Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

(#litres_trial_promo) In the 1930s, throughout the Sudan, lion were classed as vermin and unlimited numbers could be shot without a licence. As an employee of the Sudan Political Service, Thesiger was entitled to a general licence to hunt specified varieties of game, at a reduced annual fee. Additional licences permitted sportsmen to shoot a maximum of two elephants each year. In the desert, south of Wadi Howar, he had stalked addax antelope (Addax nasomaculatus),whose meat he described as ‘very fat and juicy’. He wrote: ‘It is strange that this animal which never drinks and won’t live anywhere but on the very edge of the true desert has the best flesh of any animal in the Sudan.’

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1935, on the slopes of Jabal Ubor in the Jabal Maidob in Northern Darfur, he shot a Barbary sheep (Ammotragus lervia)with horns measuring twenty-eight and three-quarter inches over the curve ( overleaf); an inch longer than the official record for the Sudan. In the Western Nuer District between 1937 and 1939 Thesiger killed four elephant and twelve buffalo. Thesiger’s game-book listed only twelve animals he judged ‘worth recording’. Of course, he had shot more than these (quite apart from the seventy lion he killed over five years); but he was nevertheless adamant that he had taken care to shoot ‘selectively and seldom’.

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In The Life of My Choice(1987) Thesiger acknowledged the debt he owed Guy Moore who, he wrote, had recognized from the start his ‘craving for hardship and adventure’ and his preference for remote places.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I undoubtedly owe much of my later success as a traveller,’ he wrote, ‘to his unobtrusive coaching. No other DC [District Commissioner] would have sent me to the Libyan Desert to learn about desert travel with camels under testing conditions.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Moore’s nostalgia for deserts, and his admiration for tribes who lived there, deepened as he grew older. Reading Arabian Sandsin 1959, Moore wrote that it ‘makes even my nostrils distend a little with past memories of barbaric glories’.

(#litres_trial_promo) After he retired to England, Moore often longed ‘to return to the Desert and poke the fire … with a dagger in that incomparable company that gathers round it to share for a few hours the Peace of God’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In 1964, he inscribed for Thesiger a Christmas card showing the Three Wise Men riding their camels across a moonlit desert: ‘Silent their voyaging-victory their quest/ Beyond the tumult in the city’s breast/ Over the dune, sinew and heart to test/ Unshod to tread the Temple of God’s Guest.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger wrote that, in the Sudan, Moore–who had served in Iraq and spoke fluent Arabic–often referred to the desert as the ‘High Altar of God’.

(#litres_trial_promo) The letters he wrote to Thesiger after the Second World War were filled with yearning for a vanished past. Thesiger kept these letters, but admitted that he had found some of them disturbing and sad. Thesiger wrote in 1987: ‘More important [than camels or desert travel], something decisive in my life, [Guy] taught me to feel affection for tribesmen. Ever since then it has been people that have mattered to me, rather than places.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger was criticized for the phrase ‘taught me to feel affection’, on the grounds that affection cannot either be taught or learned. Did Thesiger instead mean that Moore had taught him it was all right to feel affection for tribal people? If so, this would make more sense. Thesiger confessed that he had found difficulty, to begin with, putting some of Moore’s teaching into practice.

Sharing food and sleeping arrangements with his followers was something Guy Moore’s contemporary Hugh Boustead (1895–1980) would never have done. Nevertheless, the well-being of Fur cultivators in his district had been Boustead’s overwhelming concern. Years after he had left Zangili, the Fur tribe remembered him with admiration. Hugh Boustead believed that the welfare and happiness of tribal people depended on an improved standard of living that resulted from Western education and technology. Thesiger liked and admired Boustead, while observing (in exasperation more than disapproval) that, ‘For all his versatility he was by nature conventional, holding firmly to English ways … he would never have worn native dress’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger did not accept that Western education and innovations necessarily improved people’s lives or made them happier than they had been in more ‘primitive’ conditions. He felt that, if anything, the reverse was true, and noted that Boustead never appeared to consider the possibility of damaging repercussions. Boustead’s attraction to the African wilds never faded. On 12 June 1971 (aged 76) he wrote enthusiastically to Thesiger from Tangier: ‘If I could get up to [the] Turkana [Lake] Rudolf country–I’d love it.’

