brad brace contemporary culture scrapbook

Fifty thousand Muslim pilgrims are expected in Lamu town for the Maulidi celebrations marking the birth of Prophet Mohammed.

Cultural, sporting and religious activities have been lined up during the celebrations which start on Monday and run up to Friday when the pilgrims will converge at the Riyadha Mosque for a procession to the grave of fete founder Habib Swaleh.

The National Museums of Kenya has lined up a number of events which kick off with lectures at the Lamu Fort to be followed by bao games for men and henna painting and design for women.

Museums official Ahmed Yassin said other events sponsored by Celtel Kenya to the tune of Sh1.1 million included donkey and dhow races, swimming and tug of war.

“This is the first time we have a major sponsor. The cash prizes for will be much bigger,” he said.

Releasing the programme to the media, Dr Yassin confirmed that Heritage minister Suleiman Shakombo would open the Islamic calligraphic exhibition and ethnographic storage at the Lamu Fort.

At the Riyadha Mosque where the religious activities, including recitation of the Holy Quran, event organisers said there would be a free medical camp and traditional dances.

Corruption drains Africa of over $140bn, the Chairman of the Economic and
Financial Crimes Commission, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, has said. Ribadu, who disclosed this at the convocation lecture of the University of Abuja on Friday, said that
the African Union released the startling figure recently. The theme of the
lecture was ”The Anti-corruption crusade: Why, how and the journey so far.‘ He
said that there was the likelihood that greater part of the money, which
represented about 25 per cent of the continents official Gross Domestic
Product, was stolen from Nigeria.

The EFCC boss also said that the African Development Bank indices had shown that
corruption was responsible for the loss of approximately 50 per cent of tax
revenue. He continued, ‘Some eight years ago, the Central Bank (of Nigeria)
told us that N200bn was lost in depositors— savings under a regime we now call
the failed bank regime. ‘This incidence was an extravagance act of the most
wicked proportion and a savage violation of thousand of small income family
savings by a gang of elite bank robbers who chose the media of the banking halls
to rip off people of their hard earned income.‘

He said that there was also a recent case of N18bn that was recovered from a
head of the law enforcement institution in the country. ‘All this, fantastic as
they are, pales into insignificance when we recall the mind-bogging example of
the much reported brazen profligacy of our ruling elite.‘ I am talking here of
the 220bn pounds (about $500 billion) of development assistance that has been
stolen from this country since independence to date by past leaders of our
country,‘ he said. He challenged participants at the lecture to consider
development infrastructure the stolen amount would have helped the country to
finance. ‘If we do not know how to compute the concrete cost of this loot, we
can at least relate it with the fact that it represents six times the value in
money that went into rebuilding Europe via the famous Marshal Plan at the end of
the second World War,‘ he said.

NAIROBI – British troops in Kenya shot dead a rare white rhino after it charged them while they were on night-time training, officials said on Monday.

“On the night of November 8 a British patrol on a training exercise had a close encounter with a rhino. When it charged towards them they opened fire and sadly it was fatally wounded,” said a spokeswoman at the British High Commission.

An official with the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) said the four soldiers strayed into a rhino sanctuary on a ranch. The British spokeswoman denied media reports the troops were lost.

She and the KWS official said both their organisations had launched enquiries into the shooting. KWS says there are only 235 white rhinos in Kenya where the British army has carried out training operations for decades.

White rhinos are targeted by poachers for their horns. These fetch high prices in Yemen, where they are made into dagger handles, and in the Far East, where they are coveted for their supposed medicinal qualities.

Nairobi

Faced with glaring evidence of massive Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education (KCSE) examination leakage, top officials of the examining body returned to their offices on a weekend to re-assure furious parents and teachers that the exam was still credible.

There were angry reactions from across the country, with all stakeholders calling for the overhaul of the Kenya National Examinations Council (KNEC).

And police in Kilifi, the epicentre of the leakage, moved swiftly and arrested 10 people, including a secondary school principal and five candidates suspected of playing a key role in the exams leakage scandal .

