a grooming exercise by the men who became friendly with the girls, gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends.
‘When they got used to being abused it just became a normal way of life for the girls. It is akin to self-harm.
‘It was very dangerous. The girls could have faced death if the men weren’t getting what they wanted.’
She said the girls’ parents bore some of the responsibility but they were in a difficult position and at a loss to do something about their children’s ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Detective Sergeant Dave Walker, who led the inquiry, said: ‘One was only 12 when she met one of the men and started smoking cannabis and drinking and coming in late at night.
‘As it escalated the defendants were becoming more aggressive to the girls.
‘We basically have a group of young men who think it is all right to abuse young girls and they just groomed them and isolated them from their families.’
All four girls are now back in mainstream education. The three youngest are taking GCSEs and the eldest is at college.
Mr Walker added: ‘We don’t know what the future holds for them but it will be a lot better than it was.’
6th November 2010
Daily Mail
A gang of Asian ‘sexual predators’ were jailed yesterday for abusing white girls as young as 12.
The five men preyed on their victims over several months and threatened them with violence if they refused their advances.
One of the men branded his victim a ‘white bitch’ when she resisted, while a second smirked: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.'
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years)
Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years)
Mohsin Khan, 21, left (jailed for four years) and Razwan Razaq, 30 (jailed for 11 years) were convicted of a string of sexually related offences against girls as young as 12
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years)
Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years)
Umar Razaq, 24, left (jailed for four and a half years) and Zafran Ramzan, 21 (jailed for nine years), prowled the streets looking for girls, attacking them in parks and in the back of their cars
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
Adil Hussain, 20, was jailed for four and a half years
The men, all British-born Pakistanis, attacked the four girls in play areas, parks and in the back of their cars, Sheffield Crown Court heard.
They gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends. The girls were abused so frequently that after many months it ‘became a way of life’.
The girls, who were being monitored by social services, were eventually rescued by police and removed from their homes amid growing concerns for their safety.
Two of the men wept in the dock yesterday as they were jailed.
Judge Peter Kelson QC told them: ‘I’ve listened to the backdrop of some of you sobbing – I have to say your weeping cuts no ice with me at all.
‘You had what you regarded as your fun, now you will take your punishment.’
The five, Umar Razaq, 24, Razwan Razaq, 30, Zafran Ramzan, 21, Adil Hussain, 20, and Mohsin Khan, 21, were found guilty of a string of sexually related offences against the girls, one aged 12, two aged 13 and one aged 16.
Ramzan was found guilty of raping the 16-year-old girl in her own home, and the other four were found guilty of sexual activity with a child.
Umar Razaq was jailed for four and a half years, while the judge gave Razwan Razaq 11 years.
Ramzan was jailed for nine years, and Hussain and Khan both received four years. All five were placed on the sex offenders register. Three further men were cleared.
The attacks took place in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, during 2008, the court was told. Khan, a mortgage adviser who owned a BMW, described his victim as a ‘little stick’ who looked as if she had not reached puberty.
Despite this he told her he loved her and would spoil her like a ‘princess’.
During the seven-week trial the jury were told how the men drove around the streets looking for girls. The teenagers believed they were in relationships with the much older men.
On one occasion Umar Razaq tried to pull the clothes off one of the 13-year-olds.
When she resisted he pulled her hair and called her a ‘white bitch’.
On another occasion Umar introduced the girl to his brother Razwan who had sex with her in his car.
Afterwards he told her: ‘I’ve used you and abused you.’ When Ramzan was asked by police what age he was attracted to he later replied: ‘As long as they are not too young and they’re legal, that’s it.’
The authorities were alerted after some changes were noted in the behaviour of the victims and they were removed from their homes.
Joyce Thacker, director of Rotherham’s children and young people’s services, said the girls were under child protection plans following family breakdowns or other issues with their behaviour.
‘When we pieced together a map of what was happening we stepped in very quickly to move these girls to a place of safety outside Rotherham,’ she said.
‘It started off as a grooming exercise by the men who became friendly with the girls, gave them gifts and introduced them to their friends.
‘When they got used to being abused it just became a normal way of life for the girls. It is akin to self-harm.
‘It was very dangerous. The girls could have faced death if the men weren’t getting what they wanted.’
She said the girls’ parents bore some of the responsibility but they were in a difficult position and at a loss to do something about their children’s ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Detective Sergeant Dave Walker, who led the inquiry, said: ‘One was only 12 when she met one of the men and started smoking cannabis and drinking and coming in late at night.
‘As it escalated the defendants were becoming more aggressive to the girls.
‘We basically have a group of young men who think it is all right to abuse young girls and they just groomed them and isolated them from their families.’
All four girls are now back in mainstream education. The three youngest are taking GCSEs and the eldest is at college.
Mr Walker added: ‘We don’t know what the future holds for them but it will be a lot better than it was.’
