Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Chris Morton
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received 40 per cent of the income from pearl-fishing, the remaining 60 per cent was divided among the divers and the crew.25 Thesiger wrote: ‘I thought fleetingly of buying her and leading a life resembling [de Monfreid’s], but reality took charge.’26 The truth was that the son of a former British Minister at Addis Ababa, a friend of the Emperor, was never destined to live like de Monfreid, whom officials treated as an outcast, ‘fishing for pearls off the Farsan isles and smuggling guns into Abyssinia through Tajura’.27 Thesiger remained loyal to his hero, despite the fact that Henry de Monfreid later served as a war-correspondent and alleged apologist for Mussolini during the Italian occupation of Abyssinia from 1935 to 1941. In 1942 de Monfreid was arrested on a charge of espionage and deported to Kenya. There he remained, a prisoner of war, until 1947 when he was repatriated to France.
The Sudan
In England as a boy Thesiger daydreamed continually of Ethiopia. By the time he went to Eton in 1923, he had made up his mind to join the Sudan Political Service. He accepted that it was somewhat unusual for a boy of 12 or 13 to have had such a definite plan for his future, and the determination to achieve it. There were, however, several good reasons for this. Thesiger said:
The Sudan bordered Abyssinia. I felt that serving there would help me to get back to Abyssinia, where I wanted to be, whereas being somewhere like Nigeria wouldn’t. Besides I had read books such as Abel Chapman’s Savage Sudan(1921) and [John Guille] Millais’s Far Away up the Nile(1924) and I was attracted to the Sudan by the prospects for hunting big game and getting among the tribes that lived on the Nile. It was the hunting and tribes and being close to Abyssinia [that] made me feel the Sudan was the right place for me.28
Never for a moment did Thesiger expect to serve somewhere like Khartoum or one of Sudan’s cotton-growing areas. When he was fortunate enough to meet Charles Dupuis—the Governor of Darfur Province–at a friend’s house in Radnorshire in 1934, he left Dupuis in no doubt as to the sort of adventurous life he hoped to lead. Thesiger had been interviewed by the Sudan Political Service that August and had been accepted, he felt certain, in large part due to the success of his recent Awash expedition. Dupuis, on the other hand, realized that despite his awkward manner and sense of ‘ancient’ virtues, Thesiger might well be an asset the Sudan Political Service could not afford to lose. When Dupuis discovered that Thesiger had been posted to the Wad Medani cotton-growing district, he urged Sir Angus Gillan, the Civil Secretary, to post him instead to Kutum in Northern Darfur. Dupuis assured Gillan that if he did not do this Thesiger would almost certainly resign.
Based at Kutum from 1935 to 1937, Thesiger served as an Assistant District Commissioner under Guy Moore, who encouraged him to ride camels and to treat the tribesmen who were with him not as his servants but as companions. Sitting on the ground beside his men, sharing their fire, eating from a communal dish, at first Thesiger felt self-conscious and even condescending. He soon, however, grew accustomed to this way of life and preferred it both on trek and at home. At Kutum, he replaced the trained Sudanese servants with a 14-year-old murderer from the town gaol.29 Idris Daud of the Zaghawa tribe had been imprisoned after stabbing another boy in a scuffle.30 Thesiger secured his release, paid the blood-money owed to the victim’s family and put Idris in charge of his house. Idris became Thesiger’s devoted companion. Guy Moore–with whom Thesiger got on extremely well–was often away, whereas Idris seldom left Thesiger’s side. On safari, Idris served as his gun-bearer and tracker, and when necessary as translator. He was an excellent shot, a dependable and fearless gun-bearer upon whom Thesiger could rely when he hunted dangerous game such as lion, elephant and buffalo.
In Northern Darfur, Thesiger shot thirty lion, most of which had been raiding cattle owned by the Bani Hussain and Kobé-Zaghawa tribes. Hunting by himself or joining in the tribesmen’s pursuit of those lion, Thesiger saved many herders from serious injury or death. He wrote: ‘you probably saved a couple of [them] from being killed or mauled and you were getting closer to them’.31 He observed that, ‘When hunting lion they expect to get at least one man mauled or killed. On one occasion a lion mauled twelve Zaghawa before they succeeded in killing him. When with them I have always spoilt the sport by shooting the lion.’32
In the Sudan’s Western Nuer District, where he served from 1937 to 1939, Thesiger killed forty more lion, bringing the total number he had killed to seventy. In the Sudan Political Service’s journal, Sudan Notes and Records,Thesiger described galloping down lion, bringing them to bay, dismounting and shooting them, if possible, before they charged. Galloping down lion had been a highly dangerous sport made popular by European settlers on the Athi plains of Kenya. Arthur Blayney Percival, Kenya’s first Chief Game Warden, regarded it as ‘the finest sport in the world’.33 In A Game Ranger’s Notebook(1924) Percival enthused: ‘the race over country after [a lion] stirs the blood as no stalk can possibly do’.34
Thesiger was charged sixteen times, once at very close quarters by a lion which knocked him down. (Whether the lion actually did so, or whether a tribesman standing nearby, whom the lion had attacked, fell against him, Thesiger could never be sure.) This lion would probably have killed them both had Thesiger not managed to scramble to his feet and shoot it through the head with his.350 Rigby Mauser. Thesiger was convinced, if he went on hunting lion, his luck could not possibly hold. ‘It became an obsession. I felt that if I kept on, one day a lion would certainly kill me. But the urge to keep hunting them was too strong to resist.’35 At what stage Thesiger reached this conclusion, and indeed why he gave up after he had killed seventy lion, he does not tell us. It has been suggested that he lost his nerve: an explanation with which he vehemently disagreed. Perhaps he had wearied of hunting lion in the Nuer country, mainly as a sport. Hunting cattle-raiding lion in Northern Darfur had been more purposeful and far more dangerous, since these lion were often bold and very sly and offered Thesiger all the challenge and excitement he could possibly have desired.
In 1935, when ‘Pongo’ Barker, the Sudan’s Game Warden, told him there were lion in Darfur, but that nobody had ever shot one, Thesiger vowed he would succeed where previously other men had failed. It seems clear from everything he said and wrote about his experiences in the Sudan that hunting lion meant more to him personally than hunting any other dangerous species of big game. Thesiger later read about certain totemic attitudes to lion described in Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan(1932), by anthropologists Charles and Brenda Seligman (from whom Hobley had urged Wilfred to seek advice on the Afar in April 1933).36 Among the Niel Dinka tribe of the Upper Nile, lion were regarded either as ordinary animals or as man-eaters. Dinka clans of the lion-totem believed that man-eaters were not ‘one’ with themselves and should be killed on sight. On the other hand, the Dinka might feed ordinary lion with joints of meat, cut from a sheep, left at some distance from the village. The villagers prayed that the lion would come and feed off this meat, but if they did not the villagers would eat it themselves.37 After one Dinka man had killed a lion, and sometime later another lion killed twenty of his cattle, the tribe refused to hunt the marauder whose depredations they considered a fitting punishment for the herdsman.38 In the 1930s, throughout the Sudan, lion were classed as vermin and unlimited numbers could be shot without a licence. As an employee of the Sudan Political Service, Thesiger was entitled to a general licence to hunt specified varieties of game, at a reduced annual fee. Additional licences permitted sportsmen to shoot a maximum of two elephants each year. In the desert, south of Wadi Howar, he