Sir Wilfred Thesiger

EXPLORERS OF THE WORLD 

Sir Wilfred Thesiger (1910 – 2003) 

Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, CBE, DSO, FRAS, FRGS (3 June 1910 – August 24, 2003) was a British explorer and travel writer born in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.

Thesiger was educated at Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford University where he took a third in history. Between 1930 and 1933, Thesiger represented Oxford at boxing and later (1933) became captain of the Oxford boxing team.

In 1930, Thesiger returned to Africa, having received a personal invitation by Emperor Haile Selassie to attend his coronation. He returned again in 1933 in an expedition, funded in part by the Royal Geographical Society, to explore the course of the Awash River. During this expedition, he became the first European to enter the Aussa Sultanate and visit Lake Abbe.

Afterwards, in 1935, Thesiger joined the Sudan Political Service stationed in Darfur and the Upper Nile. He served in several desert campaigns with the Sudan Defence Force (SDF) and the Special Air Service (SAS) with the rank of major.

In World War II, Thesiger fought with Gideon Force in Ethiopia during the East African Campaign. He was awarded the DSO[1] for capturing Agibar and its garrison of 2500 Italian troops. Afterwards, Thesiger served in the Long Range Desert Group during the North African Campaign.

There is a rare wartime photograph of Thesiger in this period. He appears in a well-known photograph usually used to illustrate the badge of the Greek Sacred Squadron. It is usually captioned 'a Greek officer of the Sacred Band briefing British troops'. The officer is recognisably the famous Tsigantes and one of the crowd is recognisably Thesiger. Thesiger is the tall figure with the distinct nasal profile. Characteristically, he is in Arab headdress. Thesiger was the liaison officer to the Greek Squadron.

In 1945, Thesiger worked in Arabia with the Desert Locusts Research Organisation. Meanwhile, from 1945 to 1949, he explored the southern regions of the Arabian peninsula and twice crossed the Empty Quarter. His travels also took him to Iraq, Persia (now Iran), Kurdistan, French West Africa, Pakistan and Kenya. He returned to England in the 1990s and was knighted in 1995.

Thesiger is best known for two travel books. Arabian Sands (1959) recounts his travels in the Empty Quarter of Arabia between 1945 and 1950 and describes the vanishing way of life of the Bedouins. The Marsh Arabs (1964) is an account of the Madan, the indigenous people of the marshlands of southern Iraq. The latter journey is also covered by his travelling companion, Gavin Maxwell, in A Reed Shaken by the Wind — a Journey through the Unexplored Marshlands of Iraq (Longman, 1959).

Thesiger took many photographs during his travels and donated his vast collection of 23,000 negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.

Obituary from The Guardian, August 27th 2003

Explorer whose mystic vision rejected the modern technological world in favour of the tribes people of Africa and the Arabian deserts

Once, in 1946, Wilfred Thesiger lay starving on a sand dune in Arabia’s Empty Quarter for three days, waiting for his Bedu companions to bring back food, and tortured by hallucinations of cars and lorries that could carry him to safety. “No,” he wrote later, “I would rather be here starving as I was than sitting in a chair, replete with food, listening to the wireless and dependent on cars to take me through Arabia.” As an explorer, Thesiger, who has died aged 93, recognised that satisfaction in attaining a goal was directly in proportion to the hardship and challenge involved in getting there.

He reserved the word “abomination” for cars and aeroplanes, and all his life resented the intrusion of any innovation post-dating the steam engine. His mystical regard for tradition was a product both of his childhood in still-medieval Abyssinia and an intense pride in his aristocratic forebears, the Barons of Chelmsford.

Born in Addis Ababa, where his father was British minister, he grew up in the barbaric splendour of an imperial court, and was privileged to see a victorious and blooded Abyssinian army marching through the city in the full panoply of war. It was an experience he never forgot.

Daydreams of Africa and the wider world were his means of escape throughout his awkward and often unhappy schooldays at St Aubyn’s school, Rottingdean, in Sussex (1919-23), Eton College (1923-28), and his time reading history at Magdalen College, Oxford (1929-33). During his first summer vacation from the university, he set off alone, working his passage on a tramp steamer to Istanbul and returning third-class by train.

