Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003)

This guy was just nuts, in an amazing way. I read his obit in the Guardian awhile back, and had to check out one of his books. He grew up as a foreign service brat in what is now Ethiopia, and then went to school at Eton. Upon graduating at like 22, he promptly decided to go explore a corner of Ethiopia that had never been mapped, because it was populated by cannibalistic tribes. And pulled it off. Then he traveled all over the Sudan and the Sahara, and throughout the Middle East during WWII show more in the British foreign service and military.

After all of that, he decided to take on a real challenge(ha!) and explore the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Peninsula, an almost waterless sand desert where only two Westerners had travelled before in modern memory. Upon arriving at the more hospitable and populous southern coast of Arabia, he immediately sought out the Bedu tribes who were the only ones who could brave the desert interior, and adapted to their almost inhuman ways remarkably quickly and ably. The book tells the story of his adventures among them, and it’s a tale evocatively, humanely, and at times poignantly told.

It’s a classic adventure/exploration tale, but it’s also very aware that it’s one of the last such tales, and that the door is closing on a world in which such places and cultures exist untouched by the modern world. show less

This is a fascinating true account of the years British traveler Wilfred Thesiger lived among the Ahwaris in the 1950s. The Ahwaris lived in southern Iraq in the marshlands where the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers meet before they empty into the Persian Gulf. The Ahwaris (or Maʻdān as Thesiger calls them) had a unique way of life adapted to living in the marshes. They built their homes out of the marsh reeds, traveled everywhere by boat, kept buffalos, and grew rice. The book is an show more interesting look at an ancient way of life that was quickly disappearing.

There was one surprising aspect of Ahwaris culture that is relevant to modern readers in places like the United States. According to Thesiger, the Ahwaris acknowledged and accepted that some people are what we would call transgender. Biological women who identified and lived as men were accepted as men by their society, and vice versa. The Ahwaris men told Thesiger that some people were just born in the wrong bodies. So the claim that being transgender is a new phenomenon and only found in “western” countries is just false. Transgender people have existed and been accepted in many societies around the world and throughout history. Learning about different cultures, places, and times is one important way to gain much needed perspective. show less

Thesiger writes about strange, exotic cultures the way we might expect him to write about a visit to a slightly eccentric relative. Just like Desert sands, this book is not about "a culture" or "a region", but about a group of individual characters with their own personalities, families, backgrounds, and so on. Our picture of the culture of the marshes comes through Thesiger's descriptions of his encounters, friendship and conflicts with all these individuals, not through any global show more pronouncements. Charming, utterly personal, and very engaging.

You can't simply read the book as a quaint description of an exotic place, though: everyone reading this book since 1991 is only too well aware of how thoroughly Saddam Hussein wiped out what remained of the environment and culture that Thesiger describes. That gives the book an extra poignancy, of course, but you also have to wonder a bit about how much Thesiger influenced British and American attitudes to the Shia of Iraq, and how much that in turn contributed to Saddam's actions. Perhaps not much, but the BBC were certainly illustrating their reports with Thesiger's photographs... show less

Exploring is normally a rather egotistical activity. You travel through antres vast and deserts idle in order to boast about your achievements afterwards: to publish books and make films about how intrepid you are, to make money for your sponsor, or (like Othello) to help you chat up girls.

The wonderful thing about Thesiger as an explorer is how modest he is. You get the idea that he would really have preferred to keep the whole thing quiet. When word gets out about where he's been, he's show more more likely to have problems with the local authorities next time around, and he also knows that other people will emulate his journeys and spoil the fragile, pristine ecologies he has had the privilege of seeing. In the case of his Arabian journeys, he was only persuaded to write a book ten years after the event, much against his better judgement. By this time it was becoming clear that the life of the Bedu in the deserts of southern Arabia had already been changed irreversibly by the discovery of oil.

Despite his reluctance to commit himself to the printed page, Thesiger turns out to be a wonderful travel writer. His work has a rather different slant from what we are used to seeing: much less about moving accidents by flood and field or rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven, but much more about his travelling companions. The Bedu who cross the Empty Quarter with him are presented more like characters in a novel than colourful extras in a travel book. They are all very clear-cut individuals, with their own backgrounds, worries, ambitions, families, habits endearing and otherwise, and so on. Thesiger makes sure we understand how they fit into Bedu society, how the economy and ecology of the desert works, how social customs are linked to the particular constraints of living in a decentralised, tribal and nomadic society. It's an affectionate, sympathetic account, with none of T.E. Lawrence's lyrical bombast (and certainly none of Lawrence's "Me! Me! Me!"). Thesiger does admittedly let himself go a little bit when he's talking about the beauty of the two teenage tribesmen who travel with him, but judging by the photographs he's got some reason for that... He does make it quite clear that the Bedu, contrary to what Lawrence leads us to believe, don't go in for hanky-panky in the desert, and includes a rather grisly (second-hand) description of an execution for "sodomy" in Riyadh.

The real joy of this book, for me, are Thesiger's descriptions of the inconsequential everyday discussions in camp or on the march, the endless debates about the qualities of different camels, and the infinitely recursive nature of Bedu storytelling. Even a simple request for information about the travelling time between two wells has to be answered with a detailed description of the journey, the ancestries of the camels involved, the Arabs met in the way and the reasons for their journeys, etc. show less