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In August 1937 Thesiger trekked to Jabal Maidob (Darfur), accompanied by Mark Leather, a young officer from El Fasher who was later to be awarded the Military Cross, and in November of that year made the first of several journeys with his mother in Morocco. At Jabal Maidob Thesiger shot another fine Barbary sheep, a ram with thirty-one-inch horns, which surpassed his unofficial record shot in 1935. Thesiger praised Leather as ‘an admirable companion … enthusiastic about everything, and desperately keen on his hunting’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Leather enjoyed travelling with Thesiger too, and pictured him as ‘a real “tough guy” [who] knows how to do things hard’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger wrote to his mother:

For those days I lived with the Maidob as I love living, moving where we would, sleeping under the stars, at one moment gorged on meat, the next with nothing but some flour and water, with no barriers between us. We had one unforgettable night when we came across some shepherds and spent the night with them. Everyone so free and natural. They played to us on their pipes round the fire far into the night, lads each of whom looked like Pan.

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Among Thesiger’s most memorable experiences in the Sudan was a journey he made south-west from Jabal Maidob to the Anka wells. ‘I sat or slept on a rug on the ground,’ he wrote, ‘with my few possessions in my saddle-bags, and enjoyed that easy, informal comradeship that this life and our surroundings engendered. It was my first experience of the infinite space of the real desert, its silence and its windswept cleanness.’

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Travelling with his mother that autumn in Morocco, he found a land that still retained something of its antique charm and mystery. There were no flights from Europe; Morocco could only be reached from there by rail and sea. From Marrakech, with its palm groves set against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains, the Thesigers visited Telouet, Taroudant, Meknes and Fez, whose setting among the hills he felt could only be compared with Istanbul seen from Pera, or Jerusalem seen from the Mount of Olives.

(#litres_trial_promo) The Pasha of Marrakech, Thami al Glawi, gave Thesiger and his mother a banquet in his spectacular kasbah at Telouet in the Atlas Mountains. In 1931, Kathleen Thesiger had married an elderly widower, Reginald Astley, yet she remained what she had always been to her son: a goddess without equal in his otherwise exclusively male pantheon. She was tireless, uncomplaining and interested in everything she saw. In her guidebook Kathleen noted beautiful buildings, people and exotic scenery, using rather colourless phrases that masked her feelings of excitement and wonder.

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Among the Nuer on the Upper Nile–as in Ethiopia–Thesiger had lived and travelled ‘like an Englishman in Africa’.

(#litres_trial_promo) He enjoyed being with the Nuer, yet in their pagan society he felt unfulfilled, isolated and lonely. Travelling across the vast Sahara, he reverted easily to the freer, less encumbered life he had begun to miss increasingly since he had left Northern Darfur. At an encampment in Wadi Howar early in 1937 Thesiger first heard stories of Tibesti—a mountainous region of dormant volcanoes mostly in northern Chad–from Kathir, one of the Badayat tribesmen whom Guy Moore had recruited to watch for camel-raiders crossing the Sudan’s northern frontier. The old man described huge mountains named Tu, ‘many days’ journey towards the setting sun’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger felt sure that Tu must be Tibesti. He decided immediately he would go there. In April 1938 the Civil Secretary’s office in Khartoum approved his journey; agreement from the French authorities followed in May. On 3 August Thesiger set off from Tini, Idris Daud’s village, with a small party including Idris, and with Kathir, Thesiger’s elderly Badayi informant as their guide. The first European to visit Tibesti, Gustav Nachtigal (1834–85), had arrived there in 1870 from Fezzan (Libya). Tibesti had been explored and mapped by a French expedition led by Lieutenant-Colonel Tilho in 1925. No European, however, had approached Tibesti from the east across the Sahara, nor, to Thesiger’s surprise, had any English traveller visited it before him. At the end of his journey, he observed: ‘It is not easy to be the first Englishman nowadays’;

(#litres_trial_promo) a comment underscored by his sense of quiet pride in this achievement which had followed only four years after another even more remarkable ‘first’: his successful crossing of Aussa to the end of the Awash River in Ethiopia. After submitting his official report in 1939, Thesiger described his experiences in a detailed article, ‘A Camel Journey to Tibesti’, printed in the Geographical Journal.This was followed by other accounts in Arabian Sands(1959), Desert, Marsh and Mountain(1979) and The Life of My Choice(1987).

