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Out of Africa (Essential Penguin 2)

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Karen Blixen's African adventure (now Kenya) as a colonial Master and a coffee planter brought her in immediate contact with the heart and the mind of the Natives.
Her book is a heartrending but also a violent tale about the laws of the white man, the fight against nature (for water), prejudice, customs and inveterate beliefs (healing), and also about the mysterious and sacred moments in the life of the Natives (e.g., dancing).

Life before colonization
The extreme violence of life before colonization is expressed in a Masai dream: `in the old days it was good fun. When the Kikuyu or the Wakamba had got a fat piece of land and fat herds, we came to them. First we killed all men and male children with steel. We ate the sheep and goats. Then before going away, we killed off the women with wood.'

Colonization
The white man stole the black man's land by creating a `Protectorate'. According to the latter's laws, the Natives could not own land (!). But as Karen Blixen says, 'it is more than their land you take away. It is their past, their roots and their identity.'
The Natives were also bombarded by competing Missions: `the intolerance that one Christian Church showed towards the other.'
The treatment of the blacks by the white colons was nothing more than a master/slave relation.

The Natives
In some aspects, the white man filled in the mind of the Natives the place God takes in the minds of the colons.
For the Natives, something written was taken as an evangel.
Their wealth was their livestock, but also `eroticism (which) runs through their entire existence. It is the number and quality of the wives which decides a man's success and happiness in life, and his own worth.'
The fact that `some nations gave away their maidens to their husbands for nothing' was for them incomprehensible. More, `one tribe was so depraved as to pay the bridegroom. Where was their self-respect?'
In judicial affairs, the Natives didn't look for the motive of the crime. The damage done (even in the case of murder) had to be compensated by replacement (cattle).

Karen Blixen's book sketches an objective, but `human' picture of, all things considered, a shameless period of exploitation in the history of mankind.

Highly recommended.