Wilfred Thesiger in Africa. Chris Morton
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once original and recherché.
Thesiger’s photography and his travel writing also reflected an Orientalist attraction to danger, mystery, romance, exotic settings and sensual freedom. His superb photographs of the kasbahs would have appealed strongly to Jacques Majorelle, who painted many of them and in 1930 published Les kasbahs de l’Atlas,a portfolio containing thirty magnificent reproductions.
Thesiger’s photographs of kasbahs, villages, landscapes and towns in Morocco were the product of a ‘great picture-taker’77 whose magical effects were created using the camera instead of brushes, paints and canvas. Thesiger’s atmospheric photograph from 1965 of a street in Marrakech reminds us instantly of any bazaar or street scene in Cairo painted by John Frederick Lewis or David Roberts, only Thesiger has used black and white film, leaving the colours to our imagination. While it is true that the later Orientalists used cameras to record pose, lighting and detail, Majorelle would have found it ironic that Thesiger, who had a strong empathy with Orientalism, identified himself with photography, since it was the camera’s increasing precision and popularity that accelerated the decline of the Orientalist movement.
John Newbould, a botany student at Merton College, who had been Thesiger’s first choice as a companion, had fallen off a cliff and fractured an arm the day after Thesiger arrived at Taddert. Instead, he took with him the Oxford expedition’s zoologist, whom he criticized as dirty, unkempt and opinionated, yet who proved capable and enduring, and would later become a world authority on bird flight. The High Atlas Mountains were remote and wild, but, Thesiger felt, already spoiled by innovations, such as cars and telephone lines linking kasbahs with the towns. The mountain views were magnificent. In the villages Thesiger was welcomed, and fed on bread, honey and meat stew washed down by cups of coffee and refreshing mint tea. At Aioui, he climbed for eleven hours on high sheer cliffs made slippery by rain and abseiled part of the way down them. In the Taria gorge a raging flash-flood of muddy yellow water filled it to a depth of fifteen feet and threatened to sweep Thesiger’s party to their deaths. He had warned them just in time of the danger and noted with obvious relief in his diary, ‘it was well we got out when we did’.78
In September, after John Newbould had recovered, he and Thesiger climbed to the 13,671-foot summit of Jebel Toubkal, the highest of the Atlas Mountains. On the way, Newbould collected a large number of flowers and plants, including a new variety of carnation. Fit as he was, he found the last thousand feet hard going, whereas Thesiger, who had walked, since 1952, hundreds of miles over the high valleys and mountain passes of Chitral, Hunza and Afghanistan, ‘felt … no effects of altitude at all’.79
They enjoyed themselves so much that Thesiger asked Newbould to come with him to Nuristan the following year. For various reasons this plan did not come to fruition. Meanwhile they kept in touch by letter. They met briefly in Nairobi when Thesiger first arrived there, in November 1960. From April to May 1961 they trekked for a month round the Ngorongoro Crater. From June until September 1963, Thesiger and Newbould travelled in northern Tanzania, where they walked, with donkeys, for eleven weeks, across the Maasai plains.
Winters in Morocco
Every year in January and February, from 1965 to 1969, Thesiger took his mother to Morocco. These journeys gave them as much pleasure as their first visit together there in 1937. Thesiger enjoyed his mother’s company and admired her vitality. In April 1965, he wrote to a friend: ‘My mother and I are back from Morocco where we had a wonderful time seeing nearly every corner of the country that was worth seeing. We covered 6,000 miles, a lot of it in the Sahara, and stayed in 20 different hotels. Not a bad effort on my mother’s part now she is 85!’80° To Thesiger’s delight, his mother often said she would have been perfectly happy to spend the night sleeping on the ground beside the car.81 During 1966 and 1967, Thesiger and his mother took Field-Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884–1981) with them on drives round the country near Marrakech. ‘If you had not taken me out so often,’ Auchinleck wrote in 1966 from Casablanca, ‘I should have missed these delightful valleys. I am very grateful and I am very depressed at leaving Marrakech where I was very happy and untroubled. I am NOT looking forward much to England where no one seems to have time to stroll or loaf [as] I have been doing!’82
Thesiger spoke always with affection of Auchinleck, who had been Commander-in-Chief in the Middle East and in 1942 took personal command of the Eighth Army. Indirectly, Thesiger had owed Auchinleck his experiences in the SAS. It had been Auchinleck who first took seriously David Stirling’s proposal that small, highly trained groups dropped behind enemy lines in North Africa could do crucial damage by attacking airfields.83
This background contrasted with an inconsequential yet unexpectedly insightful correspondence from the celebrated soldier to the great explorer. From the Hotel El Mansour Casablanca, Auchileck wrote: ‘We had a very good run down here in our coach, a halt for ten minutes for a glass of beer and two very good rolls full of ham provided by the Maghreb [Hotel in Marrakech]—on YOUR suggestion! … It was a very great privilege and pleasure to meet your mother and yourself–a most interesting and unexpected “bonus” to my tour!’84 Who but Auchinleck, Thesiger mused, would have written such a letter? In Morocco, Thesiger took more excellent photographs of kasbahs, landscapes, crowded marketplaces, city squares and castellated towers. Unlike Freya Stark, who would focus her camera on an arch and wait for someone to pass under it–whom she then photographed–Thesiger as often as not seized the ‘magic moment’ almost at random. That he had an instinctive eye for composition is shown again and again by his photographs: a street scene in Marrakech; horsemen at Marrakech encircled by a crowd and with snow-capped mountains in the far distance ; a wide river valley with palm trees and mountains; a hill town seen from across a river; a busy market at Erfoud in the Dades Valley; people in Fez drifting through a magnificently ornate gateway.
Ethiopia revisited
In 1959 and 1960 Thesiger revisited Ethiopia, where he made two journeys, on foot and with mules. In 1959 he went south as far as the border with Kenya; from 1959 to 1960 he made a great circuit of the north.
At an audience in Addis Ababa in 1959 the Emperor welcomed him and promised him every assistance. To Thesiger’s quiet satisfaction, the Crown Prince, prompted by his father, made arrangements for him to visit Lalibela, which he had stubbornly refused to permit him to do in January 1945. The Sandfords’ charming mud-walled thatched farmhouse at Mullu, where Thesiger stayed before setting off from Addis Ababa, held reminders of his visit in 1933 before he explored the Awash River. Then he had shot specimens of blue-winged geese, which he gave to the Natural History Museum in South Kensington. At Mullu and Addis Ababa he now worked for ten hours a day correcting the proofs of Arabian Sandsfor his London and New York publishers. On 6 March he wrote telling his mother that after he had checked the index he hoped to ‘get away down south at the end of the month’.85
In February and March 1959 Thesiger stayed at his old home, the former British Legation, now the British Embassy, in Addis Ababa, as a guest of the First Secretary Philip Mansfield and Elinor, his wife. He liked the Mansfields, who had lived in the Sudan and unlike many Europeans in Ethiopia spoke fluent Amharic.86 He was moved to be in the compound once again, where the big sholatree still stood by a pond near the drive, and a pepper tree outside his father’s dressing-room window reminded him of a kite he had shot there with his air rifle. Thesiger’s photographs showed the house very overgrown by creeper, and fir trees, many of which his father had planted, obscured the view from the garden steps. Thesiger and Philip Mansfield left Waldia near Dessie on 16 February