Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

During the war in Abyssinia, Thesiger took many photographs of the Patriots, including portraits of men who had fought with him in Gojjam or had taken part in the capture of Agibar fort. But he regretted that he had taken no photographs of Wingate, which ‘would have been worthwhile as a record of those years’,

(#litres_trial_promo) nor any real portraits of David Stirling (1915–90), with whose recently formed Special Air Service Brigade he served in North Africa from November 1942 until May 1943. In 1944, at Haile Selassie’s request, Thesiger returned to Abyssinia–now known as Ethiopia–to serve as a Political Adviser to the Crown Prince, at Dessie, in the Province of Wollo. The appointment was meant to last for two years, but after only a year Thesiger decided to resign. Photography helped to distract him from a task that he found frustrating and pointless. Confined to Dessie, and unfamiliar with Wollo, at the mercy of what he perceived as an obstructive administration, Thesiger complained that he had been treated like ‘the consul of a suspect power’ instead of ‘a trusted member’ of Ethiopia’s government.

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As well as photography (which he scarcely mentions), Thesiger found other ways of passing his time in Dessie. After he arrived there the Crown Prince had given him an Arab stallion which Thesiger rode every day, reminisent of his daily pony rides as a child at Addis Ababa. Sometimes he went out shooting snipe or duck. From June to September the daily downpours of summer rain fell from midday until the late evening. After the rain the Dessie landscape turned bright yellow with Mascal daisies. Thesiger shared his parents’ love of flowers, and compared their waves of glorious colour with the brilliant profusion of anemones, poppies and tulips which he saw in Iraq and Persia after the war. In 1943 in southern Tunisia he had found seemingly lifeless desert transformed into ‘one vast flowerbed’ of red poppies, yellow marguerites and snow-white daisies. Describing the scene to his mother he wrote, ‘You would have loved them.’

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When the Crown Prince refused Thesiger permission to visit Lalibela’s rock-hewn churches, this was the final straw. Thousands of miles from Ethiopia, he wrote, ‘tremendous events were taking place. In Europe and the Far East, great battles were being fought … while here was I, stuck in Dessie, achieving nothing.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger’s decision to quit his posting at Dessie signalled a break with the past: an Abyssinia/Ethiopia he identified with childhood, whose memory he idealized and revered as the ‘shrine of my youth’.

(#litres_trial_promo) This, however, did not mean that all ties with Ethiopia were broken; but rather that he viewed the the Ethiopia of the post-invasion years with a clearer, and evidently less subjective, eye.

From 1945 to 1950 Thesiger explored and travelled in Arabia, where he twice crossed the great southern desert, the Rub’ al Khali or Empty Quarter, and became the first European to have seen the Umm al Samim quicksands and Liwa oasis. Between 1950 and 1958 he spent several months each year with the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, except for 1957 which he spent writing Arabian Sands.He did not return to Africa until August 1955, more than a decade after he had left Ethiopia.

Morocco

To escape the humid, oppressive, summer heat of the Iraqi marshes, Thesiger travelled between 1952 and 1956 over the mountains and high passes of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nuristan. In 1955, when a journey in Nuristan had to be postponed, he spent two months in Morocco trekking and climbing in the High Atlas Mountains.

Hajj Thami al Glawi, whom Thesiger and his mother had met at Telouet in 1937, gave him permission to travel from one kasbah to another across his territory. At Taddert, Thesiger encountered an Oxford University expedition, whose members had come to southern Morocco to study life in Ait Arbaa, a remote Berber village. Thesiger helped them find the twenty baggage mules they needed, and agreed that one of their party could join him on his long walk across the High Atlas. A guide whom Thesiger hired at Telouet proved nervous and uncooperative, certain that he would be murdered if he strayed too far from his own country. Another guide, who replaced him, refused to go further than Zaouia Ahansal. Thesiger judged, probably correctly, that his guides did not want to get caught up in the conflict between Moroccan nationalists and the French. When Thesiger returned to Marrakech in September he found the city under curfew and heard that insurgents had killed several of the soldiers in a French military outpost at Ahermoumou, near Fez.

