A bloody rift 3 : source : Men's Vogue

The Cholmondeley trial has gripped Kenya. The British Spectator, in a recent headline, referred to the case as "a trial that will decide the future of Kenya." It's also one that has resurrected the past. Cholmondeley's great-grandfather—the Lord Delamere affectionately known as "D" in the 1985 film version of Isak Dinesen's Out of Africa—virtually founded Kenya in the wake of the 1901 completion of the Mombasa Railway. The railroad connected the coast with the Great Rift Valley and also helped establish the highland city of Nairobi (the word means "cold water" in Masai). Great farming estates opened up around the railway, bulldozing the Masai herdsmen out of a long corridor of grazing land by treaties in 1904 and 1911. The Masai population, meanwhile, had been decimated by internal warfare and smallpox. This paved the way for a brace of baronial English families to sweep into what was then British East Africa. Along with Delamere, who settled in 1903, came fancifully named friends—Lord Hindlip, Lord Egerton of Tatton, Lord Cardross—looking for agricultural fortunes.

They rarely found them. Instead, decades of hardship, disappointment, and bankruptcy followed, as English farming methods floundered amid African diseases and crop pests. The Delameres, who had sold their ancestral estates in Cheshire to finance their African adventure, didn't find commercial luck until the thirties. This crucible created a distinct breed of men: tough, sometimes embittered entrepreneurs and frontiersmen who were always at war with the rule-loving British bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, a younger, more cosmopolitan crowd emigrated to Kenya, which had been officially established as a British colony in 1920, initiating an influx of flashier money and causing the Rift to be redubbed Happy Valley. Later immortalized by James Fox's 1982 book, White Mischief, the Happy Valley set scandalized Britain with its cocaine habits and wife-swapping. White Mischief was one of those books I devoured at school, sorry that its debauched sangfroid was consigned to the past. It was the brazen, metallic quality of its characters that fascinated me, the fierce, hard edge of their repulsive personalities: the cruelty and neurosis of rootless aristocrats who, in colonial Africa, had lost all their social bearings—or relevance.

The book itself was an investigation of the 1941 murder of the womanizing Lord Erroll, the lover of Diana Broughton, an unstable socialite prematurely married to a morbid middle-aged lord named Jock Delves Broughton. The cuckolded Broughton probably had Erroll shot in revenge on a lonely road outside Nairobi as the self-confessed serial adulterer—who frequently boasted of his marriage-busting prowess—drove home from a night of dancing. Broughton committed suicide in a Liverpool hotel in 1942, and, in 1955, Diana Broughton married Thomas Delamere—Cholmondeley's grandfather. And just as Broughton had been famously acquitted, so Cholmondeley was exonerated of killing Sisina in 2005. Agence France-Presse talked ominously of "colonial-era resentments" being revived. The Times of London ran a piece called "Trigger-Happy Valley." It was guilt by association.

The Cholmondeley case has been widely portrayed as a flashpoint in a racial struggle for land and power, an echo of colonial injustice. "We now know why Robert Mugabe acted the way he did," Kenyan deputy immigration minister Ananias Mwaboza is reported to have said before the Njoya trial began, referring to the president of Zimbabwe's notorious "land reform" campaign to kick whites off their ill-won estates. "Which independence are we talking about if the settlers continue occupying more than half of our lands?" Mwaboza's rhetoric aside, Kenya is quite different from Zimbabwe.