KENYA: A slew of anti-colonial books and lawsuits dating from the time of British rule in Kenya is unleashing a wave of hostility towards white settler families, according to one of the country's most prominent aristocratic landowners.
In a rare interview with a Kenyan newspaper, Andrew Cole, the seventh Earl of Enniskillen, said the media had become obsessed with raking over the "sins" of British east Africa's former rulers.
"The widespread media coverage of anything anti-colonial - from books, legal proceedings, demand for dubious rights and often inaccurate articles by uninformed writers - is creating ill-will towards Europeans in general, particularly among the young Kenyans who have no other source of historical knowledge," he told the Sunday Standard newspaper.
His comments follow a year of increasing hostility towards wealthy white landowners descended from the Happy Valley set.
It began last summer when Masai herdsmen staged a series of violent land invasions. They led cattle on to white-owned ranches in the Laikipia region, part of their ancestral homelands.
The Masai are demanding the return of land which they claim to have leased to the British administration in 1904. They claim the lease was due to run for only 100 years.
Meanwhile, veterans of the Mau Mau rising are preparing a multimillion-pound lawsuit which they hope to bring against the British government, claiming human rights abuses by the former colonial power.
Their case has been bolstered by the recent publication of two books detailing allegations of torture and rape by British security forces and their Kenyan allies during the Mau Mau emergency of the 1950s.
Earlier this year, Tom Cholmondeley, sole heir to the sixth Lord Delamere, was arrested and charged with the murder of a Masai game warden on his land. However, the attorney general quashed the charge within weeks.
The decision sparked a wave of angry protests by Masai. They claimed that his position as a wealthy white Kenyan had won him early release, while black Kenyans can spend years languishing on remand.
Mr Cholmondeley later blamed the protests on hostile reporting of his case in the local press. These high-profile examples are concentrating resentment on a small community of white residents, who often work hard behind the scenes to create employment, according to Lord Enniskillen.
"I abhor branding all whites as colonial oppressors just as much as I abhor branding all Masai as primitive or all Kikuyus as dishonest or all Kenyan politicians as corrupt," said Lord Enniskillen, a former officer in the Irish Guards. His family remains among the most prominent of the white settlers who arrived in what was then British east Africa during the late 19th century.
The Kenya Human Rights Commission is the driving force behind many of the allegations levelled at the colonial administration. It has dossiers of evidence from hundreds of Mau Mau veterans claiming to have been tortured by colonial security forces during the run-up to independence in 1963.
However, Steve Ouma, its deputy director, said there was no anti-white agenda.
"It doesn't matter if this has been committed by a black person, a white person, a Kikuyu or Luhya," he said. "It's just that for a society to have a new beginning it must deal with its past atrocities."