Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa
Chris Morton

Alexander Maitland

Philip Grover

A unique collection of essays accompany Wilfred Thesiger’s own personal photographs of the Africa he experienced as one of the world’s most celebrated explorers.While Wilfred Thesiger’s own classic writings (including ‘The Marsh Arabs’, ‘Arabian Sands’, ‘Desert’, Marsh and Mountain’, ‘The Life of My Choice’ and ‘My Kenya Days’) comprehensively cover his classic journeys amongst the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, or across the Empty Quarter in Arabia, they fail conspicuously to shed light on his character and motives, which have remained an enigma.Maitland’s biography had Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003, and has been written with full access, granted to no one else, to the rich Thesiger archive – vivid, intimate family correspondence, and his own letters, diaries and notebooks which are far more confiding than his scrupulously edited published accounts. Maitland investigates in depth Thesiger’s parents and family influences; his wartime experiences and the ethos of conflict; his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist; his development as a writer and photographer; his close friendships with the Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived; and his sexuality. In all, this major biography of a great and unusual man will take its place on the shelf of outstanding lives of the great explorers.

WILFRED THESIGERIN AFRICA

EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER MORTON

AND PHILIP N. GROVER

Published to accompany

Wilfred Thesiger in Africa: A Centenary Exhibition, Pitt Rivers Museum

Contents

Cover (#u1d2ab982-36c4-555f-90d4-1043a1a5e9fc)

Title Page (#u56420f25-3a62-5e8e-a0fe-8fa8bc201ee9)

Chapter 1 Wilfred Thesiger in Africa ALEXANDER MAITLAND (#uf7bb51e2-182d-5991-9ce3-2cec27d48529)

Chapter 2 Heart of a Nomad: Wilfred Thesiger in Conversation with David Attenborough (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 3 Wilfred Thesiger: Last of the Gentleman Travellers BENEDICT ALLEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 4 Imagined Time: Thesiger, Photography and the Past ELIZABETH EDWARDS (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5 An Incidental Collection: Objects Donated by Wilfred Thesiger to the Pitt Rivers Museum JEREMY COOTE (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6 Wilfred Thesiger’s Photograph Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum CHRISTOPHER MORTON AND SCHUYLER JONES (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7 Wilfred Thesiger’s Photographs of Africa: A Centenary Selection PHILIP N. GROVER AND CHRISTOPHER MORTON (#litres_trial_promo)

NOTES (#litres_trial_promo)

Bibliography of Works by Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 1 Wilfred Thesiger in Africa ALEXANDER MAITLAND (#ulink_b7d45f7c-1e8a-5b63-aff8-13521e1d40f9)

The greatest traveller of the twentieth century and one of its greatest explorers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger is most famous for his journeys in Arabia and his sojourns among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Yet fifty of Thesiger’s seventy years living, travelling and exploring in remote places were spent in East and North Africa. Thesiger was born in 1910 at Addis Ababa and lived there until 1919 when his family returned to England. Throughout his life, Thesiger continued to revisit Ethiopia, which he preferred to call by its former name Abyssinia. In 1944 he achieved his boyhood ambition of living and working in Ethiopia; however, this was in wartime when he felt that he might have been employed more usefully elsewhere. From 1960 to 1963 and from 1968 to 1977 he travelled each year, on foot, using camels to carry baggage, in northern Kenya. From 1978 to 1994, he settled at Maralal in Kenya’s Eastern Rift Valley Province, among the cattle-owning Samburu. It was there, among his Samburu and Turkana adoptive ‘families’, that he wished to spend his final years.

From 1919 to 1933 Thesiger was educated in England, first at St Aubyn’s preparatory school in East Sussex, and later at Eton College, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. Thesiger’s 1930 autumn term at Oxford was interrupted by Haile Selassie’s coronation, to which he was invited both by the Emperor himself and the Foreign Office as Honorary Attaché to HRH the Duke of Gloucester, who headed the British Mission.

Dressed in a morning suit that contrasted dully with the dress uniforms and medals worn by others in the Duke of Gloucester’s party, Thesiger felt conspicuous and ill at ease. Soon, however, he was absorbed by the splendours of the occasion and wrote: ‘You could easily imagine yourself back in the days of Sheba.’

