Who killed Esmond Bradley Martin and for what motive?

The mysterious murder of white conservationists in Kenya attracts a lot of international media attention, especially if the crime remains unresolved.

The authorities are usually quick to dismiss the murder as a “robbery gone wrong” or the work of a disgruntled domestic worker — as has been said of the killing of gorilla researcher Diane Fossey, the environmental activist Joan Root and wildlife conservationist Joy Adamson.

The British tourist Julie Ward’s murder in the Maasai Mara has not yielded any arrests either, even after her father, billionaire hotelier John Ward, spent years personally investigating her murder and initiated a campaign to find her killers.

All these murders suggest that the authorities were either not keen to find or apprehend the killers or had botched up the investigations.

The murder of 76-year-old Esmond Bradley Martin in his home in Nairobi’s Lang’ata area early this month has also given rise to speculation.

STABBED

Martin was stabbed in the neck with a knife on a Sunday afternoon after he had returned from lunch with friends at the Nairobi National Park. Nothing was stolen from his house at the time of the murder.

While some speculate that he was killed for his work on exposing ivory smugglers, others have suggested that his murder was probably related to a possible land grab — not an improbable theory, given that land grabs in Kenya have been the cause of many deaths of Kenyans, not just of white foreigners. 

Martin was not a well-known academic, though his reports on the illegal ivory trade had earned him accolades in academia and internationally. He was a conservationist but he did his work away from the public glare.

I first came across Martin’s work through the booklet Malindi, Past and Present, one of the most authoritative pieces of research on the history of this coastal Kenyan town that has ever been published.

RICH IN DETAIL

Through his work, I learnt that Malindi was once an affluent town that exported ivory and rhino horn and had a thriving agricultural sector.

Slaves were recruited by Arab sultans to farm the land and, for a long period in the 19th century, Malindi thrived as a producer of oranges, bananas, coconuts and mangoes.

It was also a centre of Portuguese maritime activity in the 16th century.

Martin’s research on Malindi, first published in 1970, was so well received that it was republished by the Malindi Museum Society in 2003 — simply because there was no other text on Malindi so rich in detail existed.

His investigative work on the illegal ivory and rhino horn trade earned him some titles — the United Nations appointed him as the special envoy on rhino conservation — but he was not viewed as a celebrity like Richard Leakey, for instance.

He was not an influential or famous ranch owner either — like the flamboyant Kuki Gullman, for example, who was recently shot by herders in her 98,000-acre conservatory/ranch in Laikipia and whose love for Africa and its wildlife has been captured both in her books and in a Hollywood film.

BUILDING A CHURCH

Martin’s 20-acre property in Nairobi may have been large by urban standards but it was hardly massive.

So, who would have wanted Esmond Bradley Martin dead?

An article published in The Daily Beast suggests that his murder might be linked to his opposition to the building of a church in his Lang’ata neighbourhood.

Apparently, the Karen and Lang’ata District Association (KLDA), of which Martin was a member, had filed an injunction to stop the construction of the church in a forested section of Lang’ata that bordered Martin’s property.

According to the article, the injunction had been granted by a court but was ignored by the church, which went ahead with the construction anyway.

MYSTERIOUS MURDERS

So, was Martin killed because he was especially vocal in his opposition to the construction of this church?

Like most mysterious murders in Kenya, this one might also remain unresolved. But it does raise the question of why this respected scholar was murdered at this particular time and not earlier, when his work posed a more direct threat to criminal ivory and rhino horn smuggling networks.

If, indeed, this particular church has violated a court injunction, then it should be investigated and penalised.

Should the construction of the church continue, it will only add fuel to the speculation that Martin’s murder had to do with a large land grab scheme that involved this church and, possibly, its political patrons.

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