Anthony L. Hall is a descendant of the Turks & Caicos Islands, international lawyer and political consultant - headquartered in Washington DC - who publishes his own Internet Weblog at www.theipinionsjournal.com offering commentaries on current events from a Caribbean perspective

Almost a year to the day after murder charges against him for killing a Maasai ranger were summarily dismissed (due to “insufficient evidence”), Cholmondeley, 45, son of the 5th Baron Delamere, was arrested earlier this week for shooting dead yet another one.  And now Kenya’s Maasai community - still simmering with reasonable suspicion that Cholmondeley got away with murder last year - seems poised to burst into race riots that would make those that recently set all of France ablaze seem like an unruly camp fire.

After his first (reported) killing, this fortunate son claimed that he mistook the Maasai ranger he shot for an animal poacher trespassing on his daddy’s 100,000-acre farm. And, evidently, his race and pedigree entitled him to shoot first and explain later.  After all, most blacks in Nairobi were as convinced of his (premeditated) guilt as blacks in Los Angeles were of the guilt of those white officers who were acquitted after the world saw them on tape beating the life out of Rodney King.

Moreover, I suspect even Cholmondeley would admit that if a Maasai had made such an alleged mistake, he would have been charged with manslaughter (an unintentional killing of another human being) at the very least. Therefore, one can understand why the Maasai community has no confidence that Cholmondeley will be held to account for killing another ranger under eerily (perhaps arrogantly) similar circumstances.

Indeed, after this killing, the Maasai now seem mindful of the universal maxim “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice shame on me.” And, their elders - who once encouraged deference to Kenyan (English) law and the aristocratic prerogatives of (latter-day) colonists - have now vowed to lead their fellow warriors in attacks on the Cholmondeley farm (and others) to exact Mugabe-style retribution for last year’s killing, this killing and so many other racial injustices.

In fact, this second killing appears to have exacerbated the rift - in the appropriately named Rift Valley of Kenya – between few white landowners and millions of black squatters so much that the government might now feel compelled to seize farms from whites to redistribute amongst poor blacks – as MPs called for (by unanimous vote) after Cholmondeley was let go after his first killing.  (If it does, however, let’s hope the Kenyan government follows what Chavez did in Venezuela and not what Mugabe did in Zimbabwe - where seizing farms from whites and doling them out to black cronies caused the country to go from the breadbasket of Africa to a basket case of chronic starvation almost overnight….)

NOTE:  Fueling much of the Maasai resentment is their belief that all the land occupied by Kenya's white settlers and their families was stolen from them in 1904, when British began colonizing the country.