(#litres_trial_promo) For ten days he took part in ceremonies, processions and banquets. Finally he watched the Patriarch crown Haile Selassie. The Emperor under the state umbrella then emerged into the cathedral square, where he received homage from chiefs in brilliant robes and lion’s mane headdresses, their shields ablaze with gold and silver. Even at that moment Thesiger was conscious that such long-revered customs, rites and traditions were doomed to disappear. ‘Already there were a few cars in the streets. There had been none when I was a boy’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Seeing the priests dance in the cathedral, he wrote to his younger brother, was ‘a sight never to be forgotten … you can’t even try to describe such scenes as I have seen in a letter’.

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After the ceremonies were over, Thesiger set off alone to hunt big game, following the Awash River as far as the hot springs at Bilen. Looking back, he felt convinced that this month in a country inhabited by the Afar (Danakil)

(#litres_trial_promo) tribes had been the ‘most decisive’ month in his entire life.

(#litres_trial_promo) He described this journey in the first chapter of Arabian Sands(1959):

My first night in camp, as I sat eating sardines out of a tin and watching my Somalis driving the camels up from the river to couch them by the tent, I knew that I would not have been anywhere else for all the money in the world. For a month I travelled in an arid hostile land. I was alone; there was no one whom I could consult; if I met with trouble from the tribes I could get no help; if I were sick there was no one to doctor me. Men trusted me and obeyed my orders; I was responsible for their safety. I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.

The opportunity of hunting and travelling in Abyssinia had given Thesiger a tremendous thrill. His family ties with the country dated from 1868 when his grandfather, the Hon. Frederic Augustus Thesiger, had served as Deputy Adjutant-General under Sir Robert Napier during the campaign to release a British consul and other captives imprisoned at Meqdala (Magdala) in Abyssinia by the increasingly harsh and erratic Emperor Tewodros (Theodore) II. As General Lord Chelmsford, Frederic Thesiger later commanded the British force in South Africa, in 1879, during the Xhosa and Zulu Wars. Although he finally defeated the Zulu army at the battle of Ulundi, Chelmsford would be remembered not for this crucial victory, but for the massacre of more than 1,300 of his troops by the Zulu army at Isandhlwana. At Wilfred Thesiger’s home in the Welsh borders were the assegais, clubs and shields that his grandfather had brought back from Zululand. Memories of conflicting emotions stirred by the Zulu relics caused Thesiger to write in The Life of My Choice(1987): ‘my grandfather … had shattered the Zulu army at Ulundi … but I never begrudged those peerless warriors their earlier, annihilating victory over a British force on the slopes of Isandhlwana’.

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Abyssinian impressions

Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger, died in 1920. The third son of Lord Chelmsford, he joined the consular service in 1895, and was posted first of all to Lake Van in eastern Turkey, followed by Taranto, in southern Italy, Belgrade, and then St Petersburg. In 1907 he was posted to Boma in the eastern Congo. In Belgrade he proved his ability and courage by running single-handed the British Legation, after anarchists had murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga. In the Congo, Wilfred Gilbert investigated Sir Roger Casement’s shocking reports of atrocities inflicted by Belgian officials on native workers employed in the plantations. He performed these duties so efficiently that, in 1909, he was appointed HM Consul-General and Minister Plenipotentiary in charge of the British Legation at Addis Ababa, which his immediate predecessor, Captain John Harrington, had helped to establish only a few years before the Thesigers’ arrival there.

On 21 August 1909, Captain the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger DSO married Kathleen Mary Vigors at St Peter’s Church, Belgrave Square, London. The couple arrived at Addis Ababa in early December, after they had trekked for a month with mules, across the Tchercher Mountains, from the railhead at Dire Dawa in eastern Abyssinia. Wilfred Patrick, eldest of the Thesigers’ four sons, was born at 8 p.m. on Friday 3 June 1910 in one of the circular, thatched mud huts known as tukuls,which originally housed the British Legation. These huts were less primitive than Thesiger’s descriptions suggest. The better furnishings were shipped from England, and then transported by camel-caravan across the Danakil Desert. The wattle-and-daub walls of the Thesigers’ tukulwere tastefully papered and decorated with framed pictures, and the exposed roof lathes were interlaced with coloured ribbons. Kathleen Thesiger thought them ‘enchanting’ and described the Legation tukulsas ‘wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The single-storey building housing the new Legation had a pedimented façade and shuttered windows. Sited in a compound that according to Kathleen was the size of St James’s Park in London, it was completed in 1911, and became the family’s home for the next eight years. Thesiger’s parents were both energetic gardeners and the gardens they laid out and planted have remained to this day very much as they left them.

