We have decided to bring you this story from the Standard Newspaper, Kenya. The story was carried on the standard on the 13th of may 2006.
The trial of Mr Cholmondeley is on in Kenya where he is being tried for killing a man. Cholmondeley had earlier killed another man in the same style and was lucky not to stand trial.
This time around, the case is very serious.
The story reminds us Africans about Karen Blixen the Danish woman who lived in Kenya. The story reveals alot of things that the Kenyans never knew of a woman they thought was great, yet she was a racist inside her skin. She had top love for animals than she had for her black African cook. Read the story and analyse if you wish!
Cholmondeley: we live in a white man’s world
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By Barrack Muluka
This modern day English settler in Kenya, Mr Thomas Cholmondeley, reminds you of the tragic story of Monsieur Mersault in Algeria’s, Albert Camus’ story, L’Etranger.
You are reminded of the place where Monsieur Mersault, a White French man, having just shot dead an Arab gentleman on the Mediterranean beaches, goes on to relate the subsequent few moments, “I knew that I had destroyed the equilibrium of the day, the placid silence of the beach, where I had once been happy. Then I shot four more times into the dead body. I watched as the bullets lodged themselves into the dead flesh.”
Tom has done it again. About this time last year he shot a game warden on his sprawling one hundred thousand acre farm in Kenya’s former White Highlands. The Attorney General, Amos Wako, moved with exemplary speed and spice to discontinue legal proceedings against Tom. And now Tom has killed another man. He has crowned the killing with two dead dogs.
The space I write in is not the place to judge Tom. The courts are there and, hopefully, they will try him. But if this may not be the place to try him, it is at least the place to ask some disturbing questions about this gentleman. Are there similarities of a psychoanalytical nature between the lodging of four bullets into a dead man on the salubrious Mediterranean beaches, on the one hand, and the killing of a man and his two dogs by a man who killed another man a year ago? Is it possible that there could be guns out there in the hands of misanthropes and assorted social monsters?
That aside, I am reminded of the European lady who once wrote these words, “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” The truth of the matter is that this farm — the Karen Blixen farm — was a mammoth swathe of Kenyan land, stretching over hundreds of thousands of prime acres. It was on this farm that she thought of Africans in the same idiom as she thought of beasts. For, this regal lady wrote thus of the people of Kenya, “The discovery of the dark races was to me a magnificent enlargement of all my world. If a person with an inborn sympathy for animals had grown up in a milieu where there were no animals, and had come into contact with animals late in life, their case might have been similar to mine.”
But that was not all. She went on to write, “It was not easy to know the Natives. They were quick of hearing, and evanescent; if you frightened them, they could withdraw into a world of their own, in a second, like the wild animals which at an abrupt movement from you are gone.” Sometimes she would also contradict herself, in terms that lacked any redeeming value, “When you have caught the rhythm of Africa, you find it is the same in all her music. What I learned from the game of the country, was useful in my dealings with the Native people.”
And how does she deal with “the Native people”? Take the case of her houseboy and cook whom she lavishes with praise, “He had a great memory for recipes. Nothing, I thought, could be more mysterious than this natural instinct in a savage for our culinary art.” And of the savage’s own food she says, “He stuck to the maize cobs of his fathers. Here even his intelligence sometimes failed him, and he came and offered me a Kikuyu delicacy — a roasted potato or lump of sheep’s fat — even as a civilized dog that has lived for a long time with people will place a bone on the floor before you, as a present.”
It was not that Karen Blixen, for whom a whole estate in up market Nairobi has been named, hated animals as such. Is this not how she writes of some wild beast: “In the Ngong Forest, I have also seen the Giant Forest Hogg, a rare person to meet. He came suddenly past me, with his wife and three young pigs, the whole family looking like uniform….”? The picture should be fairly clear — her cook is a “civilized dog” that has learnt to live with people. The forest hog is “a person” with a “wife and family”.
You can read about this and much more in the story Out of Africa, by Isak Dinisen, aka Karen Blixen, if you have the patience. Or you can watch the world famous film by the same name. Meanwhile the Americans are busy sponsoring the Somali to slaughter one another like goats. The dinosaur called the United Nations has elected to play the coward, in their usual fashion. First they do not recognise the ongoing genocide in Somalia for what it is. Second, they can only say it has been sponsored by a “foreign government”. Why can’t Kofi Anan call a spade by its rightful name for once?
At any rate, the UN has degenerated into a bastion of corruption, nepotism, cronyism, cowardice and amnesia. Even as the Americans sponsor Somalis to decimate themselves while at the same time they rehearse to begin pounding Iran Iraq-style, the UN has forgotten that the war in Iraq is an illegal war. It is a war being fought in defiance of the Security Council of the UN. One wonders why the US would move motions before the UN on Somalia and on Sudan, seeing that they have no respect for this dead institution.
Nobody wants to whip up race related sentiments but, come on, what’s wrong with facing the facts squarely in the eye and admitting that we live in the white man’s world?
African Press International (API) 