A bloody Rift 1 ( source : mensvogue )

Inside Kenya's historic Delamere estate, wildlife still roams free, along with the poachers who hunt the animals down. But then the property's scion shot and killed two Africans, stirring up the country's colonial past—and revealing what could be a troubled future. By Lawrence Osborne
Thomas Cholmondeley, on trial for murder, entering the Nairobi High Court.

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All trials are trials for one's life," Oscar Wilde wrote in De Profundis, "just as all sentences are sentences of death."

It was a sentiment you could see all over the face of 38-year-old Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, son of the fifth Lord Delamere and scion of Kenya's grandest white family, as he shuffled handcuffed into the Nairobi High Court on October 30, 2006. In the coming days, as the second leg of his trial, which began in late September, played out, Cholmondeley sat in a tense, cross-legged pose, as if he were following a particularly gripping cricket game relayed by radio. His zip-up ankle boots, windowpane shirts, and perfectly knotted ties cut some dash in a courtroom filled with poor Africans: "Old Etonian," the British press, from the Daily Mail to The Independent, has repeatedly reminded us in its coverage of the trial. But Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee) didn't look up as photographers massed around him. He seemed to be consumed in a long inner monologue. And during the endless hours of testimony, he mostly stared down at the floor, as if wondering what strange karma had brought him to be tried for the murder of a black Kenyan on his family's breathtaking 56,000-acre estate in the Great Rift Valley—the second such charge brought against him in little more than a year.

In the gallery, Masai tribesmen with dangling earlobes stared down at him with cool curiosity. Cholmondeley has long been famous in Kenya. But now he is also notorious. As the court rose at around 9:00, they watched the accused stand to a gigantic height, their mouths hanging open a little as his blond curls elevated above all present. Cholmondeley is six foot six, and even next to the frocked African lawyers in their fantastical blond and white wigs, he appeared vaguely extraordinary, outsize, and not at all like a killer who had been arraigned for shooting two men on his estate on two separate occasions. He looked more like a beneficent headmaster whose sole beastliness might be with a cane. If convicted, he could hang.

Court No. 4 was full and the air was chilly. Above Judge Muga Apondi's throne hung a coat of arms with Kenya's rather shopworn national motto, "Harambee"—Swahili for "Let us all pull together." Testimony was agonizingly slow. There was no stenographer and Judge Apondi had to write down everything himself. There was a jury of three "court assessors" but, under Kenyan law, the judge can ignore their findings. The first witness of the day was called. Joseph Kamau, a thin youth in awkward mitumba clothes (hand-me-downs), clambered into the witness box and began talking in a barely audible whisper. He took one look at the man accused of shooting dead his friend Robert Njoya, 37, during a May 10, 2006, poaching incursion into the Soysambu Ranch—the Delamere estate where Cholmondeley grew up amid herds of Cape buffalo and zebras, two hours northwest of Nairobi—and then he, too, looked down. Despite the notices in the corridors demanding Kimya kabisa—total silence—the court was a roar of gossip and laughter. Kamau, part-time poacher, had to speak up.

"What were you doing on the Soysambu estate?" the defense counsel, Fred Ojiambo, head of litigation at the Nairobi firm of Kaplan, Stratton, boomed at him. "You knew you were doing something illegal?" The youth hesitated. He seemed stunned to be at the center of a media circus. "I see," Ojiambo continued. "Then why didn't you walk in through the front gate? Why didn't you just say to the Delameres that you enjoyed picking up game on their land?"