Eccentric Life
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British writer and explorer Wilfred Thesiger
Tall, talented athlete and boxer, reluctant writer, extreme traveller, photographer, hunter, war hero, introvert, lover of the Middle East and Africa: Wilfred Thesiger was a true eccentric and an outsider. He travelled not for “queen and country” but simply for the love of travel.
Born to an aristocratic British family in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1910, he attended Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, and began exploring in the 1930s, when he visited the Awash River in Abyssinia (as Ethiopia was known then). The region was famous for its nomads, who thought nothing of killing strangers and keeping their testicles as trophies.
Thesiger spent most of the Second World War fighting in Africa. No sooner had the war ended than he set off to cross the Empty Quarter — the largest sand desert in the world. It measures almost 650,000 square kilometres and includes parts of today’s Yemen, Saudi Arabia, UAE and Oman. He struggled to find Arab companions to join him on the difficult and dangerous journey, almost all of it to be done on camelback and on foot.
Writing about this time in his book Arabian Sands, Thesiger’s fearlessness and love of the hard life come across. His respect for Arab culture and wish to understand it shine through. On one occasion, when he and his companions were terribly hungry, they managed, with great luck, to catch a rabbit. The men made a stew and sat in a circle watching the pot, waiting desperately for it to be ready. The rabbit was almost cooked, when three further Arabs arrived, acquaintances of Thesiger and his friends.
As was the custom, the new arrivals were treated as honoured guests and were served the stew. Thesiger and his companions refused to join them. “I hoped that I did not look as murderous as I felt…” Thesiger wrote. He knew, however, that his Arab brothers would do the same for him. “Would I really wish to be anywhere else?” he reflected.
Thesiger published Arabian Sands in 1959, followed in 1964 by The Marsh Arabs, among whom he lived from 1951 to 1958. Both reflect Thesiger’s perhaps idealized view of Arabian society — in truth, the Middle East was changing quickly in those years.
Thesiger, though, did not fit in with the modern world. “All my life I had hated machines,” he writes in Arabian Sands. “For me, exploration was a personal venture. I did not go to the Arabian desert to collect plants nor to make a map; such things were incidental. At heart I knew that to write or even to talk of my travels was to tarnish the achievement. I went there to find peace in the hardship of desert travel and the company of desert peoples.”
Along with his writings, Thesiger’s legacy includes a collection of 38,000 black-and-white photographs taken on his travels.