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Anastasia Katz – The Unz Review July 25, 2025

The White Masai, Harper Collins, 2006, 307 pages, $28.96.
(Originally published in Germany in 1998 by Al Verlag GmbH Munich as Die Weisse Massai.)

The book The White Masai is a memoire by Corinne Hofmann, a white Swiss woman who married a primitive African man and tried to live in his world. While others around her, especially blacks, had no illusions that their marriage was a fool’s errand, the author had a naïve “love conquers all” attitude, and she spent three-and-a-half years desperately trying to live out the fairy tale.

The book explores the perils of life in sub-Saharan Africa, both from nature and from people. In vivid detail, it describes the type of society an African tribe formed with minimal exposure to European influence. Corinne’s story is a perfect case study showing that racial differences can be so vast that no amount of love and devotion can overcome them.

How they met

In the late 1980s, Corinne Hofmann owned a clothing and bridal shop in Switzerland. She lived with her boyfriend, Marco, and by the time the couple left for a vacation in Kenya, friends were asking if they might get engaged soon.

The pair booked a stay in the coastal city Mombasa. On their first visit to the beach, Corinne wished she could live there. The next evening, after a day of sight-seeing, they took a ferry on the way back to their hotel and spotted a Masai man among the mostly black crowd on the boat.

At that time, there were fewer than 400,000 Masai; today, there are about 1.2 million. The black Kenyans who adopted Western customs looked down on the Masai and discriminated against them. A black tour bus driver had described them as “the last uncivilized people in Kenya” and said that they were trouble.

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