Deputy officer commanding Kilifi police division, Mr Nehemia Lang’at, confirmed his officers had arrested the principal and the candidates from the same school.

Reporters bought English and Physics papers

Lang’at said the police were also holding a manager and three employees of a local bureau in Kilifi, where some papers of the leaked examinations were impounded.

In a faxed statement KNEC Secretary Mr Paul M Wasanga said police, the Ministry of Education and KNEC had commenced investigations and the culprits, if convicted, would face imprisonment, fines or both.

“We wish to inform the public that any person who gains access to the examinations material and knowingly reveals the contents, whether orally or in writing shall be guilty of an offence and is liable to imprisonment or fine or both”, said Wasanga.

KNEC did not deny exclusive reports by our sister publication,The Saturday Standard, in which we detailed how a cartel of greedy people was selling KCSE examinations papers at prices ranging between Sh5,000 and Sh15,000.

Our reporters bought English and Physics examination papers hours before they were given to the candidates. They were assured that they could get any other paper so long as they had the money.

Papers have been on sale since exams started

Wasanga did not explain how the examination papers had been sneaked out of the 567 strong rooms countrywide, which are guarded around the clock.

The examinations, we established, are usually leaked long before they are distributed to the countryside. Sources indicate that the examinations are usually leaked by examiners during the proofreading stage.

Although Wasanga said the leaked examination papers were sold on Thursday, our investigations reveal that the KCSE papers have been on sale since the exams started.

Lang’at said the arrest of the 10 people and the ongoing crackdown would assist police to arrest all suspects behind the circulation and selling of the examination papers.

He said police officers on Friday stormed the secondary school and carried checks on the students who were sitting the chemistry theory paper.

The officers found one student had a paper with hand written answers .

Another student was arrested after he attempted to swallow a paper which also had answers for the same paper.

IFO, Kenya – Somalis are fleeing their homeland in the greatest numbers in years as Islamic militants seize control of more territory and edge closer to a military showdown with the weak interim government.

The new arrivals say Islamist militias are imposing harsh laws within hours of taking over towns, including banning the popular narcotic plant khat, a mainstay of Somali commerce. Refugees said the militias had banned the sale of charcoal for environmental reasons and curtailed key transport routes north to Mogadishu and south to Kenya.

“They came and said they were in control of business and I had to stop selling immediately,” said Mohammed Hussein Abdi, a khat dealer in the southern port of Kismayo, which the Islamists seized last month.

To drive home the point, Abdi said, militiamen tied his hands and beat him for several minutes with sticks and the butts of their guns.

Islam forbids the use of narcotics, but some strict Islamist groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan and Hezbollah in Lebanon, have tolerated and even profited from sales of drugs to non-Muslims.

As many as 14,000 Somalis have crossed into neighboring Kenya since September, according to United Nations estimates. That brings the total for the year to 34,000, the biggest influx since the early 1990s, when the collapse of Mohammed Siad Barre’s dictatorship opened a decade and a half of anarchy that made the Horn of Africa country the world’s best-known failed state.

The new arrivals now huddle alongside 130,000 other Somalis in refugee camps that sprawl across the sandy scrubland of eastern Kenya. Thousands more are expected to arrive in the coming weeks, and aid agencies are concerned about high rates of malnutrition and the threat of diseases from over the border, where there’s no functioning health-care system.

Last week, a 3-year-old Somali girl in the camps was diagnosed with polio, the first case of the crippling disease in Kenya in more than two decades. The U.N. has appealed for $35 million in emergency aid to handle the influx.

The rise of the Islamists, who in June took control of Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, has spawned fears that a hard-line regime akin to the Taliban in Afghanistan is taking root in the Horn of Africa, where militants loyal to al-Qaida are thought to operate.

The threat of civil war has grown in recent days as the Islamists’ powerful militias advance on the government’s base of power in the provincial town of Baidoa, 150 miles northwest of Mogadishu. On Monday, the Islamists took control of a strategic town 30 miles outside Baidoa when the government withdrew its troops.

