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A lost world

by Chris McGreal

31 October 2006 08:43

Tom Cholmondeley appears in court charged with killing a black poacher (Photograph: AP)

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 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 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 1980s 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.

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, was on to her third marriage by the time she wed the Fourth Baron Delamere, Thomas Cholmondeley, during World War II. When they divorced in 1955, Cholmondeley went on to marry Diana Caldwell, the by-then famous widow of 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). After he left the army in 1948 he moved to Kenya, where the family bought him an 800-acre farm.

A couple of years after that, Cunningham-Reid was successful enough to buy a 6 000-acre ranch. 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 £22-million available to buy out farmers in the Rift Valley. I was the first in the queue.”

He used the money to buy a mansion in Karen. “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 the 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 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 is 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 clients to Tanzania.

Gaymer 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 two million 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.” -- © Guardian News & Media Ltd 2006

http://www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=288181&area=/insight/insight__international/

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