Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

In The Danakil Diary(1996) Thesiger describes in more detail the hunting trip he made to Bilen after the coronation of Haile Selassie:

I had gone down there to hunt, but this journey meant far more to me than just the excitement of hunting … [T]here had been the constant and exciting possibility of danger … with no possibility of getting help if we needed it. I had been among tribesmen who had never had any contact with a world other than their own.

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Among the Oromo (Itu Galla), Thesiger had ‘an unpleasant feeling … of being in a hostile country … constantly being watched from the hilltops’.

(#litres_trial_promo) That ‘wonderful’ month gave his boyhood dreams a thrilling reality and made him even more determined to live a life of ‘colour and savagery’.

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After the coronation in 1930 Thesiger had intended to hunt in the Sudan, but was advised against this because of the expense and difficulty of arranging the necessary permits.

(#litres_trial_promo) Instead, Colonel Dan Sandford, who had served for five years with Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger and farmed near Addis Ababa, suggested that Wilfred should spend a month hunting in the Danakil country. While in Addis Ababa, Thesiger also met Robert Ernest Cheesman (1878–1962) who had been a consul at Dangila in Abyssinia from 1926 to 1929 and had published an account of his earlier adventures, In Unknown Arabia(1926). Cheesman recollected Thesiger saying to him, ‘I want to do some exploring. Is there anywhere I could go?’ When Thesiger showed no interest in ‘cold countries’ of the Polar regions, Cheesman suggested the Awash River which vanished somewhere in the Danakil Desert. Writing in 1959, Thesiger seemed to imply that having decided to explore the Awash River, he approached Sandford for help with the hunting trip to Bilen; not only to shoot big game but also to ‘have a look’ at the Danakil and get some impression of their country.

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During the month Thesiger hunted on the Awash, his headman on that occasion, Ali Yaya, made continual enquiries about the river on his behalf. According to the local Afar, the river ended against a great mountain in Aussa, a country of lakes and forests, forbidden to outsiders and ruled by a xenophobic sultan. Thesiger wrote: ‘I had felt then the lure of the unknown, the urge to go where no white man had been, and I was determined, as soon as I had taken my degree, to return to Abyssinia to follow the Awash to its end and to explore the Aussa Sultanate.’

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The objectives of the expedition varied, owing to differing agendas set by its sponsors. According to the Imperial Institute of Entomology, its primary object was ‘to collect material for the British Museum (Natural History)’ and obtain data for the Institute ‘respecting migratory locusts’. The Royal Geographical Society endorsed this, adding that Thesiger also wished ‘to undertake surveys and photography’.

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Replying to a letter from Thesiger in April 1933, C. W. Hobley, a colonial administrator and authority on East Africa, gave advice and useful information for any geologist, ornithologist or anthropologist attached to the expedition, and suggestions for borrowing cameras and handling supplies of film.

Cameras can be hired from various sources but I fancy only cinecameras & not ordinary ones–you might try the RGS for the latter. The Zool[ogical] Soc[iety] has a very nice hand ciné-camera, it cost £100, they might lend it to someone who was competent to work it, upon certain terms, if fully insured by the borrower against loss & damage, but I cannot say for certain … Films need special packing for hot countries …

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He added a caution: ‘Your only hope of grants is to guarantee the scientific aims of the expedition, geographical research or mere exploration is not enough.’ Hobley’s advice on geology and ornithology, no doubt, partly explained why these aims took precedence over Thesiger’s personal motives: ‘to follow the Awash river into the fabulous Sultanate of Aussa and discover how and where it ended’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Of vital importance to Thesiger were the challenges offered by the ‘murderous’ Afar, as well as the many hardships involved with the journey.

