Whites in Kenya

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After the end of the British colonial rule in 1963, realizing that a minority rule in the way of the Rhodesian and South African apartheit régimes was no longer possible after the Mau-Mau uprising, the majority of white settlers departed within one decade, under a willing-buyer-willing-seller scheme, which was largely financed by (secret) British subsidies. The remaining small minority of whites has mostly taken Kenyan citizenship. Economically, virtually all belong to upper middle and upper class.

The recent homicide case of the white Kenyan dairy and livestock farmer and game rancher Thomas Cholmondeley, a descendant of British aristocrats, has brought into question the class bias of the judicial system of the Commonwealth of Nations country and the resentment of many Kenyans toward what is perceived as white privilege. The book and movie White Mischief told the tale involving an earlier member of the Cholmondeley family, the fourth Baron Delamere who was married to Diana Broughton, whose lover was murdered in Nairobi in the 1940s. Her first husband was tried and acquitted. See also Happy Valley set.

The whites of Kenya formerly clustered in the country's highland region, the so-called "White Highlands", where the Cholmondeley (Delamere) family, as one of the few remaining white landowners, still owns over 100,000 acres (400 km²) of farmland in the Rift Valley. Nowadays, only a small minority of them still are landowners (livestock and game ranchers, horticulturists and farmers), whereas the majority work in the tertiary sector: in finance, import, air transport, hospitality. Apart from isolated individualists such as Richard Leakey, Kenyan whites have virtually completely retreated from Kenyan politics, and are no longer represented in public service and parastatals, from which the last remaining leftover staff from colonial times retired in the 1970s.

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