From the Sudan’s western border, Thesiger’s small party travelled through Oudai, along the west flank of the Ennedi Mountains to Fada; and from there, touching the Ouaita, Oude and Moussu oases, to Faya in Borkou. Although it has no pretensions to literary style, Thesiger’s itinerary, taken from his previously unpublished report, is nevertheless indispensable as a guide for those who might wish to trace his route as accurately as possible on a map:

The country through which I passed was as follows. From Tini, on the Sudan frontier, through Northern Wadai to Burba, the Wadi Arno and Bagussi wells to the Wadi Haouach … Thence I marched along the Western edge of the plateau of Ennedi to Fada. The name Ennedi is known to the nas [nas el-khala—‘men of the desert’ and by inference, nomads] who call this area by a number of local names, such as Muno, by which name they know the plateaux to the west of Ito. From Fada I went to Faya, by the wells of Oum el Adam, more usually known as Oueita, Oude, marked Oueita on the map, and Moussou. I then went to Gouro, and thence to Modiounga and up on to the summit of Emi Koussi. I next crossed into the valley of the Miski at Beni Herdi, followed this valley up to the Modra, passed over the pass of Modra into the Zoumorie and followed this down to Bardai. From Bardai I visited Aouzou, and also the Trou au Natron known to the Tibbu [tribe] as Doon. Having returned to Bardai I went to Zouar, by the hot springs of Soboron and the Gorge of Forchi. From Zouar I returned to Faya by Sherda, Oudigue, the lower Miski, Tire Tigui and Bedo. I then went to Ouinanga Kebir, Ouinanga Saghir and Dimi returning to Fada by the Wadi N’Kaola and Kika. From Fada I was obliged owing to lack of time to return to Tini by very much the same route as I had taken on the way up.

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Thesiger’s map of Tibesti and its surroundings–which he took with him on his journey–was the 1933 edition of Lieutenant-Colonel Tilho’s survey, printed in Paris by the Service Géographique de l’Armée. The map had been cut up into small sections, mounted on a folded linen sheet for extra durability. Most of Thesiger’s maps were reinforced in the same way. Thesiger evidently took great care of them. The Tibesti map is to this day in remarkably good condition after being carried in a saddle-bag for 2,000 miles across the Sahara and unfolded and refolded by Thesiger many times during his journey. At Bardai in Tibesti he photographed and sketched petroglyphs of human figures and animals, carved in the hard rock. A.J. Arkell (1898–1980), a former Deputy Governor of Darfur and later Director of Antiquities at Khartoum, enthused about Thesiger’s drawings in letters from Khartoum and Oxford, writing:

… some of your pictures are most interesting and no doubt v[ery] old … Hammered pictures are often interesting, as being perhaps an earlier technique than painting–but not always. Your single bull from Tirenno with horns projecting forward, and those on the road from Trou to Bardai interested me very much. You will remember my suggestion in [Sudan Notes and Records’]that this type is related to Herodotus’ Garamantian cattle … Several of yours are interesting as apparently showing the method of stimulating the milk supply by blowing into the vagina–as practised by some Nilotics today. I have not heard of that practice from the Tibesti area, have you? Your ‘hammered’ elephant reminds me of some pictures I have from Fezzan …

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Thesiger underlined in soft pencil on his Tibesti map place names of special interest: Tirenno, for example–north-east of Bardai–on the Trou–Bardai road, where he photographed and sketched some of the petroglyphs that Arkell discussed with such enthusiasm. In the margin Thesiger drew the four lakes at Ounianga Kebir—Yoa, Ouma, Midji and Forodone–whose waters were coloured deep sapphire blue, deep permanganate red and deep vegetable green. The lakes named Yoa (or Yoan or Youan) and Ouma, Thesiger noted, were ‘fed by numerous fresh springs’ whose temperature was 30 degrees centigrade. Yoa was seventy feet deep. The water in all four of the lakes tasted of salt.

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Refining the detail of the lakes, in 1938–9, Thesiger changed his description of the colour of Yoa’s water from sapphire to Mediterranean blue; and describing Ouma, Midji and Forodone changed a reference to them (as much for literary effect as for exactness) from ‘the other lakes’ to ‘the strange lakes’. In 1939, Thesiger drafted the manuscript of his lecture on Tibesti to the Royal Geographical Society, with a fountain pen and ink, on sheets of foolscap paper ruled in blue. It may be assumed that this was the final version, given to the typist, since the accompanying typescript included all of Thesiger’s corrections. When his writing was illegible the typist left blank spaces, later filled in by hand.

(#litres_trial_promo) The scarcity of corrections suggests that, as early as the 1930s, Thesiger may have adopted a method he used in later years, when he built up his manuscripts sentence by sentence from jottings on scraps of paper that he afterwards crumpled up and threw away.

