cover image White Masai: An Exotic Tale of Love and Adventure

White Masai: An Exotic Tale of Love and Adventure

Corinne Hofmann, . . Amistad, $24.95 (307pp) ISBN 978-0-06-113152-3

One glance at a Masai warrior "wearing almost no clothes—just a short loincloth—but lots of jewelry," and Hofmann, a Swiss business woman on vacation in Kenya, abandons all in obsessive pursuit of Lketinga who has "never been to school, can't read or write and barely speaks English." The passion is palpable and sometimes purple ("I feel myself at one with this man and now, this night, I know that despite all the barriers between us, I have already become a captive of his world"). Seekers of romance and adventure will be amply rewarded, but the power of Hofmann's memoir rests in her hard-won capacity to take the reader inside the domestic world of the African bush as she learns to be Lketinga's wife (living in her own dung hut), grappling with unfamiliar sexual and gender manners and struggling to balance her commitment to bush life with the knowledge and resources she has as a European woman (acquiring a car, starting a business). The idyll, spoiled by Lketinga's bouts of jealous fits, ends after four years when Hofmann, with their daughter, flees to Switzerland. Hofmann's commitment, however, lingers and infuses her account with an affecting richness that defies the reader to ridicule her decision to give "up [her] whole life back in Switzerland for Lketinga." (Oct.)