Thursday, October 29, 2009
racist attacks in UK
Shock CCTV of racist attacks
Sickening ... Justin and Luke Lovedale attack shopkeeper
By JOHN COLES
Published: 23 Oct 2009
The SUN (UK)
THREE racist teenagers have been publicly named and shamed for a series of sickening assaults on Asian shopkeepers.
Feral twins Luke and Justin Lovedale and yob Nicholas Gardener were all 16 when they launched their attacks amid a torrent of racist abuse.
The trio — now 17 — sneered and laughed as CCTV footage of one of the sickening assaults was shown to a court.
It showed them wrestling one shopkeeper to the floor before stamping on him as they shouted 'F***ing P***' while a terrified female shopkeeper desperately tried to fend them off.
Another clip showed them battering two shopkeepers to the ground before repeatedly stamping on them.
They admitted the attacks in Bristol this year but denied they were racially motivated — despite Luke Lovedale telling police after his arrest: "I aint beaten up no P***. F***ing **** needs to go back home."
Luke and Justin Lovedale
Hate crimes ... teen brute Justin Lovedale and his twin Luke, right
District Judge David Parsons found all three defendants guilty of racially aggravated common assault — and lifted an order banning their identification.
He warned them all to expect jail and told Bristol Magistrates' Court: "The protection of the community outweighed the teenagers' interests.
"Race hatred should be dealt with seriously by the court, and your victims deserve the protection of the court."
The convictions come days after a BBC Panorama programme showed an undercover reporter being subjected to race hate on Bristol's Southmead estate.
Gardener, who has 19 previous convictions, stormed in to Costcutter in Bedminster, Bristol, with an unidentified pal on April 5 and attacked shopkeeper Hardik Patel.
He punched him to the ground before hitting him twice more and shouted "You f****** P***".
The other youth then kicked him three times in the stomach and as they ran away Gardener shouted: "I will kill you, you f****** P***."
Two months later the Lovedale twins and Gardener — boyfriend of the brothers' sister — went to a Bargain Booze at 10.30pm to buy cigarettes and vodka.
When staff refused to serve them they launched a sickening assault on shopkeeper Ashok Selvam as a female member of staff frantically tried to beat them off with a broom handle.
They pulled his T-shirt over his head and, as one brother held him in a headlock, the other repeatedly punched him in the face.
Mr Selvam told the court that as they assaulted him they shouted "F****** Asian, f****** P***."
Less than an hour later, the three teenagers went to a nearby Costcutter and snatched a bottle of wine.
As shopkeeper Parakram Zala tried to call cops Gardener punched him in the face, shouting "We will kill you, f****** P***."
Colleague Girish Patel tried to fend of the youths, before all three began hitting him.
CCTV footage shows them continuing to punch and kick the two shopkeepers as they lay on the floor.
Mr Patel was left with such serious injuries he feared he may lose the sight in his left eye.
The three thugs showed no remorse throughout the three-day trial and sat yawning and sighing in the dock, chatting to each other and laughing.
Gardener was remanded in custody but the Lovedale twins were released on bail, on condition that they live at their home in south Bristol with a curfew of 8pm to 6am.
Detective Constable Gary Booth, of Avon and Somerset Police, said: "Racism will not be tolerated in Bristol."
The three will be sentenced on November 11.
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Exterminate the Race (of Indians) - Charles Dickens
The East offering its riches to Britannia, by Spiridione Roma
Loot: in search of the East India Company
Nick Robins, 22 - 01 - 2003
Concerns about corporate power and responsibility are as old as the corporation itself. In this account of the East India Company, the world’s first transnational corporation, Nick Robins argues that an unholy alliance between British government, military and commerce held India in slavery, reversed the flow of trade and cultural influence forever between the East and West and then sunk almost without trace under the weight of colonial guilt.
Ours is a corporate age. Yet, amid the fertile arguments on how to tame and transform today's corporations, there is a curious absence, a sense that the current era of business dominance is somehow unique. For there was a time when corporations really ruled the world, and among the commercial dinosaurs that once straddled the globe, Britain's East India Company looms large. At its height, the Company ruled over a fifth of the world's people, generated a revenue greater than the whole of Britain and commanded a private army a quarter of a million strong.
Warren Hastings'The most formidable commercial republic known to the world' Warren Hastings, 1780 (1732–1818).
Although it started out as a speculative vehicle to import precious spices from the East Indies – modern-day Indonesia – the Company grew to fame and fortune by trading with and then conquering India. And for many Indians, it was the Company's plunder that first de-industrialised their country and then provided the finance that fuelled Britain's own industrial revolution. In essence, the Honourable East India Company found India rich and left it poor.
