Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Chris Morton
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’.66 In the months that followed, Thesiger wrote, ‘I would have given much to have had Idris with me.’67
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.68 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.’69
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’,70 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.71
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.’72
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.’73 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’.74 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.’75 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’.76 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