Read Online The White Masai by Corinne Hofmann - Free Book Online Page B

get lost and not come back. Even so, I feel lonely and betrayed. What if it’s true? All sorts of thoughts run through my head, and in the end all I know is that I don’t want to believe it. I could go to the Indian in Mombasa, but I can’t summon up the courage because I wouldn’t be able to bear hearing what he might tell me. Every day I meet warriors on the beach, and I hear more stories. One even tells me that Lketinga is ‘crazy’ and had to be taken home where he married a young girl and won’t be coming back to Mombasa. And if I need comforting, this guy’ll always be there for me. My God, I think, will they ever leave me alone? I’m beginning to see myself as a deer lost along lions; they all want to eat me up.
    In the evenings I tell Priscilla the latest rumours and calumnies, but she says it’s just normal. I’ve been here three weeks now without a man and these men’s experience is that white women never live for long on their own. Then Priscilla tells me about two white women who’ve been living in Kenya for years and run after almost every single Masai. On the one hand, I’m shocked – on the other, astounded – to hear that there are other white women here and that they even speak German. The news awakens my curiosity. Priscilla points to another hut in the village and tells me: ‘That belongs to Jutta, a German. She’s somewhere in the Samburu District working in a tourist camp at present but will come back for a short while some time in the next two or three weeks.’ I’m more than curious about this mysterious Jutta.
    In the meantime the chat-up lines keep coming, and I’m really no longer comfortable. It seems that a woman on her own is considered fair game. Even Priscilla can’t – or won’t – do anything about it. When I say anything to her she laughs almost childishly, which I can’t understand.

A Trip With Priscilla
    O ne day Priscilla suggests that I go with her for a couple of weeks to her village to see her mother and her five children. ‘You have five children?’ I gasp in astonishment. ‘Where do they live?’ ‘With my mother or sometimes with my brother.’ Priscilla only lives on the coast to make money, selling jewellery, and twice a year she takes it home. She and her husband haven’t lived together for years. Once again, African ways amaze me.
    When we come back, I think, maybe Jutta will be here and agree to go. The trip would be one way of getting away from the Masai men’s attention. Priscilla is delighted, as she’s never brought a white person home before.
    With the decision made, we leave the next day. Esther will stay behind to look after the house. In Mombasa Priscilla buys several school uniforms to take to her children. I take only my little rucksack with some underwear, a pullover, three T-shirts and a spare pair of jeans. We buy our tickets, but as there’s lots of time before the bus leaves in the evening I go to the hairdressers and have my hair braided African-style. This takes nearly three hours and hurts a lot, but it seems a lot more practical for the journey.
    Long before the bus is due to depart dozens of people are milling around it, loading every conceivable type of baggage onto the roof. By the time we leave it’s pitch dark, and Priscilla suggests we get some sleep. It’ll be at least nine hours to Nairobi; then we have to change and it’s nearly another four and a half hours to Narok.
    I can’t get comfortable and the journey seems to last forever, so it’s a great relief when we arrive. But even now there’s a long trek on foot ahead. For nearly two hours we march, always slightly uphill, through fields, meadows, even a forest of pine trees. From the landscape alone, Icould almost imagine myself back in Switzerland; there is not a human being to be seen.
    At long last I see smoke rising in the distance and make out a few dilapidated wooden shacks. ‘Soon be there,’ says Priscilla and explains that she has to fetch a case of