But visit London today, where the Company was headquartered for over 250 years, and nothing is there to mark its rise and fall, its power and its crimes. Like a snake, the City seems embarrassed of an earlier skin. All that remains is a pub – the East India Arms on Fenchurch Street. Cramped, but popular with office workers, the pub stands at the centre of the Company's former commercial universe.
The absence of any memorial to the East India Company is peculiar. For this was not just any corporation. Not only was it the first major shareholder owned company, but it was also a pivot that changed the course of economic history. During its lifetime, the Company first reversed the ancient flow of wealth from West to East, and then put in place new systems of exchange and exploitation. From Roman times, Europe had always been Asia's commercial supplicant, shipping out gold and silver in return for spices, textiles and luxury goods. And for the first 150 years after its establishment by Queen Elizabeth I in 1600, the Company had to repeat this practice; there was simply nothing that England could export that the East wanted to buy.
The situation changed dramatically in the middle of the 18th century, as the Company's officials took advantage of the decline of the Mughal Empire and began to acquire the hinterland beyond its vulnerable coastal trading posts. Territorial control enabled the Company both to manipulate the terms of trade in its favour and gouge taxes from the lands it ruled. Within a few years of Clive's freak victory over the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey in 1757, the Company had managed to halt the export of bullion eastwards, creating what has poetically been called the 'unrequited trade' – using the East's own resources to pay for exports back to Europe. The impacts of this huge siphoning of wealth were immense, creating a 'misery' of 'an essentially different and infinitely more intensive kind than all Hindustan had to suffer before', in the words of a columnist writing for the New York Tribune in 1853, one Karl Marx.
'An unbounded ocean of business'
Daniel Defoe (1660–1731)
Established as a means to capture control of the pepper trade from the Dutch, the East India Company prospered as an importer of luxury goods, first textiles and then tea. From the middle of the 17th century on, the growing influx of cottons radically improved hygiene and comfort, while tea transformed the customs and daily calendar of the people. And it was in the huge five-acre warehouse complex at Cutlers Gardens that these goods were stored prior to auction at East India House. Here, over 4,000 workers sorted and guarded the Company's stocks of wondrous Indian textiles: calicoes, muslins and dungarees, ginghams, chintzes and seersuckers, taffetas, alliballlies and hum hums. Today, the Company's past at Cutlers Gardens is marked with ceramic tiles that bear a ring of words: 'silks, skins, tea, ivory, carpets, spices, feathers, cottons', but still no mention of the company itself.
This lifestyle revolution was not without opposition. For hundreds of years, India had been renowned as the workshop of the world, combining great skill with phenomenally low labour costs in textile production. As the Company's imports grew, so local manufacturers in England panicked. In 1699, things came to a head and London's silk weavers rioted, storming East India House in protest at cheap imports from India. The following year, Parliament prohibited the import of all dyed and printed cloth from the East, an act to be followed 20 years later by a complete ban on the use or wearing of all printed calicoes in England – the first of many efforts to protect the European cloth industry from Asian competition. And it was behind these protectionist barriers that England's mechanised textile industry was to grow and eventually crush India's handloom industry.
'What is England now? A sink of Indian wealth, filled by nabobs'
Horace Walpole, 1773 (1717–1797)
Standing on Leadenhall Street facing the site of East India House, it is difficult to appreciate the raw energy, envy and horror that the Company generated in 18th-century England. Today, Richard Rogers' sleek Lloyds insurance building stands on the site, but on auction days in the 18th century, the noise of 'howling and yelling' from the Sale Room could be heard through the stone walls on the street outside.
For 30 years after Robert Clive's victory at Plassey, East India House lay at the heart of both the economy and governance of Britain, a monstrous combination of trader, banker, conqueror and power broker. It was from here that the 24 Directors guided the Company's commercial and increasingly political affairs, always with an eye to the share price; when Clive captured the French outpost of Chandernagore in Bengal in 1757, stocks rose by 12%. The share price moved higher still in the 1760s as investors fed hungrily on news of the apparently endless source of wealth that Bengal would provide. The Company was rapidly extending its reach from trade to the governance of whole provinces, using the taxes raised to pay for the imports of cloth and tea back to England.
In the wake of Enron and other scandals of the dot.com 1990s, the malpractice of many of the Company's key executives is sadly familiar: embedded corruption, insider trading and appalling corporate governance. In the process, a new class of 'nabobs' was created (a corruption of the Hindi word nawab). Clive obtained almost a quarter of a million pounds in the wake of Plassey, and told a House of Commons enquiry into suspected corruption that he was 'astounded' at his own moderation at not taking more. Thomas Pitt, Governor of Madras earlier in the century, used his fortune to sustain the political careers of his grandson and great-grandson, both of whom became Prime Minister. By the 1780s, about a tenth of the seats in Parliament were held by 'nabobs'. They inspired deep bitterness among aristocrats angry at the way they bought their way into high society. A few lone voices – such as the Quaker William Tuke – also pointed to the humanitarian disaster that the Company had wrought in India.
