HAD THE KILLING OF ROBERT NJOYA been an isolated incident, it would probably have rated only a few lines in local newspapers. But one year earlier, on April 19, 2005, Thomas Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee) had been involved in a strikingly similar confrontation. In that incident, Samson ole Sisina, a 45-year-old ranger for the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), was dispatched to Soysambu with two KWS corporals on an undercover mission. The three government officers were investigating whether members of the Soysambu staff were illegally shooting wild animals on the property and selling the meat. With ole Sisina at the wheel, the team arrived at the ranch in an unmarked Toyota Corolla station wagon with fake license plates. Posing as meat buyers from Nairobi, they talked their way past the security man inside the guardhouse, signed a register using false names, then drove ten minutes down a gravel road to the slaughterhouse, a low, white-painted stone building with a tin roof. Ole Sisina's two colleagues entered, asked about buying game meat, were told that none was being sold at the ranch, then left without finding incriminating evidence.

As the KWS employees were leaving Soysambu, however, they passed a Land Rover heading into the ranch carrying a buffalo that had been shot a few hours earlier. (Cholmondeley later explained that the buffalo was a "problem animal" that had been

Kenyan bloggers are calling the courtroom drama "KENYA’S VERSION OF THE O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL," both because of the voluminous amount of media coverage the case has generated and because of the starkly different views of Cholmondeley held by blacks and whites.

endangering his employees and insisted that the ranch staff had the right to kill it under Kenyan law; the KWS disputes that claim.) Ole Sisina turned the Toyota around and followed the Land Rover back to the slaughterhouse. Then, while he stood by an entrance, the corporals drew their weapons, burst inside, and made all 16 workers—several of whom were in the process of skinning the buffalo—move into one corner of the building.

A few moments later, according to a police report, a Soysambu driver appeared at the nearby house of Christopher Chirchir, the ranch's managing director. Chirchir was told that "people with guns . . . who looked like robbers" had invaded the property and taken the slaughterhouse staff hostage. Chirchir then phoned Cholmondeley at his home 100 yards away. A crack shot, Cholmondeley picked up his .357 Luger pistol and hurried down a path. As he approached the slaughterhouse, he later told police, ole Sisina appeared around a corner. In unclear circumstances, Cholmondeley fired four shots, instantly killing him with a bullet in the neck.

Immediately after the shooting, Rift Valley police confiscated Cholmondeley's weapon and took him into custody. The next day, 50 members of ole Sisina's family, from the Masai tribe, stormed the nearby Naivasha police station, where Cholmondeley was being held, but were driven off; hundreds of Masai also demonstrated on the highway in front of the ranch. Cholmondeley spent the next month in a filthy jail cell before Kenya's director of public prosecution, Philip Murgor, to widespread public dismay, ordered him released, citing a lack of evidence to sustain a murder charge.

After the death of Robert Njoya, Cholmondeley was not as fortunate. Arrested hours after Njoya's death, he was charged with murder 14 days later and dispatched to Kamiti prison, a maximum-security, British-built fortress outside Nairobi. Friends and family have closed ranks around him, forbidding the media from seeing him in prison, visiting the ranch, and talking to Chirchir, Carl Tundo, or those closest to him. If convicted, he could be hanged.

Cholmondeley's trial began on September 25 with a four-day round of opening arguments and testimony; some observers are predicting it could last a year or more. But even before that, Kenyan bloggers were calling the courtroom drama "Kenya's version of the O.J. Simpson trial," both because of the voluminous amount of media coverage the case has generated and because of the starkly different views of Cholmondeley held by blacks and whites. Black Kenyans tend to believe that Cholmondeley is guilty of murder, defined by Kenyan law as homicide carried out with malice aforethought. In recent months, stories have surfaced about Cholmondeley's alleged mistreatment of trespassers.

A September article in The New York Times named a woman who claims Cholmondeley slapped her after he caught her collecting firewood on the property. Nick Maes, a British journalist who spent a social week with Cholmondeley at Soysambu, described, in an article in the Sunday Times of London last June, "a moment of intense drama and fury" between the rancher and a Masai herdsman who had trespassed on the ranch to graze his cattle—a disturbing foreshadowing of the Njoya killing. "Tom hit the brakes and leapt out of the car, yelling: 'Get these fucking things off my land!'" Maes wrote. "He snatched a Masai cudgel from the trespasser and wielded it above his head." The incident ended, according to the article, when Cholmondeley threw the weapon in his pickup truck and drove off.

Cholmondeley's friends, most of them white, have proclaimed his innocence, arguing that he was defending himself in two potentially deadly confrontations in the middle of a crime wave. In the past several years, the Rift Valley has experienced a spike in violence, attributed to an influx of the poor from across rural Kenya searching for work in the booming flower industry around Lake Naivasha. Five whites have been shot dead in the past two years, most notably Joan Root, a wildlife documentary filmmaker, murdered in the bedroom of her cottage on Lake Naivasha in January 2006 by three killers wielding AK-47's, possibly in revenge for her crusade against poaching. That same month, thieves invaded Soysambu and shot the ranch's managing director, Chirchir, a black man, in the stomach with a Kalashnikov, seriously wounding him. Weeks before that, robbers had held up the ranch's dairy manager, an Indian-Kenyan, at gunpoint.

"Tom is not a mad, gun-toting idiot," I was told by one of his closest friends, who insisted on anonymity. "[The two fatal shootings were] just a terrible, terrible coincidence."

The Cholmondeley case has provided endless fodder for the tabloids—the Delamere heir has emerged as the man whom black Kenyans love to hate—but it has also raised larger questions about race, economic injustice, white privilege, and land distribution. The Delameres are the most prominent members of an elite group of white landowning families that profited from treaties forced on indigenous tribes by the British colonial government at the turn of the 20th century. Although many whites sold their land to black Kenyans decades ago, the few hundred big land owners who remain continue to live in a bubble of wealth and privilege, even as the vast majority of Kenya's indigenous population is mired in poverty.

"The Delamere family owns 50,000 acres in the Rift Valley, in a country where people fight for a quarter of an acre," I was told by Parselelo Kantai, a black Kenyan journalist who writes frequently about Rift Valley politics. "Their lives are a 1920s fantasy."