Fears of a broader regional conflict also have mounted. The Islamists declared jihad against neighboring Ethiopia for sending troops to back the government. Regional analysts say Iran, Libya and Saudi Arabia are aiding the Islamists.

The scene at the main border checkpoint about six miles inside Kenya has been chaotic at times, the limited number of relief workers far outmatched by the numbers of refugees, who must register before they’re sent to one of three camps around the market town of Dadaab.

Refugees often wait several days in the camps to receive plastic sheets, food and other assistance. The region is on the equator, and as the short spring rains fall many new refugees are spending nights in the open or huddled with other families under wobbly wooden shelters covered by thin swatches of fabric.

Last week, Kenya’s government ordered a temporary halt to the arrivals so that screening procedures could be improved after U.N. officials expressed concern that as many as 30 percent of the new arrivals were “recyclers,” refugees coming from the camps to reregister in order to receive more aid.

Despite the conditions, refugees said they had no choice but to flee.

“There will be civil war,” said Habiba Abdi Hassan, 70, who left Kismayo after the Islamist takeover.

Like many Somalis who clung to life in their collapsed society, Hassan was a hardy merchant who’d evolved a way to survive. For 20 years she sold rice, sugar and other staples, paying off a succession of warlords to keep her small business afloat.

She refused to leave, even after her husband and son were killed three years ago in a shootout between rival warlords. But now the threat of war is too great, she said.

She and other former residents of Kismayo huddled in Kenya’s Ifo refugee camp said their livelihoods would have suffered under Islamist rule. In some parts of Somalia, hard-line clerics have outlawed business during prayer times, including much of the holy month of Ramadan.

Many of the refugees are Somali Bantus, descendants of black Africans who spent decades as slaves and whom Arab clans long have persecuted.

“They discriminate against us,” said Mohammed Salad Aden, 32, a farmer from outside Kismayo. “They say you’re not a pure Somali.”

Of all the upper-crust British families who came to this country and never left, one is more famous than them all: the Delameres.

They had the most glamorous parties, the most fabled pedigree (going back to William the Conqueror, they said) and, not insignificantly, the most stunning land.

Soysambu Ranch is the jewel in their crown, 50,000 acres teeming with giraffe and zebra in the heart of Africa’s great Rift Valley. The scenery is straight off a postcard — the golden pastures, the sculptured hills, the sense of getting so much of the world in one big gulp.

But Thomas Cholmondeley, the cravat-wearing scion of the family, who until recently was on track to be the sixth Baron of Delamere, is no longer here. He is in Kamiti maximum security prison in Nairobi, the rare white face behind bars in this country, awaiting trial in a murder case that is dividing Kenya.

Because in little more than a year, he has shot and killed two black Kenyans on his ranch.

The first was an undercover wildlife ranger who was arresting some of Mr. Cholmondeley’s workers suspected of poaching. Claiming self-defense, Mr. Cholmondeley was cleared without trial.

The second was a poacher himself, with an antelope slung over his back. Mr. Cholmondeley says that the poacher’s dogs attacked and, again, that he fired in self-defense.

White farmers in Kenya, an increasingly beleaguered and endangered species, are deeply sympathetic. They say that crime is out of control and the police are useless, and that the bush, however beautiful, is awash with guns.

Certainly, there has been an explosion of violence in the Rift Valley, with gangs surging in from Nairobi and tensions peaking between the dirt-poor farm workers and the handful of white Kenyans still living on vast tracts of land. Joan Root, a famed conservationist, was gunned down in her bedroom in January. Other whites have been killed in holdups. One farmer said he now slept with an elephant gun by his side.

During colonial times this area, 50 miles northwest of Nairobi, was famed among whites for its hedonistic lifestyle and called Happy Valley. Now, it seems to be under siege.

But black Kenyans see Mr. Cholmondeley’s situation differently, and worry that the days of white privilege may not be over. His absolution in the first case deepened their cynicism about an already suspect judiciary and ignited large protests. Some people even threatened to invade white farms.