All these forces converged to create a new movement to regulate the Company's affairs. But so powerful was the Company's grip on British politics that attempts to control its affairs could bring down governments. In the early 1780s, a Whig alliance of Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke sought to place the Company's Indian possessions under Parliamentary rule. But their efforts were crushed by an unholy pact of Crown and Company. George III first dismissed the government and then forced a general election, which the Company funded to the hilt, securing a compliant Parliament.
Yet the case for reform was overwhelming, and the new Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger – that beneficiary of his great-grandfather's time in Madras – pushed through the landmark India Act of 1784. This transferred executive management of the Company's Indian affairs to a Board of Control, answerable to Parliament. In the final 70 years of its life, the Company would become less and less an independent commercial venture and more a sub-contracted administrator for the British state, a Georgian example of a 'public–private partnership'.
'Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India'
Edmund Burke, 1783 (1729–1797)
For centuries, the City of London has ruled itself from the fine mediaeval Guildhall. It was here in 1794 that the Mayor of London made the Governor-General of Bengal, Lord Cornwallis, an Honorary Freeman of the City, awarding him a gold medal in a gilded box. Cornwallis had certainly earned this prize from Britain's merchant class. He had defeated Tipu Sultan of Mysore, extracting an eight-figure indemnity, and had just pushed through the 'permanent settlement' in Bengal, securing healthy tax revenues for the Company's shareholders. Seeking to increase the efficiency of tax collection in the Company's lands, Cornwallis cut through the complex patterns of mutual obligation that existed in the countryside and introduced an essentially English system of land tenure. At the stroke of a pen, the zamindars, a class of tax-farmers under the Mughals, were transformed into landlords. Bengal's 20 million smallholders were deprived of all hereditary rights. Two hundred years on, and after decades of land reform, the effects still live on in Bengal.
This 'permanent settlement' was simply a more systematic form of what had gone before. Just five years after the Company secured control over Bengal in 1765, revenues from the land tax had already tripled, beggaring the people. These conditions helped to turn one of Bengal's periodic droughts in 1769 into a full-blown famine. Today, the scale of the disaster inflicted on the people of Bengal is difficult to comprehend. An estimated 10 million people – or one-third of the population – died, transforming India's granary into a 'jungle inhabited only by wild beasts'. But rather than organise relief efforts to meet the needs of the starving, the Company actually increased tax collection during the famine [similar policies were applied again more than a hundred years later by the government of British India - see Present Hunger, Past Ghosts] . Many of its officials and traders privately exploited the situation; grain was seized by force from peasants and sold at inflated prices in the cities.
Even in good times the Company's exactions proved ruinous. The Company became feared for its brutal enforcement of its monopoly interests, particularly in the textile trade. Savage reprisals would be exacted against any weavers found selling cloth to other traders, and the Company was infamous for cutting off their thumbs to prevent them ever working again. In rural areas, almost two-thirds of a peasant's income would be devoured by land tax under the Company – compared with some 40% under the Mughals. In addition, punitive rates of tax were levied on essentials such as salt, cutting consumption in Bengal by half. The health impacts were cruel, increasing vulnerability to heat exhaustion and lowered resistance to cholera and other diseases, particularly amongst the poorest sections.
The Company's monopoly control over the production of opium had equally devastating consequences. Grown under Company eyes in Bengal, the opium was auctioned and then privately smuggled into China in increasing volumes. By 1828, opium sales in China were enough to pay for the entire purchase of tea, but at the cost of mass addiction, ruining millions of lives. When the Chinese tried to enforce its import ban, the British sent in the gunboats.
'The misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce'
William Bentinck, 1834
By this time, the Company's dual role as trader and governor was viewed as increasingly anachronistic – not least by the rising free trade lobby that despised its dominance. Eager to sell its cloth, in 1813, Britain's textile manufacturers forced the ending of the Company's monopoly of trade with India. The Company's commercial days were coming to a close. The final blow came in 1834 with the removal of all trading rights; its docks and warehouses (including those at Cutler Street) were sold off.
Technology, free trade and utilitarian ethics now came together in a powerful package to uplift the degraded people of India. But while the Company promoted a mission to make Indians 'useful and happy subjects', the twin pillars of Company rule remained the same: military and commercial conquest. By the 1850s, the budget for 'social uplift' was meager – while £15,000 was indeed made available for Indian schools, £5 million went to the military war chest.
The telegraph, steam ship and railway were introduced to accelerate access of British goods to Indian markets. The rapid influx of mill-made cloth shattered the village economy based on an integration of agriculture and domestic spinning, and the great textile capitals of Bengal. Between 1814 and 1835, British cotton cloth exported to India rose 51 times, while imports from India fell to a quarter. During the same period, the population of Dacca shrunk from 150,000 to 20,000. Even the Governor-General, William Bentinck, was forced to report that 'the misery hardly finds parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton-weavers are bleaching the plains of India.'
