Why I married a Masai warrior INTERVIEW INTERVIEW It was love at

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Sep 18, 2005 | by Torcuil Crichton

LOVE, we know, can drive us mad. It catapulted 27-year-old Swiss businesswoman Corinne Hofmann half-way around the world into a malaria-infested mud hut in the African bush, for the want of a Kenyan Masai warrior.

She insists she wasn't mad, but her reaction on the riverbank near Mombasa when she set eyes on her warrior was crazy. Everyone who knew her thought this, including the boyfriend who was as good as dumped from the moment she first saw Lketinga, her African prince.

Escaping from the drabness of a Swiss winter, Hofmann had alighted on a two-week holiday in Kenya with her boyfriend, and on a river ferry she was struck down by love, laid low in an instant by a disease against which she was not inoculated.

"I'd never felt anything like it before, " she tells me, recalling the moment she first set eyes on a loincloth-clad Lketinga. "It was my boyfriend who spotted him and pointed him out. I just turned and wow, it was crazy. It was not a good feeling.

"Everybody thinks it must be a beautiful feeling, but no. You realise in the first second that your life has changed. Everything that you need, that you hold, is broken in one second. You get lost, your legs shake and then you start to think this man will go away and I will be left here with all those feelings and you don't know what will happen. After this moment I just wanted to sit down and cry. I was really lost. Nothing was important any more - my boyfriend, my shop. I just had to find a way to talk to this man."

Communicating in broken English, the pair didn't touch, though Hofmann took Lketinga's photograph before reluctantly returning home, feeling sick. Back in Switzerland she told her boyfriend it was all over and, ignoring the doomsayers, packed up her life in Europe, set off in desperate search in Mombasa and eventually found her magnetising love.

You don't really need to read The White Masai, Hofmann's Mills and Boon-esque account of her hopeless fantasy, to guess what happened next. She stuck it out for four years, in love and in Africa, married Lketinga, fell ill with malaria and pregnant with a daughter. But driven to distraction by her husband's insecure jealousy, his reliance on alcohol and the insurmountable demands of African village life, she fled Kenya with her infant child.

It sounds like a post-colonial trash novel, and in parts reads like one, but when you hear out Corinne Hofmann's story, her seemingly infallible naivete and instinctive pursuit of desire emerge as strengths, not weaknesses.

Like the best love stories it all happened a long time ago in a faraway place. The Kenyan Bush is thousands of miles and 15 years' distance from the Brighton seafront, where this statuesque red- haired 45-yearold now stands. Hofmann is spending a month at a language school perfecting her Swiss-accented English and dashing to London to select a dress for the premiere of the German film version of her life.

Yes, love can make fools of us all, but Corinne Hofmann has had the last laugh. She has written three best-selling books about her relationship with Africa, stretching from her first encounter with Lketinga in 1986 to her return to the village and her friendly reunion with her former lover last year. In the film adaptation of her life, released in Germany this month, she is played by an attractive and talented German actress who looks similar to the woman in Hofmann's wedding photographs, standing in a white wedding dress amid the red shawls of the Samburu.

Love, after a veil of tears, has bought a good life for Hofmann and her now teenage daughter, and space to devote her time to promoting her books, her website and herself. The first book has already sold four million copies in several languages. The recently- released English translation reads badly, but is compelling in that, "What is she going to do next and how long can she carry on deluding herself?" kind of way.

It works, or at least it sells. Women, says Hofmann, love her story because it is about following your inner voice and living your dreams. There is, apparently, also something in the sexual subtext of white woman meets black man that either consciously or unconsciously, fulfils a Western male fantasy.

Two British production companies are currently attempting to get "white African bride" documentaries off the ground, so there must be an appetite for this not uncommon phenomenon.

Those in search of sexual voyeurism will be disappointed by Hofmann's book.

Nor do we gain much insight into tribal life, which is inevitably viewed from the perspective of the white, so therefore wealthy in the eyes of everyone she meets, woman and trophy wife. Also missing is Lketinga, who adorns the book's cover, but whose voice is not really part of the story except as an "exotic" young god who falls to earth as a disconsolate, abusive and jealous husband.

Life is so desperate in rural Africa that it seems incredible there was any erotic charge left between the couple after even two days.

Yet Hofmann did it: very bravely, very madly, she went to live in the African bush for love.