The case seems to be hitting many of Kenya’s sore spots — land, violence, corruption, the illegal game trade and, of course, race.

“It’s very sexy when a white man gets in trouble,” said Maina Kiai, chairman of Kenya’s human rights commission. “We still have this inferiority complex and get a thrill out of seeing a white man in a powerless position.”

And this is not just any white man.

The Hon. Thomas Patrick Gilbert Cholmondeley, 38, is a 6-foot-6, raised-in-the-bush anachronism, who has a scar running from his ankle to hip from when he was attacked by a buffalo several years ago and whose great-grandfather made it fashionable for British aristocrats to move to Africa.

That settler, Hugh Cholmondeley (pronounced CHUM-lee), the third Baron of Delamere, took chunks of the Rift Valley from local (and illiterate) Masai tribesmen in the early 1900’s, turning the area into a playground for whites. He rode horses through bars and shot chandeliers at fancy hotels and went on to become a leading dairy farmer and politician. Nairobi’s main street was named Delamere Avenue until independence in 1963.

Thomas was born five years later, grew up on Soysambu (the name means “place of red rock” in the Masai language) and eventually was shipped off to Eton. By then, a Masai named Samson ole Sisina was fixing trucks for Kenya’s tourism board, hoping to become a wildlife ranger. Robert Njoya, a poor Kikuyu tribesman, had dropped out of school to haul rock, and to poach game. The men lived near Naivasha, a once sleepy town going through serious growing pains.

Flower farms were sprouting up along Lake Naivasha, drawing thousands of low-paid temporary workers. Many lived in squatter camps, including one named Manera built on Delamere land. The people there call Mr. Cholmondeley “the honorable killer” and say he has terrorized them for years.

Mary Njeri, 51, said Mr. Cholmondeley caught her collecting firewood on his property two years ago and slapped her until she saw stars. Peter Kiragu, 12, said he was playing soccer on Delamere property four years ago when Mr. Cholmondeley snatched him by the back of his shirt, threw him into a truck and kept him locked up for hours.

Both episodes were reported to the police but charges were never pursued. “The Delameres used to be untouchable,” said Gideon Kibunjah, a Kenya police spokesman. “But that’s changed now.”

The Thomas Cholmondeley described by white friends is much different: charming, genuine, a good listener, a father involved with his two sons, the type of rancher to speak Swahili to his workers and look them in the eye.

The director of his family’s dairy and beef ranches, he is a proponent of wildlife and his efforts have increased the numbers of giraffes, zebras, pelicans and flamingoes in the area. One reason he was licensed to carry a gun was to protect that game.

“Tom loves that land,” said Dodo Cunningham-Reid, a friend who runs an exclusive bed-and-breakfast in Naivasha.

Fred Ojiambo, Mr. Cholmondeley’s lawyer, said his client had been unfairly demonized. He did not want to discuss details, but said: “It’s very difficult to only look at this case as the firing of a gun. This happened in a context.”

Last year, Kenya wildlife officials said, workers at Soysambu were suspected of poaching and dealing in illegal “bush meat” from poached animals. On April 19, 2005, Mr. Sisina, who had been promoted from mechanic to ranger, and two other rangers drove onto the ranch, undercover, and caught workers skinning a buffalo.

Just as Mr. Sisina and his colleagues began to make arrests, Mr. Cholmondeley arrived. He saw strangers in street clothes holding his staff at gunpoint and shot Mr. Sisina.

After Mr. Cholmondeley was arrested, he told the police, “I am most bitterly remorseful at the enormity of my mistake.” He said he thought Mr. Sisina was a robber.

The case cracked open a rift between police officials pushing for a murder trial and prosecutors who believed the claim of self-defense. And the Masai were watching.

The Masai are famed for their red ochre war paint and traditional pastoralist ways. Most are dirt poor, but Mr. Sisina was different. He had moved from a dung hut to a respectable government job.

When the charges were abruptly dropped a month later — a picture of Mr. Cholmondeley flashing thumbs-up ran on the front page of Kenya’s leading newspaper — the Masai detonated, protesting outside the attorney general’s office and threatening to storm Soysambu.

