What a day for Kenyan justice! Balance liberty by justifying the release of a murderer with a killer!
Fridays are fun at Kenyan prisons. The weekend is too poorly staffed by prison workers, so Fridays all sorts of fun last-minute stuff must happen.
So today two of Kenya’s most notorious inmates were released.
The last of the blue blood colonials to live in Kenya, Tom Cholmondeley (pronounced, “Chumley”), was released early after serving a manslaughter charge for killing an African who had shot an antelope on his game ranch. He was released early for “good conduct.”
This was the second African that Cholmondeley had shot for killing wild animals on his ranch. He managed to avoid conviction for the first.
And another murderer, Maina Njenga, the feared Mungiki “Chairman” (Kenyan mob), was released from bail after prosecutors were unable to proceed with charges that he had masterminded the murder of 29 people.
Mungiki Spokesman Njuguna Gitau said: “We are very happy because the chairman has been released; he is finally free after suffering for a long time.”
Twenty-one others were released with Njenga. They all skipped trial because of procedural difficulties. You see, they were all being tried in another court for other murders, so the judge decided it was double jeopardy.
Holy Moses.
I'm glad Tom is free. It was established that he had shot the poacher by mistake while aiming at the poacher's hunting dogs which had charged to attack him. The shot hit the poacher's leg (and unfortunately a main artery) and Tom ripped off his shirt and rapped it around the man's leg to try staunch the bleeding and rushed the poacher to hospital in his landrover – sadly, too late to save his life. Tom's been sitting in a maximum security prison for 3 1/2 years for protecting his family, ranch, wildife, livestock…while the trial dragged on at a glacial pace. He was well-liked by his fellow prisoners because he spoke Swahili and many of the local dialects and helped the inmates with their legal cases.
You write that he had previously shot another poacher. That is completely incorrect. He shot an off-duty KWS ranger who came to his ranch in civilian clothes and drew a handgun in the faces of Tom's staff. After many armed robberies in the neighborhood where ranchers were killed and their wives raped…Tom came across his staff being held at gun-point and reacted. He shot the gunman only to find out it was an off-duty KWS warden who never identified himself nor the reason for pulling a gun on the workers. Tom was aquitted on the grounds of self-defense.
Recently, KWS officers shot and killed a poacher leaving the Aberdares park with an impala over his shoulders which he had killed with a poison arrow. No drama about this in the newspapers, the KWS ranger was just doing his job and of course it was a black KWS ranger doing the killing of the black poacher.
Tom had licensed guns on his property to protect the wildlife, livestock and the 300 local staff on his ranch from the growing violent crime rate – wanton killings, robberies, rapes and massive poaching. He was an "honorary KWS warden".
To put him side by side with a murderous gangster who is responsible for dozens of murders – hackings, shootings, beheadings and armed robberies and extortion of shop owners and matatu owners is simply amazing….and sad.
From Jim Heck:
I have many good friends in Kenya who very much respect Tom as you do, and I respect them. And my apologies for referring to the un-uniformed KWS ranger as another poaching, that was an error. But it is as "simply amazing… and sad" that Tom would find himself in a similar situation at a time when racial tensions in the country are so fragile. This short post is certainly incomplete and very sarcastic, but like any wanting political cartoon, I essentially stand by the perceptions created… As for Mungiki, there is as much another side to this part of the story as to the one you described for Tom. Read both the Nation and Standard of the last week of October, including the Sunday sections. There is really an extremely large number of (mostly young) Kenyans who were hoping that Njenga could lead them politically out of the political abyss Kenya currently finds itself. That, too, strikes me as wrong as justifying Tom's actions, but it is illustrative that the color of the picture is often painted by the color of the beholder.
[…] Mungiki is Kenya’s mob. Born in the slums, its leaders now live in grand houses and control huge businesses. From time to time the government indicts them, or even brings them to trial, and most of the time juries find them guilty of nothing. It started as a Kikuyu-based vigilante group. But today it reins across different cities the way mobsters did in the first half of America’s 20th Century. […]