Thesiger’s early upbringing in Addis Ababa was immensely significant, and, he maintained, affected the whole course of his life from then on. His brother Brian, a year younger, who joined in everything Wilfred did, remained almost untouched by their shared experiences. The two youngest children, Dermot and Roderic, were aged 5 and 3 when the Thesigers left Abyssinia early in 1919. As a result, neither the country nor its people left any lasting impression on them.

Thesiger remembered vividly sitting on the Legation steps in the evening, and listening to his father read aloud from his favourite books. Among them were Jock of the Bushveld(1907), Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s story of a dog’s adventures in the South African wilds; A Sporting Trip through Abyssinia(1902) by Major P. H. G. Powell-Cotton; and African Nature Notes and Reminiscences(1908) by Frederick Courteney Selous. Edmund Caldwell’s beautiful drawings in Jock of the Bushveldmay have inspired Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s sketches of big game in his letters to Wilfred and Brian. These books fired Wilfred’s boyhood passion for big game hunting, and encouraged a lifelong fascination with African peoples.

During visits to Addis Ababa, Arnold Wienholt Hodson, who served as a consul in Abyssinia from 1914 to 1927, enthralled Wilfred with tales of big game hunting and tribal warfare. Besides Hodson’s books, Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia(1927) and Where Lion Reign(1929), Thesiger possessed photographs taken by Hodson on safari, many of them captioned in Hodson’s handwriting. According to a letter written by Thesiger’s father, and his own recollections, the urge to hunt originated in Thesiger’s earliest childhood. He had tried as a toddler to knock down birds in the garden with a bat and an empty cartridge-case his father had given him, perhaps to play with instead of a ball. Aged 3, he had watched his father shoot an oryx, and remembered how the wounded antelope galloped madly away before it collapsed in a cloud of dust. He remembered later sitting up with his father, near the Legation, anxiously waiting for him to shoot a leopard that never appeared. He said: ‘My father enjoyed hunting big game, but he wasn’t very successful. He did some shooting while he was in the Congo and [hunted] in Abyssinia as well as India and Kenya. I liked being there with him and it was probably doing this that got me started.’

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Among his other memories of childhood in Abyssinia were vague impressions of camels and tribesmen at waterholes; of white-robed priests with their prayer-sticks and silver drums dancing before the Ark of the Covenant at Timkat, or Epiphany; watching in horror, one day when he and Brian were riding, as their escort dismounted from his horse, and, in doing so, stabbed himself accidentally through the shoulder with his lance; seeing Ras Tafari’s victorious army march their prisoners past the Empress Zauditu, after the battle at Sagale north of Addis Ababa, which crushed the Revolution in 1916 ( overleaf). He also remembered a boy-soldier, in Ras Tafari’s army, being carried shoulder-high, and how he would have given anything to change places with him. The deep impression made on him by such extraordinary experiences he felt certain was a key to understanding the adventurous life he would lead, years later, in Africa and elsewhere.

Stimulated by his upbringing in Abyssinia, Thesiger’s powers of observation were no doubt focussed and sharpened by his passion for big game hunting and bird life. As his fascination with birds grew, he progressed from merely shooting, to studying birds and recording their behaviour. Lying awake at night in his preparatory school near Brighton, he often pictured his home in Addis Ababa, and the brilliant green-and-chestnut bee-eaters and crimson touracos fluttering among the trees in its large garden. Throughout his life, Thesiger was always more sensitive to visual images than he was to sounds. He was tone-deaf; and he confessed that music, however beautiful or melodious, meant little more to him than a ‘jumble of noises’.

(#litres_trial_promo) For the same reason, bird-song and the call-notes of birds may have been essentially meaningless to Thesiger–although he insisted these never failed to evoke for him atmospheric, vivid memories of the African bush. Having no ear for music, he was not particularly receptive to nuances and variations in people’s voices. As a result, his publishers complained that his attempts to reproduce direct speech were seldom convincing. Thesiger’s companions in Morocco said that he spoke French haltingly, and with a bad accent. Yet his spoken Arabic was fluent and slightly flavoured by the accent and intonation of Darfur’s Muslim tribes and the dialects of the Bedu with whom he travelled in Arabia. He enjoyed listening to drums and to the rhythmic stamping of tribal dancers’ bare feet; but, unlike his brothers, he never learned to dance. In his autobiography The Life ofMy Choice(1987), he recalled with dry self-mockery his clumsy effort at dancing with the wife of Sir Angus Gillan, the Sudan’s Civil Secretary, in the 400, a fashionable Mayfair nightclub.

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The Afar (Danakil) and the Awash River