Uhuru, Excerpted

Him mind skipped back again to white women. Even during the Mau Mau they were not violated here in Kenya. Killed, yes, but not violated. Very few black men in East Africa dared to touch a white women, even if she might be insane enough to desire it. Perhaps that fellow in Uganda, but then, he was a kind of king, or thought he was, and his duty was to grant favor by taking the women of his friends.

Now there seemed to be a whole new trend in Africa—so much so that James Gichuru had felt it necessary to make a speech assuring the bwanas that nobody would rape their precious memsaabs, as had happened in the Congo. Certainly the Congolese rebels had gone mad with lust and, very possibly Indian hemp or the local bhang, and had raped wholesale. Nuns, even, they had raped. Matisia shivered a little. That was carrying freedom too far. He had been mission-raised.

I am no different from the rest, I suppose, Abraham Matisia thought, and he pressed his foot more firmly on the accelerator. Admit it, Matisia, he admonished himself. You too like the white women better than the black. You remember the big, creamy blondes of the Rieperbahn, the Grosse Freiheit, in Hamburg; huge soft-dumpling girls with long coiled ropes of flaxen hair; girls who actually seemed to prefer the black men to the white. And the little swift, darting birdlike girls of France, who murmured, “Je t'aime, come coeur,” while practicing shockingly different versions of what he had first known as a very young man as a simple uncomplicated act of animal gratification.

And the English women: ah, the slim, willowy, slightly horse-faced blue-eyed English women, who looked down their noses at you and drawled disdainfully until suddenly they were naked, writhing in bed and speaking an indescribably filth, making unbelievable demands, and then suddenly laughing at you when all was over, until you felt soiled and ashamed, like a small boy caught abusing himself. I should have sacrificed a whole herd of fat rams to absolve me of some of the things that happened to me in England, Matisia thought.

But I must get over feeling like a novelty with my education, with my position and my money, the money I will have, I don't have to be a novelty, a big black poupee, a comical black doll, any more. Any more than I must remember some of the things black men did with each other behind the wire at Lamu. The white woman seeks our bodies not because we are black and a novelty, but because we are strong and virile and bigger in those important parts than the white man. The white man is drowned in drink and rotten with decadence. His maleness is bred out of him. His skull is long and his chin is weak and he does not know how to please his woman, which is why she is always searching, always restless, always finding herself in other men's beds, always seeking the unattainable, even it if meant other women—or black men.

And there is no doubt about it, Matisia thought, the white woman, in her utter shamelessness, with her screams of passion, her sharp teeth biting, her long nails scratching, her wish to hurt and to be hurt in return, is a better bargain in bed than our women. Our women are placid cows; stupid cows because they were born cows, submissive cows because they were trained to obey or be beaten, and unfeeling cows because the circumcision ceremony meant an amputation of the lusting parts. Cattle indeed, trained to work like dumb brutes and come fresh when they drop a calf, and the act of breeding the calf with one of our women is less enjoyable than actually entering a she-ass, as the Masai do.

— Uhuru, Robert Ruark.