Kenya's Aching Courts

Closing arguments began today in the murder trial of Thomas Cholmondeley, the scion of the 5th Baron Delamere whose family qualifies for white royalty in Kenya. Thanks to Britain's extremely generous settler policies at the turn of the 20th cenuty, the Delameres are the owners of a massive ranch north of Nairobi and have earned a nice chunk of change in Kenya.

Tom is accused of murdering a poacher on his property two and a half years ago, and his trial has dragged on for two years. Watching him in court in handcuffs, with his friends and elderly parents looking on, it's easy to buy into the conventional wisdom that his relatives are the befuddled remnants of a era that has been overwhelmed by modern Kenya. The Kenyan government has been kind to the Delameres, and to all the other settler families. They retain their massive plots, and it's unlikely that they'd ever be banished. Yet they seem stateless. Citizens of a country that hardly bears any resemblance to the land they lived in as children, they appear British to the core; yet they would find Britain a disorienting and unwelcoming place. Their home is Kenya, but it's not the Kenya they knew. Their Kenya probably never really existed.

Tom Cholmondeley speaks Kiswahili and Maa, the language of the Maasai, but he still comes off as out of touch, to put it mildly. Too many descendants of white settlers in Kenya see themselves as the last bastion protecting Kenya's wildlife and wilderness. Without them, their thinking goes, thousands of animals and untold acres of land would be lost.

Maybe, though, Tom Cholmondeley is actually a product of the new Kenya. Cholmondeley has now been accused of killing two men. Every day the newspapers report new police killings of "suspected robbers." No trial for them either. Talk about taking the law unto themselves.

Just as striking as Tom Cholmondeley's family are the proceedings themselves. Kenya's court system was inherited from Britain; the judge, prosecutor and chief defense lawyer all wear white wigs; the walls are paneled with wood, the language is regal: "your lordship," "my esteemed friend," "if it pleases you," and so on. You would think that this British-based legal system might be good for Kenya, but like the old colonials, it seems to have had the breath squeezed out of it by anachronism and an adherence to tradition for tradition's sake.

One of those odd and incredibly inefficient laws of the land is that the judge transcribes everything said in court by hand. It is his notes that become the official proceedings of the court. Given that most judges are not schooled in shorthand, this means that things take an incredibly long time. People are asked to stop, to repeat themselves, to slow down. Things drag on and on.

Today, the defense lawyer did an interesting thing before he began his closing remarks: he offered to give the judge and the prosecution printouts of what he was about to say. That way, they could follow along as he spoke. He wouldn't have to slow down, and neither the prosecutor nor the judge would have to scribble down everything he said. And yet, the prosecutor objected to this idea, and the court agreed. Their reason: they had not been properly advised of the defense lawyer's plan. So, as a result, it took two hours for the defense lawyer to get through 20 minutes of his closing argument.

Considering that there were about 150 people in the court, that was 250 wasted man-hours. The government says it doesn't have the money to make the necessary changes, but surely it would be more cost-effective for someone to turn on a tape recorder at the start and then transcribe the whole thing at the end.

Comments

[sfberglund]

Sounds like they need something like this...

http://www.acappella.com.au

[ddd]

i'M NOT Surprised by the stateless nature of some of keny'as non black citizens. Alot of Kenyan indians are that way too. It is mainly due to the isolation they choose to live by as they grow up in kenya.

They CANNOT go back to their motherland because it will be totally foreign and difficult for them, but in kenya they are not seen fully as kenyans, as some cannot even speak the language.

I applaud Richard Leakey for schooling all his kids in kenya government schools, that way they learned swahili (un-accented) ffor that case and as such, they made "better" citizens.