'Exterminate the Race'
Charles Dickens, 1857 (1812–1870)
Walk to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from St James' Park and you will go up 'Clive's steps', named after the statue of Robert Clive that stands without apology outside the old India Office buildings. It was here that the government transferred the administration of India in the wake of the disastrous 'mutiny' of 1857. Many explanations have been given for this uprising against Company rule in northern India, but the Company's increasing racial and administrative arrogance lay at the root.
Anglo-Indians were excluded from senior positions in the Company; non-European wives of the Company were forbidden to follow their husbands back to Britain. Verbal abuse mounted, with 'nigger' becoming a common expression for Indians. This slide into separatism also affected the Company's relations with its Indian soldiers, the sepoys. One by one, ties between the army and local communities were cut: Hindu and Muslim holy men were barred from blessing the sepoy regimental colours, and troops were stopped from participating in festival parades. As missionary presence grew, fears mounted that the Company was planning forcible conversion to Christianity.
All these sleights and apprehensions came to a head when sepoys in northern India rejected a new type of rifle cartridge, said to be greased with cow and/or pig fat. What turned a mutiny into a rebellion, however, was the Company's crass behaviour towards local rulers in Oudh, Cawnpore and Jhansi, who all turned against the Company as the soldiers rose. Symbolically, the first act of the mutineers at Meerut was to march the 36 miles to Delhi to claim the puppet Emperor Bahadur Shah as their leader.
The war, known simply as the 'Indian Mutiny', lasted for almost two years, and was characterised by extreme savagery on both sides. When the Company retook Cawnpore, where rebel troops had slaughtered European women and children, captured sepoys were made to lick the blood from the floors before being hanged. The reconquest of Delhi by the Company's troops was followed by systematic sacking, and the surviving inhabitants were turned out of its gates to starve. Bahadur's two sons and grandson were killed in cold blood, and the old Mughal was stripped of his powers and sent into exile in Rangoon.
Yet the Company that had grown in a symbiotic relationship with the Mughal Empire could not long survive its passing. The uprising itself and the massacres of Europeans had generated a ferocious bloodlust in British society. Even the mild-mannered Charles Dickens declared that 'I wish I were commander-in-chief in India [for] I would do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of the late cruelties rested.' On 1 November 1858, a proclamation was read from every military cantonment in India: the East India Company was abolished and direct rule by Queen and Parliament was introduced. Firework displays followed the proclamation
The Company's legacy was quickly erased. East India House was demolished in 1861. India was no longer ruled from a City boardroom, but from the imperial elegance of Whitehall.
'Zakhm gardab gaya, lahu na thama'
('Though the wound is hidden, the blood does not cease to flow')
Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869)
Many would argue that the Company was no worse and in some respects somewhat better than other conquerors and rulers of India. What sets the Company apart, however, was the remorseless logic of its eternal search for profit, whether through trade, through taxation or through war. The Company was not just any other ruler. As a commercial venture, it could not and did not show pity during the Bengal famine of 1769–1770. Shareholder interests came first when it dispossessed Bengal's peasantry with its 'permanent settlement' of 1794. And the principles of laissez-faire ensured that its Governor-General would note the devastation of India's weavers in the face of British imports, and then do absolutely nothing.
Many institutions have justifiably disappeared into the anonymity of history. But in a country like Britain that is so drenched in the culture of heritage, the public invisibility of the East India Company is suspicious. Perhaps a single Hindi word can now help to explain this selective memory, this very British reticence: loot.
Nick Robins and the interdisciplinary group PLATFORM have created a critical walk through the London sites and monuments of the East India Company. For more information telephone PLATFORM 00 44 (0)20 7403 3738, or e-mail platform@gn.apc.org.
original article on open democracy
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".
Cholmondeley Trial opens old colonial wounds
By Nick Wadhams
Nairobi
06 August 2007
Thomas Cholmondeley is the sole heir to one of Kenya's largest land-owning dynasties, and the scion of one of its most famous colonial settlers. For the second time in a year, he is accused of murdering a black Kenyan. As Nick Wadhams reports from Nairobi, his case has stirred fears that whites continue to receive preferential treatment in Kenya's judicial system.
Thomas Cholmondeley sits in courtroom, surrounded by prison wardens (file photo)
Thomas Cholmondeley sits in courtroom, surrounded by prison wardens (file photo)
A little over a week ago, Thomas Cholmondeley sat in a wood paneled courtroom, surrounded by curious onlookers, his family, and a host of photographers eager to snap his picture.
He listened as his lawyer, Fred Ojiambo, appealed a court ruling that he disclose his defense witnesses. And he sat silently as the judge ordered the case adjourned for nearly two months - until September 21 - while Ojiambo's appeal is considered.