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Thesiger’s story of his 1933–4 Awash expedition was first published by The Times,in a series of four articles, titled ‘An Abyssinian Quest’, dated 31 July and 1, 2 and 3 August 1934. The text of his lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in November 1934, ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate’, appeared in the Geographical Journalin 1935. Other versions appeared in Arabian Sands(1959), Desert, Marsh and Mountain(1979) and The Life of My Choice(1987). The Danakil Diary(1996), edited from the original notebooks he kept as a daily journal, gives the most detailed account of this journey, one that Thesiger regarded as the most dangerous he ever undertook. The reasons he gave for describing the expedition as excessively dangerous were: his youth and inexperience; the ever-present risk of being attacked by parties of hostile Afar warriors; the possibility of being murdered in Aussa; dying from heat and thirst during the last stage of his trek. Indeed, by the end of the journey fifteen of Thesiger’s nineteen camels had to be abandoned, or had died of hunger and exhaustion. Thesiger never forgot the dogged dependability of some of those camels—Elmi, Farur, Neali and the ‘great-hearted’ Negadras—to whom he owed so much.

In January 1935 the young French commandant of Dikil fort, Captain Bernard, was killed and mutilated by Asaimara Afar, less than nine months after Thesiger had stayed with him on his way to the coast. Thesiger was only too well aware how this tragedy could have happened to him and his followers. Instead, his expedition was successful. Having been granted permission by the Sultan of Aussa to cross his previously forbidden territory, Thesiger became the first European to map the Awash as far as Lake Abhebad, proving it was here that the river ended. With the assistance of Omar Ibrahim, his middle-aged Somali headman, and local interpreters, Thesiger collected a lot of information about the Afar and their customs. While some of his photographs were poorly framed, due to his Kodak camera’s damaged viewfinder, many were clear and informative.

Besides his notes and sketches describing the geography of the Awash River and features such as Afar burial sites, Thesiger collected seventy-six plant specimens and shot and preserved fourteen species of mammal including the k’ebero,the Abyssinian red wolf. His collection of 872 birds included 192 species and three new subspecies–an Aussa rock chat (blackstart) (Cercomela melanura aussae),a Danakil rock sparrow (Gymnoris pyrgita dankali)and a Danakil house bunting (Fringillaria striolata dankali).According to modern taxonomic methods, the latter two birds are nowadays generally not considered distinctive enough to merit recognition, and consequently have been sunk (‘synonymized’) into other, previously described subspecies; in this case the yellow-spotted petronia (Gymnoris pyrgita pyrgita)and the house bunting (Emberiza striolata striolata).

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As well as skinning and preserving the animals and birds he shot, and interviewing the Afar, Thesiger carried out many other time-consuming and sometimes intricate tasks himself. While the expedition gave no template for the style of his later journeys, he admitted he had felt relieved when David Haig-Thomas–a companion whom Thesiger’s mother had insisted he must take with him–dropped out, because of illness, after a preliminary journey in the Arussi Mountains. Yet in his lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, and an article in The Ibis,Thesiger emphasized that he had been ‘handicapped severely’ by the absence of Haig-Thomas, who was the expedition’s ornithologist. This he never repented. Some people who attended Thesiger’s lecture, however, felt he should have shown more sympathy for Haig-Thomas and paid tribute to the research into Abyssinia’s birds which Haig-Thomas had undertaken before he and Thesiger left England.

During the Awash expedition, Thesiger travelled in the same way his father had travelled in the past, ‘as an Englishman in Africa’. He fed and slept apart from the men who accompanied him. He communicated with them sometimes directly but mainly through Omar, his headman. Thesiger admired and respected Omar, but in no sense did he regard him as a friend. He felt depressed in the railway station at Jibuti, saying goodbye to his followers, all of whom had proved loyal, ‘utterly reliable’, and had never questioned Thesiger’s decisions ‘however seemingly risky’. As for Omar, Thesiger wrote, ‘I was more conscious than ever how much of my success was due to him.’

(#litres_trial_promo) As a travelling companion, Omar had felt Thesiger was hard to equal.