(#litres_trial_promo) A former Librarian of Eton College Library recalled asking if he might retrieve some discarded fragments which Thesiger had tossed into a waste-paper basket, and how Thesiger seemed amazed that anyone should consider these worth preserving.

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While Thesiger rarely photographed people or animals in rapid movement, in the Sudan he took evocative pictures of Nuer and Dinka people dancing; Nuer staging mock-fights; and Nuba wrestlers at a funeral ceremony in Kordofan, capturing perfectly the struggle between village champions, locked head-to-head in their ritual combat ( overleaf). In 1949, two years after he co-founded the Magnum photographic agency, George Roger visited Kordofan where he photographed Kao-Nyaro bracelet-fighters and Korongo wrestlers. His famous picture of a champion wrestler being carried shoulder-high inspired the German film-maker Leni Riefenstahl to return year after year to the Nuba Hills. Her sojourns among the Nuba were documented in two beautifully illustrated books, The Last of the Nuba(1972) and The People of Kau(1976). Thesiger was fiercely critical of Riefenstahl, claiming she paid extravagant sums of money to Nuba youths, whose painted bodies she photographed in almost forensic detail. In 1992 Thesiger said: ‘The Nuba demanded the same from everyone else who went down there afterwards, and this wrecked it … I have never paid anyone to let me photograph them. I have never needed to do this, and I wouldn’t do it, anyway.’

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Thesiger often remarked how much he would have liked to go on serving in Northern Darfur where he found peace and inspiration in the deserts and comradeship among the Muslim cattle-owning tribes-such as the Bani Hussain and Idris Daud’s Kobé-Zaghawa. When pressed, he conceded that his five years’ hunting, travelling and exploring in the Sudan and Tibesti had given him more than enough material for a book. It is not quite true that Thesiger never thought of writing, nor was asked to write, a book at the time he planned a journey. Thesiger’s claim held true for almost everything he wrote, and it was this principle that mattered. The only possible exception was a book he had meant to write about his Awash expedition; and it appears that he had kept very detailed journals with this book in mind. In Africa, as elsewhere, Thesiger used his diaries, notebooks and photographs to help him prepare his lectures, and write the illustrated articles based on them. During his five years in the Sudan–except for his journey to Tibesti–Thesiger never kept a diary but instead described his hunting adventures and long camel treks in Northern Darfur in the letters he wrote to his mother and his brothers.

In defence of Abyssinia

In October 1935 the Italians invaded Abyssinia, deposed the Emperor and occupied the country. Thesiger regarded this invasion as the rape of his homeland. When he went on leave to England, he longed for his house in Kutum in Darfur with its view to the hills across the wadi.He missed Faraj Allah, his Bisharin camel, travelling with Idris among the Zaghawa and hunting lion with the Bani Hussain. Yet, despite these happy memories of Kutum and Northern Darfur, the threat of Italy, looming over Abyssinia, was seldom out of Thesiger’s mind. His first impulse had been to resign from the Sudan Political Service and join the Abyssinian resistance, but Guy Moore wisely urged him to bide his time. In 1940, after six weeks of training, Thesiger was commissioned as a bimbashiin the Sudan Defence Force. Idris remained with Thesiger until December 1940, when at his father’s request he returned home to Tini. The SDF’s diarist commented that Idris the ‘reprieved murderer’ was ‘quite a charming chap if a shade wilful’.

(#litres_trial_promo) In the months that followed, Thesiger wrote, ‘I would have given much to have had Idris with me.’

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Thesiger had hoped to fight with the Abyssinian guerrillas but meanwhile joined the SDF’s assault on border forts at Galabat and Metemma. Waiting to attack, he reflected bitterly on the Abyssinian crisis and a struggle he now regarded as a personal crusade. The Italians’ cruelty to Abyssinians left him ‘murderously angry’, even though he confessed his feelings for Abyssinia were less passionate than they had been in the past.

(#litres_trial_promo) For Thesiger the highlights of those years were his brief service with Colonel Dan Sandford’s 101 Mission, which organized the Abyssinian rebels, renamed ‘Patriots’ by Haile Selassie; serving under Wingate; and Haile Selassie’s triumphal return as Emperor to Addis Ababa in May 1941. On 22 May 1941, Thesiger and a band of Patriots captured Agibar fort and its garrison of 2,500 Italian troops. Twice already Thesiger had been recommended, unsuccessfully, for a Military Cross. For the capture of Agibar he was awarded a Distinguished Service Order (DSO). He wrote to his mother: ‘I must admit I am proud to have got it … I know how happy it will make you.’

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