Wilfred Thesiger

Wilfred Thesiger (born June 3, 1910, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia—died August 24, 2003, London, England) was a British soldier and travel writer who was a colonial explorer in the tradition of Sir Richard Burton and T.E. Lawrence. His most important writings, based on his travels to remote areas of Africa and Asia, include descriptions of the societies of the Bedouins of the Arabian Peninsula and the Marsh Arabs of southern Iraq. His works display a deep admiration for the traditional cultures of the peoples that he lived among, as well as romantic distaste for modern Western civilization and inventions such as motor vehicles and telecommunications, which he saw as threats to those peoples’ unique ways of life.

Thesiger—the son of Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger, the British consul general in Abyssinia (Ethiopia)—spent his early life hunting and riding in the countryside around Addis Ababa; he later attributed his lifelong preference for travel and the outdoors to these early experiences. The family left Addis Ababa for England at the end of Thesiger’s father’s term in 1919. Thesiger attended Eton College and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he excelled in boxing.

After leaving Oxford, Thesiger returned to a life of adventure. From 1934 to 1939 he served in the Sudan Political Service and was posted in the Darfur region. With the outbreak of World War II, Thesiger fought along with Ethiopian and British troops against the Italian occupation in Ethiopia, and he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his role in capturing the Italian fort at Agibar in 1941. He then traveled to Cairo, where he was inducted into the British Special Operations Executive. After two years of fighting the Vichy French in Syria, he was transferred to the newly formed Special Air Service and participated in raids behind German and Italian lines in North Africa.

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Exploration and Discovery

In November 1945 Thesiger undertook a two-month crossing of the Rubʿ al-Khali (Empty Quarter) in the Arabian Peninsula, the world’s largest sand desert, accompanied by Bedouin nomad guides. The expedition was at the behest of the British Middle East Anti-Locust Unit, and the official purpose was to search for sources of locust infestations, but Thesiger’s desire to live among the Bedouins and his attraction to the hardships of desert travel kept him in the area for four more years after the task had been completed. Thesiger restricted himself to the means of travel available to the Bedouins, making difficult and dangerous journeys on camelback with minimal food and water.

After leaving the Arabian Peninsula in 1950, Thesiger traveled to Iraq, where he spent the better part of seven years living among the inhabitants of the southern marshlands. He immersed himself in the Maʿdān tribe, becoming the first European to conduct detailed observation of day-to-day life in the marshes. While there Thesiger—who carried Western medicines with him and often treated local peoples’ ailments and injuries—became adept at performing circumcisions, a skill that was highly valued and which afforded him with opportunities to visit villages throughout the area. He estimated that he performed the procedure more than 6,000 times before leaving Iraq in 1958.

After Iraq Thesiger continued to travel, touring Iran and Afghanistan and serving in 1966 as an adviser to the royalist forces in the Yemeni civil war (1962–70). In 1980 he settled in Maralal, a small town in Kenya. The deaths of two of his Kenyan companions and his deteriorating health led to his return to England in 1994.

Among Thesiger’s notable writings are Arabian Sands (1959), a description of his journeys through the Rubʿ al-Khali; The Marsh Arabs (1964), which recounts his years living among the Maʿdān; and The Life of My Choice (1987), an autobiography. Thesiger’s collection of more than 38,000 photographs taken during his travels was donated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford in 2004.

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