(#litres_trial_promo) Later–in the Sudan–Thesiger learned to treat his men as companions, rather than servants. By the end of the Awash expedition he already inclined towards this still highly unconventional practice–due mainly to the influence of Henry de Monfreid, a French pearl-fisherman and smuggler, whose books, Les secrets de la mer Rouge(1931) and Aventures de mer(1932), he had bought at Addis Ababa and read at intervals throughout his journey. By the time he arrived at Tajura, Thesiger had fallen under de Monfreid’s spell. Crossing from Tajura to Jibuti in a dhow, sharing the crew’s evening meal of rice and fish, brought de Monfreid’s romantic world alive. At Jibuti Thesiger found de Monfreid’s dhow Altaïr II‘anchored in the bay’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was told Henry de Monfreid was in France. Thesiger apparently did not know that de Monfreid had been deported by Haile Selassie after the publication in 1933 of his book, Vers les terres hostiles de l’Ethiopie.The Altaïr,whose Arabic name means ‘bird’, was for sale. On Hôtel d’Europe writing paper, Thesiger scribbled a brief summary of the vessel’s running costs. For the Altaïritself de Monfreid wanted £1,200. Fuel (crude oil), repairs, wages and food for the crew totalled £65 per month. The owner received 40 per cent of the income from pearl-fishing, the remaining 60 per cent was divided among the divers and the crew.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger wrote: ‘I thought fleetingly of buying her and leading a life resembling [de Monfreid’s], but reality took charge.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The truth was that the son of a former British Minister at Addis Ababa, a friend of the Emperor, was never destined to live like de Monfreid, whom officials treated as an outcast, ‘fishing for pearls off the Farsan isles and smuggling guns into Abyssinia through Tajura’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger remained loyal to his hero, despite the fact that Henry de Monfreid later served as a war-correspondent and alleged apologist for Mussolini during the Italian occupation of Abyssinia from 1935 to 1941. In 1942 de Monfreid was arrested on a charge of espionage and deported to Kenya. There he remained, a prisoner of war, until 1947 when he was repatriated to France.

The Sudan

In England as a boy Thesiger daydreamed continually of Ethiopia. By the time he went to Eton in 1923, he had made up his mind to join the Sudan Political Service. He accepted that it was somewhat unusual for a boy of 12 or 13 to have had such a definite plan for his future, and the determination to achieve it. There were, however, several good reasons for this. Thesiger said:

The Sudan bordered Abyssinia. I felt that serving there would help me to get back to Abyssinia, where I wanted to be, whereas being somewhere like Nigeria wouldn’t. Besides I had read books such as Abel Chapman’s Savage Sudan(1921) and [John Guille] Millais’s Far Away up the Nile(1924) and I was attracted to the Sudan by the prospects for hunting big game and getting among the tribes that lived on the Nile. It was the hunting and tribes and being close to Abyssinia [that] made me feel the Sudan was the right place for me.

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Never for a moment did Thesiger expect to serve somewhere like Khartoum or one of Sudan’s cotton-growing areas. When he was fortunate enough to meet Charles Dupuis—the Governor of Darfur Province–at a friend’s house in Radnorshire in 1934, he left Dupuis in no doubt as to the sort of adventurous life he hoped to lead. Thesiger had been interviewed by the Sudan Political Service that August and had been accepted, he felt certain, in large part due to the success of his recent Awash expedition. Dupuis, on the other hand, realized that despite his awkward manner and sense of ‘ancient’ virtues, Thesiger might well be an asset the Sudan Political Service could not afford to lose. When Dupuis discovered that Thesiger had been posted to the Wad Medani cotton-growing district, he urged Sir Angus Gillan, the Civil Secretary, to post him instead to Kutum in Northern Darfur. Dupuis assured Gillan that if he did not do this Thesiger would almost certainly resign.

Based at Kutum from 1935 to 1937, Thesiger served as an Assistant District Commissioner under Guy Moore, who encouraged him to ride camels and to treat the tribesmen who were with him not as his servants but as companions. Sitting on the ground beside his men, sharing their fire, eating from a communal dish, at first Thesiger felt self-conscious and even condescending. He soon, however, grew accustomed to this way of life and preferred it both on trek and at home. At Kutum, he replaced the trained Sudanese servants with a 14-year-old murderer from the town gaol.