So began the travels that he recorded in fine prose and black-and-white photography. On his return, he found both a personal invitation to attend the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia, and a note from the Foreign Office appointing him honorary attaché to the Duke of Gloucester for the event - where he met Evelyn Waugh, a writer of very different sympathies.

For his second vacation, he set himself another endurance test, a month with a Hull fishing trawler off Iceland. Here he learnt to withstand the need for sleep.

But Africa was his goal, and at the age of only 23 he went to explore Abyssinia’s Awash River and the forbidding Aussa sultanate with its Danakil nomads, chiefly noted for a disturbing tendency to kill men and carry off their testicles as trophies. Such practices held little horror for Thesiger, who had survived fagging and flogging at Eton, and saw at least one young Afar man, flushed from the exertion of slaughtering and mutilating four victims in a day, as “the equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket”.

Thesiger gained his own blue, for boxing at Oxford - when he captained the university team in 1933, a victory against Cambridge was marred by the breaking of his noble nose - and like many an athletically endowed young Oxbridge graduate of the 30s, he sought a career in the country where “blues” were said to rule “blacks”: the Sudan. As an assistant district commissioner in the Sudan political service from 1935 onwards, he served in arid Darfur, and later in the steaming swamps of the Sudd, where one of his chief jobs was shooting troublesome lions that attacked local herds.

It was in Darfur that he first learned to travel by fast-riding camel with local companions, dressing as they did, eating local food out of the same bowl, and asking nothing of technology but a good rifle, a torch and a compass. During one leave he completed a long and dangerous journey to the almost unknown Tibesti mountains in the Sahara, and fell in love with the desert: “I was exhilarated by the sense of space, the silence, and the crisp cleanness of the sand. I felt in harmony with the past, travelling as men had travelled for untold generations across the deserts, dependent for their survival on the endurance of their camels and their own inherited skills.”

During the war he was a bimbashi - the most junior officer rank - in the Sudan defence force. He won the DSO in 1941 for leadership under fire in fighting the Italians, under the idiosyncratic Orde Wingate in the liberation of Abyssinia. With a masterstroke of bluff, he subsequently forced the surrender of an Italian-held fort, taking 2,500 prisoners. He later fought as a major, as second in command of a Druze legion formed to fight the Vichy French in Syria - which enabled him to visit a deserted Petra. He also served with Colonel David Stirling’s Special Air Service (SAS) in north Africa. Following the defeat of the Afrika Korps in 1943, the SAS went to Palestine, and in October of that year Thesiger left the organisation to act as an adviser to Haile Selassie in Abyssinia.

A resulting chance meeting brought him a job in what became the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation’s anti-locust unit and the opportunity to make his most famous journeys in the deserts of Arabia under its aegis, between 1945 and 1949. Arabia’s legendary Empty Quarter had been the goal of all Arabian explorers from Richard Burton onward, and although Thesiger was not the first to cross it, he was the first to explore it thoroughly, mapping the oasis of Liwa and the quicksands of Umm As-Sammim. He crossed the desert twice with Bedu companions, and his trek across the western sands from the Hadhramaut to Abu Dhabi was the last and greatest expedition of Arabian travel.

During his journeys he was caught up in inter-tribal raids, pursued by hostile raiders, and arrested by the Saudi authorities. He travelled alone in the Hejaz, the Assir and Najran, and explored the Trucial Coast and Dhofar in southern Arabia. He lived with the canoe-borne marshmen of Iraq for several periods over the seven years up to the Iraqi revolution of 1958, attaining acceptance only by learning the unusual skill of circumcision.

He still found time to travel in Kurdistan, Hunza (north-east Pakistan), Swat, Chitral (both north-west Pakistan), and Nuristan (across the border in north-east Afghanistan), where in 1956, 16,600ft up in the high passes, he bumped into a dispirited Eric Newby and friend Hugh Carless, and invited them to spend the night with him. They got on well until Thesiger saw them blowing up inflatable air-beds before retiring. “You must be a couple of pansies!” he said.

He crisscrossed postwar Abyssinia, fought on the royalist side in the civil war in Yemen (1966-67), traversed most of northern Kenya, where he spent much time between 1968 and 1994, travelled with the Bakhtiari nomads in Iran, trekked across the burning plains of the Dasht-i-Lut, the Great Sand Desert of eastern Iran, and explored inner Afghanistan. All of these travels and many more - in total tens of thousands of miles - were made either on foot or by traditional transport, be it camel, horse, mule, donkey or canoe.

