Nairobi Letter/Rob Crilly
Take a stroll around Nairobi and you are never far from a reminder of the British colonial elite who forged a nation from the collection of tribes they found in East Africa.
There is the Delamere Terrace at the Norfolk Hotel, named a century ago after the third Baron Delamere, the man who did more than anyone else to attract white farmers to the country's fertile land.
Other buildings bear the names of British explorers of the Victorian era - the Stanley Hotel - or businesses, such as Norwich Union House.
And the ivy-covered homes found in the suburbs of Karen and Muthaiga look as if they could have been transplanted from Surrey, along with the Range Rover in the drive.
For four decades, it seemed as if the newly independent Kenya was happy to let bygones be bygones.
Okay, Delamere's statue was removed from a prime city-centre location and his avenue was renamed Kenyatta Avenue in honour of the first president.
But the currency remains the shilling and letters are still posted into red letterboxes - ever-present reminders that Kenya had once been a part of British East Africa.
That has started to change in the past year, with a smattering of books re-examining the country's colonial past, and lawsuits designed to bring Britain to book for alleged injustices.
That growing feeling of resentment turned to rage last week as the honourable Tom Cholmondeley - Lord Delamere's great-grandson - was arrested after shooting dead an alleged poacher on his land.
This, you will remember, is the same chap who was charged with murder last year when he admitted killing a game warden, Samson Ole Sasina, who was conducting an undercover operation on his family's 100,000-acre estate.
That time he was released on the orders of the attorney general, who said there was no case to answer. The decision was followed by a wave of angry protests as Kenyans complained that the country's post-colonial white elite were afforded a privileged status before the courts.
This time he has become a symbol for a series of injustices perpetrated by generations of white settlers. Protesters carried banners with uncompromising slogans: "Enough is Enough", "We will hunt Delamere", "Hang the murderers", and "It is only blacks being killed, where is the government?".
Danson Macharia, who organised the demonstration, was similarly blunt as he railed against a state that still protects the interests of rich, white landowners.
"We are living in a neocolonist state and that is why the government is doing nothing while our brothers are being shot like dogs," he said.
Newspapers have weighed in with editorials and MPs - mindful of elections next year - have been quick to get involved.
Anyang Nyong'o, the country's planning minister, warned there would be serious consequences if the police or courts allowed deference for a titled family to interfere.
"The government goofed the last time Mr Cholmondeley was involved in the fatal shooting of a Kenya Wildlife Service ranger and it should be reminded that people are watching and will not take things lying down this time."
Impunity is the word that is mentioned over and over again. Are the Delameres able to act as they please or is the Kenyan legal system going to hold them to account? And it is part of a trend that has seen historians raking over a series of alleged colonial injustices to hold the former colonial power to account.
Last year saw the publication of two books on the 1950s Mau Mau rising. They included Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya by Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, which detailed allegations of rape, amputation and human rights abuses by the colonial forces. It won the Pulitzer Prize last month.
At the same time, the Kenya Human Rights Commission is finalising a multimillion-euro reparations case against the UK to compensate Mau Mau veterans who claim they were tortured at the hands of British officers or their Kenyan cronies.
Allegations also resurfaced this year that tribes living around Naivasha and Nakuru, where the Delameres now farm, were duped into signing over most of their land in the early 20th century.
Moving the Masai - A Colonial Misadventure by Lotte Hughes, a lecturer in African arts and cultures at the Open University, tells how illiterate elders used thumbprints to give up more than half their ancestral range to make way for white settlers in 1904. The result of these perceived injustices means some of the country's more rabid columnists are looking enviously at Zimbabwe.
"His country may have calamitously deteriorated economically. And Mugabe himself may have been turned into an overnight pariah by the western world," points out Gitau Warigi in his Sunday Nation column.
"Yet what silently resonates among many Africans when confronted with the outrages such as we are seeing out of Naivasha is the refusal by people like Mugabe to stomach the nonsense of settler descendants whose mindset remains stuck in the colonial past."
For now his view is very much in the minority. But if Cholmondeley is released again without trial, then many more Kenyans will begin to wonder whether the writ of law extends into the farms, estates and polo fields of the "settler descendants".