The White Masai

by Corinne Hofmann

Book Overview

The runaway international bestseller is now an American must-read for lovers of adventure, travel writing, and romance. Corinne Hofmann tells how she falls in love with an African warrior while on holiday in Kenya. After overcoming severe obstacles, she moves into a tiny hut with him and his mother, and spends four years in his Kenyan village. Slowly but surely, the dream starts to crumble, and she hatches a plan to return home with her daughter,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061131539
• ISBN13: 9780061131530
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Amistad Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

An honest look at attempting to transition to another world for love

I would definitely recommend this book. Don't let the age of this book deter you. This love story was completely engrossing. If you enjoy memoirs, this is a winner.

Absorbing

I thought this book was incredibly interesting. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be in her shoes. I, unlike a reviewer below, found her to be incredibly self-sacrificing in the face of so much hardship. She really wanted to make this relationship work and was willing to go to great lengths to do so, but her efforts to understand another culture were not reciprocated by the man she fell in love with. Cultural understanding is not a one way street, it must be mutual, and her husband's behavior towards the end of the book disturbed me in that he was simply not willing to understand her point of view. I didn't see her as trying to impose her European values on anyone, if anything she sacrificed many of her values many times over in order to be what the tribal people wanted her to be. It is easy to daydream about a "happily ever after" ending, unfortunately that is not the case with this story, and honestly its probably more realistic that it lacked all the happiness that the author had at first imagined possible. It is a rough awakening to the truth of the world- that love doesn't always take the path you hope it will- and a good life lesson for anyone.

The White Masai

Excellent reading. This book was on the best seller list in Germany for a few years. I can't wait for the sequel to be translated into English.

One of the most extraordinary intercultural romances ever

Corinne Hoffman was hit by a thunderbolt when she first saw Lketinga, a Masai warrior, on a ferry in Mombasa. She ditches her boyfriend, sells her boutique in Switzerland, and marries the tall warrior and lives with him in the bush. Of all the 800 or so works I read and consulted in the preparation of my own book on romances involving female travelers, this one describes one of the greatest gaps in background, literally an Information Age woman with a pastoralist man. Barring one marriage-in-name between American photojournalist Wyn Sargent and a New Guinea tribal chief living in the Stone Age, described in Sargent's "People of the Valley," Corinne and Lketinga are pretty much the champs of record in terms of attempting a marriage across an abyss of incomprehensibility. With little but mutual attraction to base their relationship on, they have but fitful success. But what a mutual attraction it is! Hoffman describes Lketinga's facial beauty and powerful body in lyric terms. The book's photos, and those of the couple in magazines, show then as equally beautiful in opposite ways, she a porcelain blond, he dark warrior with face paint and a pleasing Michael Jordan-style moustache. Hoffman is quite honest, however, that her lover is initially pretty lousy in bed, due to Masai prosriptions against touching below the waist -- and a cultural lack of emphasis on lovemaking skills. Lketinga's aunt confesses that she has heard that white people put more effort into mutual pleasure. It's interesting to me how much complete squalor Hoffman puts up with in Lketinga's home village. Excrement litters the ground outside their hut, so tiny they cannot stand upright in it. Getting water is difficult. A young woman nearly dies in childbirth, and no one much cares except Corinne herself, who tries to get the woman to the hospital in her vehicle, a lifeline for the village. Readers can compare "The White Masai" to Sarah Lloyd's "An Indian Attachment." Lloyd also lives in squalor, with an Indian Sikh whom she loves, for two years. What women will do for love, when the object of their desires is a warrior with beautiful hair. To the other reviewers who don't understand why Corinne would ditch everything to live primitively in the Kenyan bush, her actions (comparable to Sarah Lloyd's) appear to be based on an atavistic desire by modern women to find traditionally masculine men, with beautiful chiseled bodies, tremendous pride, weapons (swords, kris, spears) worn at the waist ... as found among Masai, Samburu, Sikh and other men in the developing world. Anthropologist April Gorry (who studied women who entered affairs with men in Belize) did a marvelous job in her doctoral thesis noting that modern women love competent, strong men, rather than the drones and eunuchs found in the Western workplace. That BMW cannot substitute for the ease with which men in traditional societies display mastery of their environment, from climbing a coconut tree and anchoring

Excellent & Rare Read

This book is an excellent read that is very unique. It is unique in that it gives the perspective from a woman who is from the 1st world-Western world and her relationship (as a girlfriend and then a wife) of a 3rd world Massai warrior. Both of them live for the most part according to Massai living conditions. Corinne gives her perspective from someone who is "very much in love" and wants to adjust herself to this new way of living, yet is accustomed to western living. She really gives it everything she has. It is so shocking to the way of living that most of us westerners are used to, that you cannot wait to see what's next (or how much more unusual and shocking her life can get). It really is incredibly interesting and a fun adventure. I read it in German, even though my German is not fluent. It is written very easy to understand, yet not so simple as to be boring. It would be an easy read for anyone who understands 50-75% of a normal German conversation. The few words that you don't get in a sentence can be figured out by the words around them and what you may still not get, you can look up in the translation dictionary. Highly recommended book! I have never read an experience quite like this one. How many western people get married to, live the life of a Massai tribal person and then write about it? Very unusual and well written.