Writing years earlier in The Times,in 1937, Thesiger had described ‘the resentment felt by the Moors for the French, who were competing with them on all levels, even as drivers of horse-drawn cabs in towns.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He had not forgotten the desperation of tribesmen starving in the slums of Casablanca, or the rising tide of nationalism powered by Morocco’s ‘frustrated intelligentsia’.

Thesiger photographed the kasbahs at Ghasat and Ait Hamed. He was impressed by Ghasat, where he arrived on 4 August 1955, with small fruit trees and a deep well in a courtyard with guest rooms, attached to an outer wall of the main building. From here he had a ‘very attractive view of the mountains and of the village and orchards’.

(#litres_trial_promo) At Ait Hamed, Khalifa Haji Umr’s kasbah stood on a low hill overlooking an orchard enclosed by a stone wall. The great kasbahs at Ghasat and Ait Hamed, and Tabir Ait Zaghar’s kasbah with fine, incised decorations on its walls, were among 750 photographs which Thesiger took before he returned to Casablanca in October. Even as late as 1955, he would still have been in time to meet the French painter Jacques Majorelle (1886–1962), who lived and worked in southern Morocco, which he had first visited as a convalescent in 1917. Majorelle’s house at Marrakech and its beautiful garden became tourist attractions, with tiled steps and walls of Majorelle blue–a pigment used by the Berbers and named by Europeans after him. Majorelle’s figure studies were painted in a distinctive fin de siècleOrientalist style, which was at once original and recherché.

Thesiger’s photography and his travel writing also reflected an Orientalist attraction to danger, mystery, romance, exotic settings and sensual freedom. His superb photographs of the kasbahs would have appealed strongly to Jacques Majorelle, who painted many of them and in 1930 published Les kasbahs de l’Atlas,a portfolio containing thirty magnificent reproductions.

Thesiger’s photographs of kasbahs, villages, landscapes and towns in Morocco were the product of a ‘great picture-taker’

(#litres_trial_promo) whose magical effects were created using the camera instead of brushes, paints and canvas. Thesiger’s atmospheric photograph from 1965 of a street in Marrakech reminds us instantly of any bazaar or street scene in Cairo painted by John Frederick Lewis or David Roberts, only Thesiger has used black and white film, leaving the colours to our imagination. While it is true that the later Orientalists used cameras to record pose, lighting and detail, Majorelle would have found it ironic that Thesiger, who had a strong empathy with Orientalism, identified himself with photography, since it was the camera’s increasing precision and popularity that accelerated the decline of the Orientalist movement.

John Newbould, a botany student at Merton College, who had been Thesiger’s first choice as a companion, had fallen off a cliff and fractured an arm the day after Thesiger arrived at Taddert. Instead, he took with him the Oxford expedition’s zoologist, whom he criticized as dirty, unkempt and opinionated, yet who proved capable and enduring, and would later become a world authority on bird flight. The High Atlas Mountains were remote and wild, but, Thesiger felt, already spoiled by innovations, such as cars and telephone lines linking kasbahs with the towns. The mountain views were magnificent. In the villages Thesiger was welcomed, and fed on bread, honey and meat stew washed down by cups of coffee and refreshing mint tea. At Aioui, he climbed for eleven hours on high sheer cliffs made slippery by rain and abseiled part of the way down them. In the Taria gorge a raging flash-flood of muddy yellow water filled it to a depth of fifteen feet and threatened to sweep Thesiger’s party to their deaths. He had warned them just in time of the danger and noted with obvious relief in his diary, ‘it was well we got out when we did’.

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In September, after John Newbould had recovered, he and Thesiger climbed to the 13,671-foot summit of Jebel Toubkal, the highest of the Atlas Mountains. On the way, Newbould collected a large number of flowers and plants, including a new variety of carnation. Fit as he was, he found the last thousand feet hard going, whereas Thesiger, who had walked, since 1952, hundreds of miles over the high valleys and mountain passes of Chitral, Hunza and Afghanistan, ‘felt … no effects of altitude at all’.

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They enjoyed themselves so much that Thesiger asked Newbould to come with him to Nuristan the following year. For various reasons this plan did not come to fruition. Meanwhile they kept in touch by letter. They met briefly in Nairobi when Thesiger first arrived there, in November 1960. From April to May 1961 they trekked for a month round the Ngorongoro Crater. From June until September 1963, Thesiger and Newbould travelled in northern Tanzania, where they walked, with donkeys, for eleven weeks, across the Maasai plains.