And then, silently, he stood up and was escorted away, never saying a word, his expression never changing. As he walked, cameramen got all the pictures they wanted, and everyone in the packed courtroom stared.
Cholmondeley's silence and the furor that surrounds him have come to define his case ever since he allegedly shot and killed a poacher on his family's 22,000 hectare ranch north of Nairobi in May 2006.
In the months since, observers and lawyers on both sides say the case has come to be about much more than a single murder. It has been hijacked by politics and exposed some of the festering wounds in Kenyan society: resentment toward wealthy landowners from poor locals who surround them, fears that whites get special treatment, or fears that Cholmondeley is being made an example of to prove exactly the opposite.
Outside the courtroom after the latest hearing, Ojiambo said he feared exposing Cholmondeley's witnesses could put them at risk. He argued that the case had long ago stopped being about what Cholmondeley did or did not do that evening on his family's ranch.
"What seems to be the well-known constitutional right of an accused person could very well be trampled upon and would expose the accused and the witnesses of the accused to undue pressure from police," he said. "The evidence by the defense witnesses could be very important and if police know who they are there's no reason why they can't lean on them."
Cholmondeley's case touches a raw nerve partly because of his background. He is the great-grandson of the 3rd Lord Delamere, who was a central figure in the sex and booze-soaked expatriate community dubbed "Happy Valley" that sprouted up in the Kenyan highlands between the two World Wars.
It is also the second time he is accused of killing a black man on his family's ranch. Kenyans were furious when charges were dropped against Cholmondeley in May, 2005 after prosecutors determined they didn't have enough evidence against him in the shooting death of an undercover wildlife officer.
The dismissal of those charges brought people into the streets in anger. In recent weeks, lawyers for the slain officer have sought to have the charges reinstated. They claim that the public prosecutor who made the decision was acting in Cholmondeley's interests.
"It is our view that he was quite mistaken in the actions he took and that mistake was motivated by circumstances that are not legitimate," he said. " If he had applied his mind objectively and fairly, he would clearly have seen that there was absolutely no basis for him to have sought to terminate the charges. And that is the basis on which we are maintaining the argument in court that the charges should not have been dropped at all."
Cholmondeley's case is particularly potent this year. Kenya is gearing up for presidential elections in December. In the intricate world of Kenyan politics, where everything seems interconnected, an acquittal could draw Kenyans' ire against President Mwai Kibaki, who is seeking a second term.
The same judge that oversaw the previous case against Cholmondeley is again on the bench, and he too may want to send a message. Cholmondeley, who has denied murder, could face the death penalty if he is found guilty.
"It is a test case for our criminal justice system in that, if it is found to have been poorly investigated and he is acquitted, the public will still take it with a pinch of salt," said Ojwang Agina, a legal analyst with decades of experience in Kenyan courtrooms." If he's acquitted the general impression will be that whites get preferential treatment in the Kenyan judiciary."
That is exactly that attitude that Cholmondeley's lawyer, Ojiambo, bridles against. He has barred Cholmondeley's family from speaking to the media. He argues that no one, including the police, is looking at the facts - examining the possibility - as he contends, that a friend who was walking with Cholmondeley that evening fired the fatal shot.
And he argues that Kenyan politicians have purposefully inflamed tensions surrounding Cholmondeley. Last year, Kenya's assistant information minister vowed to take the law into his own hands if Cholmondeley is released.
"It is quite possible that the publicity that this case has attracted could turn out to be to his disadvantage because much of what is being recorded and much of what is being said is mainly against him," he noted. "Nobody has tried to be very fair and very balanced about reporting what actually goes on in court."
In the end, legal bureaucracy may defuse the worst of the political wrangling. Defense arguments have yet to begin, and it's now possible that Cholmondeley's trial will not be finished by the time the presidential election takes place.
Nairobi
06 August 2007
Thomas Cholmondeley is the sole heir to one of Kenya's largest land-owning dynasties, and the scion of one of its most famous colonial settlers. For the second time in a year, he is accused of murdering a black Kenyan. As Nick Wadhams reports from Nairobi, his case has stirred fears that whites continue to receive preferential treatment in Kenya's judicial system.
Thomas Cholmondeley sits in courtroom, surrounded by prison wardens (file photo)
Thomas Cholmondeley sits in courtroom, surrounded by prison wardens (file photo)
A little over a week ago, Thomas Cholmondeley sat in a wood paneled courtroom, surrounded by curious onlookers, his family, and a host of photographers eager to snap his picture.
He listened as his lawyer, Fred Ojiambo, appealed a court ruling that he disclose his defense witnesses. And he sat silently as the judge ordered the case adjourned for nearly two months - until September 21 - while Ojiambo's appeal is considered.
And then, silently, he stood up and was escorted away, never saying a word, his expression never changing. As he walked, cameramen got all the pictures they wanted, and everyone in the packed courtroom stared.