(#litres_trial_promo) Idris Daud of the Zaghawa tribe had been imprisoned after stabbing another boy in a scuffle.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger secured his release, paid the blood-money owed to the victim’s family and put Idris in charge of his house. Idris became Thesiger’s devoted companion. Guy Moore–with whom Thesiger got on extremely well–was often away, whereas Idris seldom left Thesiger’s side. On safari, Idris served as his gun-bearer and tracker, and when necessary as translator. He was an excellent shot, a dependable and fearless gun-bearer upon whom Thesiger could rely when he hunted dangerous game such as lion, elephant and buffalo.

In Northern Darfur, Thesiger shot thirty lion, most of which had been raiding cattle owned by the Bani Hussain and Kobé-Zaghawa tribes. Hunting by himself or joining in the tribesmen’s pursuit of those lion, Thesiger saved many herders from serious injury or death. He wrote: ‘you probably saved a couple of [them] from being killed or mauled and you were getting closer to them’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He observed that, ‘When hunting lion they expect to get at least one man mauled or killed. On one occasion a lion mauled twelve Zaghawa before they succeeded in killing him. When with them I have always spoilt the sport by shooting the lion.’

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In the Sudan’s Western Nuer District, where he served from 1937 to 1939, Thesiger killed forty more lion, bringing the total number he had killed to seventy. In the Sudan Political Service’s journal, Sudan Notes and Records,Thesiger described galloping down lion, bringing them to bay, dismounting and shooting them, if possible, before they charged. Galloping down lion had been a highly dangerous sport made popular by European settlers on the Athi plains of Kenya. Arthur Blayney Percival, Kenya’s first Chief Game Warden, regarded it as ‘the finest sport in the world’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In A Game Ranger’s Notebook(1924) Percival enthused: ‘the race over country after [a lion] stirs the blood as no stalk can possibly do’.

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Thesiger was charged sixteen times, once at very close quarters by a lion which knocked him down. (Whether the lion actually did so, or whether a tribesman standing nearby, whom the lion had attacked, fell against him, Thesiger could never be sure.) This lion would probably have killed them both had Thesiger not managed to scramble to his feet and shoot it through the head with his.350 Rigby Mauser. Thesiger was convinced, if he went on hunting lion, his luck could not possibly hold. ‘It became an obsession. I felt that if I kept on, one day a lion would certainly kill me. But the urge to keep hunting them was too strong to resist.’

(#litres_trial_promo) At what stage Thesiger reached this conclusion, and indeed why he gave up after he had killed seventy lion, he does not tell us. It has been suggested that he lost his nerve: an explanation with which he vehemently disagreed. Perhaps he had wearied of hunting lion in the Nuer country, mainly as a sport. Hunting cattle-raiding lion in Northern Darfur had been more purposeful and far more dangerous, since these lion were often bold and very sly and offered Thesiger all the challenge and excitement he could possibly have desired.

In 1935, when ‘Pongo’ Barker, the Sudan’s Game Warden, told him there were lion in Darfur, but that nobody had ever shot one, Thesiger vowed he would succeed where previously other men had failed. It seems clear from everything he said and wrote about his experiences in the Sudan that hunting lion meant more to him personally than hunting any other dangerous species of big game. Thesiger later read about certain totemic attitudes to lion described in Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan(1932), by anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman (from whom Hobley had urged Wilfred to seek advice on the Afar in April 1933).

(#litres_trial_promo) Among the Niel Dinka tribe of the Upper Nile, lion were regarded either as ordinary animals or as man-eaters. Dinka clans of the lion-totem believed that man-eaters were not ‘one’ with themselves and should be killed on sight. On the other hand, the Dinka might feed ordinary lion with joints of meat, cut from a sheep, left at some distance from the village. The villagers prayed that the lion would come and feed off this meat, but if they did not the villagers would eat it themselves.

(#litres_trial_promo) After one Dinka man had killed a lion, and sometime later another lion killed twenty of his cattle, the tribe refused to hunt the marauder whose depredations they considered a fitting punishment for the herdsman.