“The Delameres were the ones who stole our land in the first place,” said William ole Ntimama, a Masai member of Parliament. “And now look at us. We’ve become part of the wildlife.”

Angry Masai marched onto white farms two years ago and tried to reclaim ancestral land. But Kenya is no Zimbabwe, where the government instigated such seizures. Kenyan police officers in riot gear cleared out the Masai.

Mr. Sisina left behind eight children, and his widow, Seenoi, now relies on handouts to feed them. Mr. Cholmondeley returned to the family business, Delamere Estates Ltd., and to patrolling Soysambu with guns.

On May 10 this year, Mr. Njoya, the Kikuyu tribesman, went looking for food for his wife, Sarah, and their four children. He took two friends and six dogs and they found a dead antelope in a trap they had laid on Soysambu land.

That evening Mr. Cholmondeley, carrying a colonial-era rifle, was out scouting a location for a house.

What happened next is not clear. Mr. Cholmondeley said the hunters turned the dogs on him, and he shot two, accidentally hitting Mr. Njoya. Mr. Njoya’s friends said they never even saw Mr. Cholmondeley.

“We just heard shots coming out of the bush,” said Peter Gichuhi, who said he was standing next to Mr. Njoya.

Mr. Njoya bled to death within minutes.

“Oh no, not again!” was the headline this time, and the protests were extensive. Many black Kenyans boycotted Delamere products, calling the family’s yogurt, marketed with the distinctive golden crown, “blood yogurt.”

This time, prosecutors filed murder charges. The trial is set for Sept. 25. If convicted, Mr. Cholmondeley could be hanged.

The last time a white man was at the center of such a sensational case in Kenya was in 1980, when Frank Sundstrom, an American sailor, killed a prostitute in Mombasa. Mr. Sundstrom pleaded guilty to manslaughter, was fined $70 and let go.

A spate of land invasion has hit Mombasa District following a presidential declaration that absentee landlords would lose their land to squatters.

And as hundreds of settlers subdivided about 100 acres of land in the north Coast at the weekend, landlords condemned the move.

Squatters armed with machetes were invading more land by Sunday, which they claimed had been idle for years.

“We have decided to take up this land because it cannot remain idle for ever while there are landless people. It has remained idle since 1952 when I settled here,” said a squatter, Mr Matano Sudi, 70.

Squatter families could be seen clearing bushes for settlement.

On his first leg of Coast tour last month, President Kibaki announced that land belonging to absentee landlords would be taken up and allocated to the landless.

The President also dared absentee landlords to sue the Government for the action. But landlords complained that the Government had failed to protect their property.

Mr Mohamed Rashid Riyami, a landowner, protested at the invasion of his more than 16 acres of land in Kisauni, which he said was inherited from his father.

He showed The Standard a title deed issued under Colony and Protectorate Ordinance of 1908. Mr Ali Riyami, who owns more than 10 acres in Kisauni, said squatters invaded his land on Friday and had shared it out.

He blamed politicians for inciting residents to take over private land and warned that such a move could degenerate into anarchy.

Ali said as a Kenyan he has a right to own property anywhere in the country, which must be protected by the State.

Another landowner, Mr Miraj Ali, said squatters killed his cows and destroyed crops on his 10-acre land on Friday. Miraj said the invaders brought down cowsheds and disconnected electricity and water.

Mombasa District Commissioner, Mr Mohamed Maalim, confirmed the invasion and promised that the Government would evict the squatters.

He said people who proved land ownership would be protected. The DC warned the squatters that stern action would be taken against those found to have invaded and destroyed private property.

“We are also aware that some of the people invading land are not genuine squatters,” Maalim added.

The Government has promised to settle the land problem by the end of this year. In June, President Kibaki directed that squatters be issued with title deeds by December.

Acting Lands minister, Prof Kivutha Kibwana, has said more than 30,000 title deeds have been processed and would be issued to squatters.