Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Chris Morton
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.’39 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’.40
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.41 ‘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.’42 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’.43 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’.44 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.’45 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’.46 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.’47 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’.48 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.’49
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’.50 Leather enjoyed travelling with Thesiger too, and pictured him as ‘a real “tough guy” [who] knows how to do things hard’.51 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.52
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.’53
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.54 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.55
Among the Nuer on the Upper Nile–as in Ethiopia–Thesiger had lived and travelled ‘like an Englishman in Africa’.56 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’.57 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,