Winters in Morocco

Every year in January and February, from 1965 to 1969, Thesiger took his mother to Morocco. These journeys gave them as much pleasure as their first visit together there in 1937. Thesiger enjoyed his mother’s company and admired her vitality. In April 1965, he wrote to a friend: ‘My mother and I are back from Morocco where we had a wonderful time seeing nearly every corner of the country that was worth seeing. We covered 6,000 miles, a lot of it in the Sahara, and stayed in 20 different hotels. Not a bad effort on my mother’s part now she is 85!’

(#litres_trial_promo)° To Thesiger’s delight, his mother often said she would have been perfectly happy to spend the night sleeping on the ground beside the car.

(#litres_trial_promo) During 1966 and 1967, Thesiger and his mother took Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884–1981) with them on drives round the country near Marrakech. ‘If you had not taken me out so often,’ Auchinleck wrote in 1966 from Casablanca, ‘I should have missed these delightful valleys. I am very grateful and I am very depressed at leaving Marrakech where I was very happy and untroubled. I am NOT looking forward much to England where no one seems to have time to stroll or loaf [as] I have been doing!’

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Thesiger spoke always with affection of Auchinleck, who had been Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East and in 1942 took personal command of the Eighth Army. Indirectly, Thesiger had owed Auchinleck his experiences in the SAS. It had been Auchinleck who first took seriously David Stirling’s proposal that small, highly trained groups dropped behind enemy lines in North Africa could do crucial damage by attacking airfields.

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This background contrasted with an inconsequential yet unexpectedly insightful correspondence from the celebrated soldier to the great explorer. From the Hotel El Mansour Casablanca, Auchileck wrote: ‘We had a very good run down here in our coach, a halt for ten minutes for a glass of beer and two very good rolls full of ham provided by the Maghreb [Hotel in Marrakech]—on YOUR suggestion! … It was a very great privilege and pleasure to meet your mother and yourself–a most interesting and unexpected “bonus” to my tour!’

(#litres_trial_promo) Who but Auchinleck, Thesiger mused, would have written such a letter? In Morocco, Thesiger took more excellent photographs of kasbahs, landscapes, crowded marketplaces, city squares and castellated towers. Unlike Freya Stark, who would focus her camera on an arch and wait for someone to pass under it–whom she then photographed–Thesiger as often as not seized the ‘magic moment’ almost at random. That he had an instinctive eye for composition is shown again and again by his photographs: a street scene in Marrakech; horsemen at Marrakech encircled by a crowd and with snow-capped mountains in the far distance ; a wide river valley with palm trees and mountains; a hill town seen from across a river; a busy market at Erfoud in the Dades Valley; people in Fez drifting through a magnificently ornate gateway.

Ethiopia revisited

In 1959 and 1960 Thesiger revisited Ethiopia, where he made two journeys, on foot and with mules. In 1959 he went south as far as the border with Kenya; from 1959 to 1960 he made a great circuit of the north.

At an audience in Addis Ababa in 1959 the Emperor welcomed him and promised him every assistance. To Thesiger’s quiet satisfaction, the Crown Prince, prompted by his father, made arrangements for him to visit Lalibela, which he had stubbornly refused to permit him to do in January 1945. The Sandfords’ charming mud-walled thatched farmhouse at Mullu, where Thesiger stayed before setting off from Addis Ababa, held reminders of his visit in 1933 before he explored the Awash River. Then he had shot specimens of blue-winged geese, which he gave to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. At Mullu and Addis Ababa he now worked for ten hours a day correcting the proofs of Arabian Sandsfor his London and New York publishers. On 6 March he wrote telling his mother that after he had checked the index he hoped to ‘get away down south at the end of the month’.

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In February and March 1959 Thesiger stayed at his old home, the former British Legation, now the British Embassy, in Addis Ababa, as a guest of the First Secretary Philip Mansfield and Elinor, his wife. He liked the Mansfields, who had lived in the Sudan and unlike many Europeans in Ethiopia spoke fluent Amharic.

