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

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

And when she set eyes on the smoky, cramped goatskin, cowdung and stick tents inhabited by Lketinga's nomadic Samburu tribe, Hofmann thought, either through incredible naivete, or the profound blindness of love, that she would make a home of it.

The love must have been beautiful, as life definitely was not. Malnourished, diseased and weakened, she and her daughter, Naparai, just made it through pregnancy and birth, in a hospital, in 1990. "Surviving was hard, " she says. To do so she had to accept malaria, the risk of HIV and a level of subjection to her husband that extended to not laughing with other men while Lketinga himself engaged in polygamy.

His warrior code excluded him from eating with women and limited physical contact to a proud distance. For the Masai, to have a wife is to own a woman, but during Hofmann's illnesses Lketinga broke male taboos by washing for her and bringing her food.

Although there was laughter in the marriage, it was swamped by jealousy and insecurity. The relationship was never going to work. "I was 60% there as a tribal wife, but the other 40% of me could not be a Masai woman, " says Hofmann now. "Losing that part of me would have meant losing my own sense of identity."

In a culture in which a woman was not allowed to look a man in the eye, Hofmann struggled to cope. "The hardest thing was that he didn't believe that the child was his. After everything I'd been through, this was too much for me. At first he was very proud of her, held her up, saying, 'Hey she looks like me', but then he changed his mind, or his friends started making him doubt."

Lketinga's jealousy increased when Hofmann, driven by her business instincts and her need for money, opened a shop in the village and later in Mombasa, where the couple moved when rural life proved too much. "He was very proud and it was always our shop, although he could not drive the car or make business." The fact Hofmann had to do the talking to wholesalers - and that curious villagers would drop by to see and even touch this unusual white woman - made Lketinga feel insecure, she says.

The shop, the white wedding dress, the idea that she could live with cocoa-coloured drinking water . . . it all sounds like a dreadful cultural trespass, yet Hofmann insists that's not how the villagers regarded her. "Like everywhere, there were people who did not like me but I was accepted as one of them."

At the end of 1990, Hofmann told her husband she was going out for a short time and ran with her daughter for Switzerland where she cried for six months. "My mother told me to start thinking about my own life and my child's future, " she recalls. "It was true, all I was thinking about was how [Lketinga] was doing, about the big lie I'd told to get away from him."

Writing the book was an eight-month catharsis. "It became like another sickness: every night I have to write and with every page my shoulders became lighter. For four-and-a-half years, nothing touched me and when I had finished, tears flooded my apartment. But I started to feel free."