Thesiger felt least at home in his own culture and with his own kind. He resented the juggernaut of western “civilisation” and its inexorable movement to squash what he believed was the colour and diversity of the earth’s peoples. His sympathies were with the indigenes, and his closest human ties were with certain of them who were his companions on his many journeys - his Zaghawa servant in the Sudan, his Bedu companions in Arabia, his paddlers in Iraq and his Samburu family in Kenya. (”Sex has been of no consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap.”) Few other explorers of the last century have tried so genuinely to see the world through the eyes of these foreign peoples. Yet much as he despised civilisation, Thesiger was never able to forsake completely his place in it.

Had he done so, he might never have left us his unique glimpses of strange worlds, in his classic books The Marsh Arabs (1964) and Desert, Marsh And Mountain (1979), his autobiography The Life Of My Choice (1987), his portfolio of superb monochrome photos, Visions Of A Nomad (1987), and above all his description of the traditional life of the Bedu, Arabian Sands (1959), probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever.

He won the founder’s medal of the Royal Geographical Society, together with three other medals from learned societies, honorary fellowships of Magdalen College, Oxford, and the British Academy, and an Honorary DLitt from Leicester University. In 1968, he was awarded a CBE, and in 1995 he was knighted.

Yet, far more than these many honours, he valued the friendship and confidence of the nomadic peoples with whom and among whom he travelled. Thesiger’s best years were the five he spent among the Bedu of South Arabia, and one cherished companion from those days, Salim bin Ghabeisha, when a greybeard in his 60s, remembered him: “He was loyal, generous, and afraid of nothing. He was a wonderful man to travel with.” Thesiger would, I am sure, ask no better epitaph.


Copyright: Wikipedia, Oxford University Exploration Club

Parures de Tête

BOOK REVIEW

Title: Parures de Tête (Hairstyles and headdresses)

Author: Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau and Iris Hahner

Year of publication: 2003

Paperback: 400 pages

Language: French and English

Synopsis:

In Africa, the art of arranging one's hair, of ornamenting and glorifying one's head, has given rise to the creation of incomparable coiffures. The Pharaohs and priests of Ancient Egypt, the nomads of the Sudan, the kings and diviners of the great Bantu civilisations, the spokesmen of Yoruba deities and the initiates of the powerful brotherhoods in West and Central Africa can all be identified by their hairstyles and headdresses. The repository of collective memory, coiffures have been transposed by sculptors onto masks and figures. Taken from the Dapper Collection, from leading museums and from private collections, the hundred or so objects we have reproduced reveal the astonishing diversity of hair arrangements and headgear - as well as the accessories that go with them. Among the diaspora in the United States or the Caribbean, following in the wake of Angela Davis or Bob Marley, many people have turned their hair into a sign of protest, in order to assert their identity and their difference, thereby influencing others throughout the world.

©Text and image: Éditions Dapper

Southern Sudan webpage at Pitt Rivers Museum

Recovering the Material and Visual Cultures of the Southern Sudan: A Museological Resource
Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford provides through its specific website, phiotos and information about Southern Sudan.
This website provides access to a detailed catalogue of the collections from Southern Sudan held at the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Oxford's museum of anthropology and world archaeology. The Museum's holdings from Southern Sudan comprise more than 1300 artefacts and 5000 photographs. Together, the artefacts and photographs provide a major resource for studying the cultural and visual history of the region. The site also provides a map; annotated lists of cultural groups, collectors, photographers, and people portrayed in the photographs; and a set of further resources (relevant literature, websites, and a site bibliography).
For example, this magnificent Zande jar of pottery collected from Sudan by Harold Alfred MacMichael in 1931.
The comments are no less than comprehensive:

©Pitt-Rivers Museum

Anthropomorphic jar, hand made from a moderately well levigated clay with small to large gold-coloured mica inclusions, slipped and burnished on the outside, and fired an orangey brown colour (Pantone 7525C) with mottled black areas (Pantone black 7C). Slight horizontal ridging up the vessel sides suggests that it may have been coil built.
The jar is circular in plan view. The top of the vessel has been modelled in the shape of a female head, with a small oval opening cut into the back. This area is curved, and modelled to represent a braided hairstyle, divided into a number of segments that, unlike the hair on 1950.12.118, follow the shape of the head and do not rise as convex bunches above it. The central part of the hair takes the form of a narrow strip that runs from the forehead to the base of the hair, and is recessed, its surface decorated with parallel incised grooves down the length. The rest of the hair is arranged in rows on either side and at right angle to this. Each row ends in a raised triangular peak where it reaches the centre, and is decorated with double rows of angular impressed marks down each parting, and a single row of similar marks down the middle of each section, flanked by oblique hatching running down in opposing directions on either side. A narrow band made up of 3 incised grooves runs along the front edge of the hair, framing the face. A similar band defines the back edge, with 3 curving rows of angular impressions, a row of impressed circular depressions, or dots, then a final row of angular marks below; there are incised lines between each of these rows. The hair is further decorated with rows of painted cream coloured dots (Pantone 7507C), that run down the centre of each bunch, at the tip of each peak, as lines or dots across the vertical central section, framing the edges of the oval hole, and along the bands that frame front and back edges. Some dots appear to have flaked away.
The face is shaped using a combination of plastic modelling, incision and impression. Modelled sections include the ears, which show detailed working of the interior, undercut brows, eyes in the form of raised lentoid-shaped area with a convex surface, a long nose with fleshy base and deep circular nostrils, a shallow groove that runs down to a slightly pouting mouth that stands out from the surface of the face and a broad, slightly cleft chin. Incised lines are used to further define the eyes and mouth, and to mark the eyebrows, which take the form of two parallel lines with faint impressed marks running between. An incised line runs vertically down the centre of the forehead, and stops at the top of the nose; this has circular impressions at its upper and lower ends. Other incised lines are used to mark facial scarring, which consists of various linear motifs: a block of 4 vertical lines with double horizontal lines at their base extending down from the base of each eye over the cheeks; a rectangle with 1 to 2 horizontal bars across the centre near the corners of the mouth, in line with the cheek bars, and on the outer edges of each cheek, a group of 3 triangles, meeting at their corners in the centre, filled with crosshatching on one side, and simpler hatching on the other. The head sits on top of a long neck that flares out to its base. This is decorated around the middle with a band made of two horizontal rows of impressed squares with a single row of dots between. There are traces of cream coloured pigment in some of the impressions, but the intended pattern of this added paint is not clear. A raised, slightly concave collar has been added around the base of the neck and decorated with impressed squares at top and bottom, and incised hatching between, that turns into crosshatching for a short section around the back of the jar.
Below this is a globular body, with its maximum diameter just above the centre, and convex sides that flare down and in to a narrow flat base. A broad flat collar has been added to the top, and stands out slightly from the rest of the body. This has been decorated with a row of cream painted dots, partially lost; a band of square impressed marks; a band of incised crosshatching; 2 rows of impressed squares with a row of dots between; a second crosshatched band then a final row of impressed squares, with the edge of the collar left undecorated. The rest of the body is divided into a series of broad bands alternating with undecorated areas. One such plain area begins the sequence, then there is a broad crosshatched band, framed above and below by 2 narrower bands of square impressed marks with a row of dots between; a gap, two further narrow square/dot bands framing a broader section filled with loose crosshatching, this time produced using the angular edged tool so that each line is formed from a row of interrupted impressions. Below this is another gap, a single row of impressed squares, a gap, then a band of the wide angular crosshatching with a square and dot band as its bottom frame. A further narrow undecorated band follows, another square and dot band and then a final section of this loose crosshatching. Finally, the flat underside of the jar is decorated with a central dot, surrounded by 6 further dots, then a series of square impressed spokes radiating out from this to the outside edge of the base, where a circle of similar marks forms a frame.