(#litres_trial_promo) He was moved to be in the compound once again, where the big sholatree still stood by a pond near the drive, and a pepper tree outside his father’s dressing-room window reminded him of a kite he had shot there with his air rifle. Thesiger’s photographs showed the house very overgrown by creeper, and fir trees, many of which his father had planted, obscured the view from the garden steps. Thesiger and Philip Mansfield left Waldia near Dessie on 16 February 1959 for Lalibela with an armed escort, servants and seven mules. After marching for three days they arrived at Lalibela, a sprawling village set amidst enormous junipers, high up in the mountains. They found a weekly market in full swing, but at first Thesiger could not see any sign of the rock-hewn churches for which Lalibela is famed. These were all below ground level and were only visible from close at hand. Lalibela did not disappoint him. ‘Perhaps no other place in the world,’ he wrote, ‘has so profoundly impressed me.’

(#litres_trial_promo) The Chief Priest–no doubt forewarned by the Crown Prince’s staff of their visit–invited them to pitch their tent in his compound and, during their stay, showed Thesiger and Mansfield round the churches. Thesiger photographed the Chief Priest by the entrance to the church known as Golgotha, which had been carved from the rock on which it stands. There were twelve of these churches, all of them different.

The most spectacular had been chiselled out of enormous blocks of tufa[a porous limestone], and separated by deep trenches from the surrounding rock. Some of the others were detached on all sides from the rock overhead; others again had been excavated into rock faces. One called Beta Medhane Alam (‘The Saviour of the World’) was over a hundred feet long, seventy-two wide and thirty-six high, with external and internal columns precisely aligned: another, Beta Giorgis, was in the form of a Greek cross’.

Thesiger added emphatically, ‘Giorgis, which stands apart from the others … was my favourite.’

(#litres_trial_promo) He listed the churches, possibly in the order he had visited them, with a tick in biro beside each one: ‘Medhane Alam, Beta Mariam, Maskal, Dairaghal, Debra Sina, Golgotha, Selassie, Markarios, Aba Lebanos, Gabriel, Emanuel, Giorgis’.

(#litres_trial_promo) Thesiger’s handwritten list was later kept in his copy of Churches in Rock(1970), Georg Gerster’s monograph on the early Christian art of Ethiopia. Thesiger’s interest in Lalibela’s rock-hewn churches may have owed something to his father, who was interested in archaeology, and wrote an illustrated account of a church excavated in 1912, at Sellali, ‘only some five hours distant’

(#litres_trial_promo) from the monastery of Debra Libanos, and whose carvings, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger felt convinced, dated the original building to the eleventh or twelfth century.

(#litres_trial_promo) This ruin was contemporary with the gloomy, though strangely impressive, church of Imrahanna Krestos (‘Let Christ be Our Guide’), inside a cave in a ravine, north-east of Lalibela, which predates by a hundred years Lalibela’s cluster of thirteenth-century rock churches.

On the Sunday of their visit, Thesiger and Mansfield went to a service at Beta Mariam that started in moonlight and lasted for five hours until 10 a.m. The congregation remained standing throughout and leaned on armrests like crutches, for which after a while Thesiger said he felt thankful. He was easily moved by the singing of choirboys, and had felt thrilled by the ‘really lovely voice’ of one singer in particular.

(#litres_trial_promo) When the service ended, the deacons performed a traditional slow dance to the rhythmic beating of their drums.

Leaving Soddu on 1 April, Thesiger trekked in heavy rain to Lake Margharita in the Rift Valley; then to Chenchia; and from there across the mountains to Gardula and the border with Kenya. In southern Ethiopia he found beautiful country–green and pleasant, covered with wild flowers in bloom after the rain. At one camp a lion chased and killed a mule–an event Thesiger omitted from his later account, yet which added a frisson of excitement to this otherwise uneventful journey. He determined that, in future, he would buy mules, instead of hiring them, since it had proved impossible to find muleteers who would travel any distance and, to his exasperation, their mules had to be changed at every village market.

Some of Thesiger’s most striking photographs were of Konso grave monuments near Bakawli and other villages beyond Lake Ghiamo and Ghidole. The villages were set among stony hills 5,000 feet high. Each village or group of houses was enclosed by a stone wall and the surrounding landscape scattered with acacias in flower and majestic euphorbias, which Thesiger’s father used to compare with Judaic seven-branched candlesticks.