Africa, My Passion

About 15 years ago, the German-born writer Corinne Hofmann enjoyed a huge success with an account of her headlong romance, marriage and then break-up with a dashing Samburu warrior in Kenya, The White Masai, which sold over four million copies worldwide. It captured the imagination of many whose own lives are rather humdrum, as well as providing an enjoyable read for European tourists heading for East Africa. It was followed by three other volumes of African memoirs, the last of which, Africa, My Passion, has now appeared in an English edition (translated from the German by Peter Millar), published by Arcadia Books (£12.99). In a sense the book is another love-song, only this time towards a continent rather than to a particular man and his environment. Not all the action is in Kenya this time, as the first part of the story relates a trek through some of the beautiful desert of Namibia (formerly German South West Africa). A middle section sees the narrator visiting various small-scale but successful development projects, ranging from vegetable growing in bags in the huge Nairobi slum, Kibera, to a football team for reformed gang-members. But most readers will enjoy most the third section of the book, which recounts Hofmann’s return to the Samburu lands, to introduce her 20-year-old daughter — who she has raised in Switzerland — to her father. There is no attempt at any full reconciliation (besides, her ex-husband now has a third wife and other children), but the meetings go well with him and her mother-in-law, who was a key figure in her Kenyan experience. And down on the coast south of Mombasa, she manages to track down her old friend, the Masai market-seller Priscilla [picture left]. But as Hofmann says in a postscript, for her a lot of the attraction of Africa is its otherness, its complete contrast to clean, solid, ordered Switzerland, “the intangible, the immovable, the unpredictable, the chaos, the animals, the sheer wildness that is Africa’s alone.”

Link: http://arcadiabooks.co.uk