The decoration has therefore been added using at least 4 tool types. One has a sharp point and can create incised lines and grooves. The second has an angular leading edge that produces either square or wedge-shaped impressions. The third creates larger, circular depressions, and the fourth has been used to apply blobs of pigment to the surface.
The jar is nearly complete, but has some minor surface damage, consisting of wear to the surface of the right ear and part of the hair, one of the triangular hair peaks has broken off at its tip, and the surface of the base has worn away in patches. The vessel is otherwise in good condition. It has a weight of approximately 2900 grams and a height of 354 mm; the top of the head measures 95.5 mm across; the shoulder has a width of 242 mm and the base is 95 mm in diameter.
Collected by Harold Alfred MacMichael in 1931, when he was Civil Secretary for the Sudanese Administration. MacMichael does not record its local name, but says that it was used as a water vessel; Larken also recorded that long-necked jars, sometimes decorated with heads, were used for washing the face and hands (P.M. Larken, 1927, "Impressions of the Azande", Sudan Notes and Records X, p. 131 ). Similar vessels were collected by Powell-Cotton at Tambura and Li Rangu and later donated to the British Museum; see 1934.3-8.27, a water vessel in the form of a female figure, and 1931.4-11.3, another female headed jar. Both were made by the male potter Mbitim (see N. Barley, Smashing Pots, fig. on p. 145 and J.C.H. King (ed.), 2000, Human Image ). These seem to be identical in style to our example - with elements such as the raised strips and roundels, the impressed designs and the shape of facial features making it probable that Mbitim was also the potter of the Pitt Rivers example. For other vessels in the museum that may have been produced by Mbitim, see anthropomorphic jars 1934.8.134, 1950.12.118, bowls 1930.86.43-44, 1931.66.2-3, and book ends 1934.8.135 and 1996.53.1. Powell-Cotton had visited Mbitim's workshop on April 28th 1933, collecting raw samples of clay, some of his tools (see 1934.8.132) and finished examples of his work. He also filmed him in action (see Mrs Powell Cotton, "Village Handicrafts in the Sudan", Man 34 (112), pp 90-91). By this period, Li Rangu had developed as a centre for foreign contact in the region (N. Barley, 1994, Smashing Pots, p. 144).
The mica inclusions noted in the clay of this example seem to be a characteristic of Zande pottery; mica occurs naturally in beds throughout the region, known as hilidiwe, meaning 'slough of the moon' (P.M. Larken, 1926, "An Account of the Zande", Sudan Notes and Records IX no. 1, p. 4). Schweinfurth noted the presence of mica in both Bongo and Zande pottery, which he suggested made their wares very brittle. He believed this mix to be naturally occurring and that potters did not know how to remove it from their fabrics: "... [Zande potters] have no idea of the method of giving their clay a proper consistency by washing out the particles of mica and by adding a small quantity of sand" (G. Schweinfurth, 1873, In the Heart of Africa Volume I, p. 292; Volume II, p. 25). This mica may well have been left in the clay deliberately, as it gives the vessels an attractive sparkle, and does not seem to have impaired the plasticity of the material, as the detailed modelling of several of these vessels demonstrates. According to Larken, clay was usually found on the banks of a stream, and prepared by pounding it in a mortar before shaping it by hand. Tools were limited to pieces of gourd or a rounded pebble for smoothing, while decoration was applied by something simple, such as a short stick bound with cord. He describes the firing and finishing as follows: "When dry, pots are turned upside down and baked in the open, only certain kinds of wood being suitable for the fire. While still red-hot, they are splashed with water in which bark of the ndili tree has been soaked, in order to blacken them. A black polish is sometimes given to the smooth surfaces, by means of graphite grains, which are mixed with water and a little powdered ironstone, painted on the clay and gently but continually rubbed into it with a polishing-pebble before the pot is fired". The resulting vessel is not very strong, and only slightly porous, if at all; broad leaves may be used for a lid, if required (P.M. Larken, 1927, "Impressions of the Azande", Sudan Notes and Records X, pp 129-131). According to Evans-Pritchard, all Zande potters were male (Evans-Pritchard 1971, The Azande, p. 95).
The head on this vessel shows facial scarring. According to Larken, while Zande men and women both practised cicatrisation, 'the face is usually not touched, except where an individual has come into contact with Arabs and copied their habit in this direction (P.M. Larken, 1926, "An Account of the Zande", Sudan Notes and Records IX no. 1, p. 31)'. This practice may have become more widespread since Larken's time, however, as most of the modelled human figures made by Mbitim (1996.53.1, 1934.8.133-135, 1950.12.117, 1928.67.4), or Zande woodcarvers (1928.67.4, 1932.30.14-15) are depicted with this kind of facial scarring.
This vessel is currently on display in the Lower Gallery, Case 132B.©Rachael Sparks 24/8/2005.