Cholmondeley's silence and the furor that surrounds him have come to define his case ever since he allegedly shot and killed a poacher on his family's 22,000 hectare ranch north of Nairobi in May 2006.
In the months since, observers and lawyers on both sides say the case has come to be about much more than a single murder. It has been hijacked by politics and exposed some of the festering wounds in Kenyan society: resentment toward wealthy landowners from poor locals who surround them, fears that whites get special treatment, or fears that Cholmondeley is being made an example of to prove exactly the opposite.
Outside the courtroom after the latest hearing, Ojiambo said he feared exposing Cholmondeley's witnesses could put them at risk. He argued that the case had long ago stopped being about what Cholmondeley did or did not do that evening on his family's ranch.
"What seems to be the well-known constitutional right of an accused person could very well be trampled upon and would expose the accused and the witnesses of the accused to undue pressure from police," he said. "The evidence by the defense witnesses could be very important and if police know who they are there's no reason why they can't lean on them."
Cholmondeley's case touches a raw nerve partly because of his background. He is the great-grandson of the 3rd Lord Delamere, who was a central figure in the sex and booze-soaked expatriate community dubbed "Happy Valley" that sprouted up in the Kenyan highlands between the two World Wars.
It is also the second time he is accused of killing a black man on his family's ranch. Kenyans were furious when charges were dropped against Cholmondeley in May, 2005 after prosecutors determined they didn't have enough evidence against him in the shooting death of an undercover wildlife officer.
The dismissal of those charges brought people into the streets in anger. In recent weeks, lawyers for the slain officer have sought to have the charges reinstated. They claim that the public prosecutor who made the decision was acting in Cholmondeley's interests.
"It is our view that he was quite mistaken in the actions he took and that mistake was motivated by circumstances that are not legitimate," he said. " If he had applied his mind objectively and fairly, he would clearly have seen that there was absolutely no basis for him to have sought to terminate the charges. And that is the basis on which we are maintaining the argument in court that the charges should not have been dropped at all."
Cholmondeley's case is particularly potent this year. Kenya is gearing up for presidential elections in December. In the intricate world of Kenyan politics, where everything seems interconnected, an acquittal could draw Kenyans' ire against President Mwai Kibaki, who is seeking a second term.
The same judge that oversaw the previous case against Cholmondeley is again on the bench, and he too may want to send a message. Cholmondeley, who has denied murder, could face the death penalty if he is found guilty.
"It is a test case for our criminal justice system in that, if it is found to have been poorly investigated and he is acquitted, the public will still take it with a pinch of salt," said Ojwang Agina, a legal analyst with decades of experience in Kenyan courtrooms." If he's acquitted the general impression will be that whites get preferential treatment in the Kenyan judiciary."
That is exactly that attitude that Cholmondeley's lawyer, Ojiambo, bridles against. He has barred Cholmondeley's family from speaking to the media. He argues that no one, including the police, is looking at the facts - examining the possibility - as he contends, that a friend who was walking with Cholmondeley that evening fired the fatal shot.
And he argues that Kenyan politicians have purposefully inflamed tensions surrounding Cholmondeley. Last year, Kenya's assistant information minister vowed to take the law into his own hands if Cholmondeley is released.
"It is quite possible that the publicity that this case has attracted could turn out to be to his disadvantage because much of what is being recorded and much of what is being said is mainly against him," he noted. "Nobody has tried to be very fair and very balanced about reporting what actually goes on in court."
In the end, legal bureaucracy may defuse the worst of the political wrangling. Defense arguments have yet to begin, and it's now possible that Cholmondeley's trial will not be finished by the time the presidential election takes place.
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."
Friday, January 16, 2009
On Free Speech
If Rushdie deserves free speech, why not Harry?
Salil Tripathi
The Spectator (UK)
Wednesday, 14th January 2009
Salil Tripathis’s article on Harry calling a Pakistani cadet ‘our little Paki friend’ has some wonderful quotes
……
And then it was discovered that the heir to the throne routinely calls a polo-playing Asian friend ‘Sooty’.
..
What’s dismayingly predictable, and yet remarkable, is the fallout. From Gordon Brown to Cabinet ministers (‘offensive’), David Cameron (‘completely unacceptable’), and Nick Clegg (‘considerably offensive’), politicians of all hues have stepped in, expressing righteous indignation. Clarence House apologised profusely, and the army added it ‘does not tolerate inappropriate behaviour in any shape or form’. Columnists have had a field day.
