When Thomas Cholmondeley - son of Baron Delamere, scion of Kenya's residual white aristocracy - appeared in court in Nairobi charged with murdering a black poacher, it was inevitable that this juxtaposition of bloodshed and privilege across the racial divide would once provoke comparison with other misbehavior by his forebears stretching back decades. It was inevitable, too, that as his trial unfolded and he was sentenced earlier this month to eight months in prison on manslaughter charges - in addition to the three years he had already served awaiting trial - the contrast between the gravity of the crime and the seeming leniency of the punishment would ignite protests that white privilege had survived far beyond the moment in 1963 when Kenya first raised aloft its banner of independence. And most of all, the outcome seemed to hold up to blacks and whites alike the fractured mirror through which each perceives the other - literally as "the other," uneasy partners thrust together by history and still struggling to lay to rest the troubled ghosts of their uneven tryst.

For some among Kenya's dwindling white minority - 30,000 in a land of more than 35 million - the punishment handed down to the 40-year-old Mr. Cholmondeley, despite his protestations of innocence, was taken as confirmation that the sins of the colonial past would forever be visited on successive generations. For Masai protesters in the courtroom, recalling the way colonial intruders took their land a century ago, the leniency reflected a double standard. A year before the death of the poacher, Robert Njoya, in May 2006, Mr. Cholmondeley had been accused of shooting to death a Masai game warden, Samson Ole Sisina, though the charge was dropped on the order of the attorney general. "Who next?" read one placard held aloft by a courtroom protester. "Butcher of Naivasha," said another, referring to the town close to the Delameres' 48,000-acre estate, called Soysambu, 55 miles, north of Nairobi.

With some gallows humor, and in reference to the whites who indulged tastes in drugs and partner-swapping on the shores of Lake Naivasha in the 1930s - the so-called Happy Valley set - wags in Nairobi began talking of the Trigger Happy Valley set. But there was, too, another lesson: independent Africa has been remarkably generous toward its erstwhile colonial rulers, offering a pact with one very simple rule. "The white community has survived by laying low, keeping their mouths shut," one settler, Michael Cunningham-Reid, told The Guardian newspaper of London. But, decades later, how do Africa's stubborn postcolonial minorities define their niche among people who did not invite their presence in the first place? Across the continent - particularly in those places in the east and south where imperial powers sent their citizens as settlers - the decades following the independence wave of the 1960s offered endless vistas of white privilege and imported ways.

In Zambia, whites hewed a cricket pitch from the encroaching savannah at a village called Ngwerere outside the capital, Lusaka; played polo in a town called Mazabuka; and some offered croquet and pink gins on manicured lawns. Even in Zimbabwe, where the dictatorial president, Robert Mugabe, has now chased most of the 4,500 white farmers off their estates, his campaign to give expropriated land to landless peasants - or, more usually, to his cronies - gathered pace only after, in his view, whites turned against him by backing his political adversaries. And yet, colonialism was built on huge imbalances and staggering chutzpah by an uninvited elite. In 1890, for instance, the so-called Pioneer Column was sent by the British arch-colonialist Cecil Rhodes to the territories north of the Limpopo River that came to bear his name - Rhodesia - hoping to find an African Eldorado of gold and diamonds. When those dreams fizzled, land became the prize, as was in Kenya and South Africa.

It is barely surprising, thus, that claims to lost land provide such political tinder in many places and touch such deep veins of resentment among those, like the Masai at Mr. Cholmondeley's trial, who still hanker for the return of ancestral terrain. But there was always a counterargument among whites, who liked to say that white skills, rarely passed on to the black majority in colonial times, justified white economic advantage. True, the white minority in Zimbabwe, accounting for far less than 1 percent of the 13 million population, controlled the vast bulk of fertile land. But those few would argue that their estates produced 70 percent of the nation's food. When Mr. Mugabe seized all but a few hundred white-owned farms, the economy spiraled down. Food supplies shriveled, and starvation spread across what had been an African breadbasket.

Indeed, it is that central claim to economic indispensability that underpins the white claim to a place - and legitimacy - in postcolonial Africa. For better or for worse, the fortunes of white minorities are often taken as barometers for economic health, drawing the foreign investment that Africa needs. Of all these lands, South Africa offers the continent's biggest, most vivid, most tangled and certainly most epochal struggle to redraw the racial divide. South Africa's white minority traces its history to the first Dutch settlers in the 17th century, long before the colonialism of Victorian Britain. It is the biggest minority - almost 10 percent of a 49 million population - and the richest. Its roots are the deepest.

Despite decades of Apartheid rule, racial reconciliation was the cornerstone of the first post-Apartheid administration, led by Nelson Mandela. That went into retreat somewhat under his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Now, Jacob Zuma has been elected president. His campaign song was an anthem from the struggle against white rule: "Bring Me My Machine Gun." His public persona is entwined with the airing in court of rape and corruption charges on which he was acquitted. The big issues facing him are crime, poverty and AIDS. But his ascendancy has also triggered a familiar, jittery reflex at the interface of minority privilege and majority power. "Sadly, I feel that too often the white elite fall into the Chicken Little mentality," Jonty Fisher, a white South African blogger, posted before Mr. Zuma's election. "They are continually waiting for the sky to fall."

Dit stuk van Alan Cowell verscheen ook in de "New York Times", in de "International Herald Tribune" en online bij "High Beam".

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