Nairobi, Kenya – Justice Muga Apondi kept a stern expression, never shifting in his fabulous black-and-red gown. In the sweltering Chamber No. 1 of Nairobi’s High Court, packed with foreign correspondents and the local press, only a few beads of sweat materialized on Apondi’s brow, just beneath the stitched edge of his white horsehair wig.

If not for the modern-day Kenyans filling the roles, one might confuse the scene with something out of Dickens. In post-colonial Kenya, advocates and judges still don the attire of their English progenitors. Curtseying and bowing before the bench is de rigueur when entering or exiting. Lawyers preen over their accents, getting the vowels of the Queen’s English just so. And there is an almost Victorian obsequiousness in the air. Attorneys do not “move for a dismissal,” they “pray your Lordship’s weighty consideration in this matter.”

The judiciary has been all but untouched by reform in the 46 years since independence from Britain. And so there was a dose of irony, a certain otherworldliness, to the murder trial of Tom Cholmondeley, a white Kenyan and aristocrat whose ancestors did more than anyone to forge the Kenya Colony and Protectorate in the image of Britain.

Two weeks ago, Justice Apondi brought to an end Cholmondeley’s three-year legal saga — the trial of the century as far as Kenyans were concerned. The judge stated his belief that “the process has humbled the accused person” and, therefore, Apondi said he wished “to impose only a light sentence” on Cholmondeley: eight months, on a reduced charge of manslaughter.

And then, a great commotion. A group of Masai, some in traditional dress and others in well-worn suits, stood up in the courtroom. The gallery came alive with placards. Wapi Haki Yetu? (“Where is our justice?”) one read. A man pointed at Cholmondeley as he was led from the courtroom, screaming “killer!” Outside, a lawyer lamented to the press, “Only because it is a white person is he getting eight months, and being given manslaughter and not murder. A black man who steals a chicken would get more.”

On May 10, 2006 — though from the anachronistic particulars it could be 50 years ago — Tom Cholmondeley shot a poacher with a turn-of-the-century Winchester .30-06 on his family’s 48,000-acre estate, the Soysambu Ranch. In the colonial past, this crime was unexceptional; probably, it would have resulted in a fine. Today, however, in an independent Kenya, the culprit and the details of his crime turned the case into the trial of the century. The Republic v. Cholmondeley was the first trial to be televised live in Kenya. To an American, it was unmistakably reminiscent of the O. J. Simpson matter. Racism or privilege was perceived at every turn, and those who discussed the matter referred familiarly to the defendant as “Tom.” In bars and at dinner parties, the trial was an inexhaustible topic that provoked hot argument. At the poles, one group held that Tom was an arrogant murderer, while the other argued, incredulously, that it was a poacher Tom shot, if he shot him at all.

Americans really were not interested in O. J.’s supposed black glove. Neither were Kenyans in the details, only in the larger issue at play: land.

Coming along five years after Uhuru, independence, the 40-year-old Cholmondeley (pronounced Chum-lee) was born into a Kenya most Europeans already had left, along with the Union Jack. While notionally allowed to keep their properties, few settler families chose to gamble on the basis of this right. Only a generation or two before, after all, the lands they occupied were expropriated from Africans or cleverly declared “vacant” by the colonial administration. Whites held unimpeachable legal titles, but would that matter in an independent Kenya eager for payback?

Independence might have been profoundly awkward for Cholmondeley’s family, since his grandfather, Lord Delamere, was a revered settler figure — chairman of the colonial-era legislature and a relentless cheerleader for white settlement and privilege. But Lord Delamere could read the writing on the wall, and deeded more than half of his estate, without compensation, to the new republic’s first president, Jomo Kenyatta. The Delamere clan lived hassle-free for years thereafter, retreating into White Kenya’s louche world of sundowners and horse-racing.

Much land changed hands this way in newly independent Kenya, and most of it ended up in the hands of the few men of the ruling Kikuyu elite’s inner circle. Colonialism was resented most of all because of the land-grab it entailed. But independence was in this respect an anti-climax, and decades later Kenya is still simmering with anxiety over what is all-too-placidly called “the land issue.”

In 2005, Cholmondeley had received essentially a slap on the hand over a similar incident. Then, he had fatally shot an intruder on his farm who turned out to be a Kenya Wildlife Services employee. The prosecution against him was discontinued after “the Attorney-General emitted a nolle prosequi,” as it was reported in the papers. To many Kenyans, the decision was quite literally incomprehensible. Riots broke out in the Rift Valley; it was simply infuriating that a public servant could be shot down in the line of duty by a white aristocrat without consequence.

With another shooting death at the Delamere estate only a year later, the venom ran freely against Cholmondeley, accompanied by a wave of sympathy for the deceased poacher, Robert Njoya, “who died in search of a single meal in a vast ranch owned by a single family,” in the words of Kilemi Mwiria, an assistant minister in Kenya’s government. If Cholmondeley previously had a get-out-of-jail-free card, by 2006 it had clearly expired. He was charged with murder and, ineligible for bail, spent 1,099 days in jail, until this month, awaiting a verdict and sentence.

Even before being found guilty, this period of incarceration was, for an angry public, a voyeuristic kind of national catharsis. The local press lapped up information about how Cholmondeley was faring in Kamiti, a prison notorious even by Kenyan standards. Editorialists cried foul when smuggled picnic baskets broke up his diet of gruel. When Cholmondeley was led into the courtroom two weeks ago, he stumbled and fell; the photo — this 6’6” aristocratic goldilocks, handcuffed and helpless, sprawled sideways on the floor — made the papers.

The appetite for salacious and humiliating tidbits was fed by the Delameres, who were, in general, abysmal in the P.R. arena. Each day, an elderly Masai house-servant bearing a stack of padded cushions followed the members of the clan into the courtroom. The benches of Nairobi’s High Court are indeed uncomfortable, but in the giggles and eye-rolls of the members of the local press who had also watched the trial day after day, you could see the lurking, indignant question, Who do these people think they are?

When a criminal trial becomes a proxy for a wider social debate, someone is bound to end up disappointed. In this case, it would be Cholmondeley’s accusers.

One of colonialism’s enduring legacies is the vast gap that exists between the ordinary Kenyan’s concept of justice and the niceties of the common law. The weakness of the case against Cholmondeley was that there was no obvious mens rea, the criminal intent to kill another that is integral to the murder charge in places as diverse as the United States and Papua New Guinea. Cholmondeley claimed he had shot at the poachers’ dogs, not the poachers, and in any case he rushed to Njoya’s aid after he was shot. Cholmondeley rigged a tourniquet, called an ambulance, and gave over his own card to a private hospital. Then he phoned the police.

These mitigating facts ended up mattering in the slow and deliberate court of law. But to many Kenyans, it seemed this English-styled court had given a free ride to this particular Englishman.

In Kenya, as in some other African countries, the feeling is palpable that independence has not really been achieved, whether the question is land or the judiciary. Tom Cholmondeley is but an unwitting player in this grander storyline. His criminal defense could be his life story: He was, is, in the wrong place at the wrong time. – Travis Kavulla is a journalism fellow with the Phillips Foundation and last year was a Gates Scholar in African history at Cambridge.