And then there is the Ramadhan Foundation, a spokesman for which called Harry ‘a thug’. Enjoying his 15 minutes of fame, the foundation’s director Mohammed Shafiq said: ‘I am deeply shocked and saddened at Prince Harry’s racism. It has no justification. Prince Harry as a public figure must ensure that he promotes equality and tolerance and this rant, whether today or three years ago, is sickening and he should be thoroughly ashamed of himself.’ That’s strong criticism, and disproportionate to the offence caused. So what should happen next? Maybe Harry should be given an Asbo. Or perhaps asked to express contrition by going to study at a madrasa in Pakistan. Or salute the Pakistani flag. (Ironically, ‘pak’, in Pakistan, means pure, and hence, in theory, the epithet — Paki — can be turned into a compliment. But this is not the time for such semantics, either.)
Of course, when spoken in anger, ‘Paki’ is a word spoken with hate, and meant as an insult. Many British Asians rightly feel insulted when they are abused. And none of this is to defend Harry’s words; rather, it is to underscore the principle of free speech. As Woody Allen famously said, everyone has the right to be a schmuck. [..]
[…]
And then there is the curious silence over how Asians refer to other communities. Ziauddin Sardar’s personal journey into our Asian communities, Balti Britain, reveals a term many Asians use for whites — gora. Like Paki, it can be seen as light-hearted banter, but is sometimes used derisively, for instance as a reference to simple-minded whites who can’t ‘get’ Asian complexities. And much else, often worse — although Balti Britain avoids going down those alleys. Furthermore, the terms used within Asian communities to describe blacks are offensive: kallu, for black, is perhaps the mildest one among them, and beyond the pale are epithets with which angry Hindus describe Muslims, and angry Muslims describe Hindus. Indeed, among certain Hindu communities, daughters are told they can date anybody ‘except a BMW’. That’s not the car; that’s short for Black, Muslim or White. These are the dark little secrets not widely known outside Asian communities.
[…]
Twenty years ago, Inayat Bunglawala, now media secretary of the Muslim Council of Britain, rejoiced when the Ayatollah declared the fatwa. Now he knows better; now he says it was wrong to call for the novelist’s death. []
Harry’s silly remarks on a home video are hardly the same stuff as a literary novel. But the response to one follows from the climate fostered by the culture of acquiescence which has roots in the other. This can have only two consequences. To paraphrase the late Bernard Levin, those who live in glass houses will have to undress in the dark. And those of us who wish to speak will have to watch our words. But sunlight is a good disinfectant: why not let our schmucks be schmucks, so that our Voltaires can imagine, and express their views, without fear?
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Financial Crisis in UK increases reliance on astrology!
Credit Crunch in UK increases reliance on astrology!
By Sarah Hughes
11th January 2009
Daily Mail (UK)
The world becomes an increasingly depressing place during these late winter months. Each day brings more bad news, from a crumbling property market to growing financial insecurity and turmoil in the Middle East.
In such gloomy times, where's a girl to turn for even small crumbs of comfort? The answer, apparently, is towards the growing army of astrologers, psychics and clairvoyants for a peek into what the future might hold.
Here in the UK, websites such as www.thepsychicsociety.co.uk and www.psychics.co.uk have noted increased hits since the markets began to falter in early 2008, while girls-about-town are clamouring to book appointments with psychics as part of their regular beauty treatments.
At Harrods' Urban Retreat, an hour with a professional intuitive or medium is £120, while at Selfridges you can have half an hour with a psychic sister for £80.
'I've had more clients since the credit crunch,' says astrologer Deb McBride. 'And most of them have asked about their financial situation and what the future might hold.
'In such situations I spend a lot of time telling clients not to be afraid to take risks. It's a difficult time for people and many of us are scared of the future.'
And it isn't only those with too much time on their hands who are looking to the stars for guidance. 'Most of my clients are professional women, many of whom do the sort of jobs in which you'd expect people to dismiss astrology,' says McBride.
By Sarah Hughes
11th January 2009
Daily Mail (UK)
The world becomes an increasingly depressing place during these late winter months. Each day brings more bad news, from a crumbling property market to growing financial insecurity and turmoil in the Middle East.
In such gloomy times, where's a girl to turn for even small crumbs of comfort? The answer, apparently, is towards the growing army of astrologers, psychics and clairvoyants for a peek into what the future might hold.
Here in the UK, websites such as www.thepsychicsociety.co.uk and www.psychics.co.uk have noted increased hits since the markets began to falter in early 2008, while girls-about-town are clamouring to book appointments with psychics as part of their regular beauty treatments.
At Harrods' Urban Retreat, an hour with a professional intuitive or medium is £120, while at Selfridges you can have half an hour with a psychic sister for £80.
'I've had more clients since the credit crunch,' says astrologer Deb McBride. 'And most of them have asked about their financial situation and what the future might hold.
'In such situations I spend a lot of time telling clients not to be afraid to take risks. It's a difficult time for people and many of us are scared of the future.'
And it isn't only those with too much time on their hands who are looking to the stars for guidance. 'Most of my clients are professional women, many of whom do the sort of jobs in which you'd expect people to dismiss astrology,' says McBride.
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