Kitabı oku: «Wilfred Thesiger in Africa»

Chapter 1 Wilfred Thesiger in Africa ALEXANDER MAITLAND

The greatest traveller of the twentieth century and one of its greatest explorers, Sir Wilfred Thesiger is most famous for his journeys in Arabia and his sojourns among the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. Yet fifty of Thesiger’s seventy years living, travelling and exploring in remote places were spent in East and North Africa. Thesiger was born in 1910 at Addis Ababa and lived there until 1919 when his family returned to England. Throughout his life, Thesiger continued to revisit Ethiopia, which he preferred to call by its former name Abyssinia. In 1944 he achieved his boyhood ambition of living and working in Ethiopia; however, this was in wartime when he felt that he might have been employed more usefully elsewhere. From 1960 to 1963 and from 1968 to 1977 he travelled each year, on foot, using camels to carry baggage, in northern Kenya. From 1978 to 1994, he settled at Maralal in Kenya’s Eastern Rift Valley Province, among the cattle-owning Samburu. It was there, among his Samburu and Turkana adoptive ‘families’, that he wished to spend his final years.

From 1919 to 1933 Thesiger was educated in England, first at St Aubyn’s preparatory school in East Sussex, and later at Eton College, followed by Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read Modern History. Thesiger’s 1930 autumn term at Oxford was interrupted by Haile Selassie’s coronation, to which he was invited both by the Emperor himself and the Foreign Office as Honorary Attaché to HRH the Duke of Gloucester, who headed the British Mission.

Dressed in a morning suit that contrasted dully with the dress uniforms and medals worn by others in the Duke of Gloucester’s party, Thesiger felt conspicuous and ill at ease. Soon, however, he was absorbed by the splendours of the occasion and wrote: ‘You could easily imagine yourself back in the days of Sheba.’¹ For ten days he took part in ceremonies, processions and banquets. Finally he watched the Patriarch crown Haile Selassie. The Emperor under the state umbrella then emerged into the cathedral square, where he received homage from chiefs in brilliant robes and lion’s mane headdresses, their shields ablaze with gold and silver. Even at that moment Thesiger was conscious that such long-revered customs, rites and traditions were doomed to disappear. ‘Already there were a few cars in the streets. There had been none when I was a boy’.² Seeing the priests dance in the cathedral, he wrote to his younger brother, was ‘a sight never to be forgotten … you can’t even try to describe such scenes as I have seen in a letter’.³

After the ceremonies were over, Thesiger set off alone to hunt big game, following the Awash River as far as the hot springs at Bilen. Looking back, he felt convinced that this month in a country inhabited by the Afar (Danakil)⁴ tribes had been the ‘most decisive’ month in his entire life.⁵ He described this journey in the first chapter of Arabian Sands(1959):

My first night in camp, as I sat eating sardines out of a tin and watching my Somalis driving the camels up from the river to couch them by the tent, I knew that I would not have been anywhere else for all the money in the world. For a month I travelled in an arid hostile land. I was alone; there was no one whom I could consult; if I met with trouble from the tribes I could get no help; if I were sick there was no one to doctor me. Men trusted me and obeyed my orders; I was responsible for their safety. I was often tired and thirsty, sometimes frightened and lonely, but I tasted freedom and a way of life from which there could be no recall.

The opportunity of hunting and travelling in Abyssinia had given Thesiger a tremendous thrill. His family ties with the country dated from 1868 when his grandfather, the Hon. Frederic Augustus Thesiger, had served as Deputy Adjutant-General under Sir Robert Napier during the campaign to release a British consul and other captives imprisoned at Meqdala (Magdala) in Abyssinia by the increasingly harsh and erratic Emperor Tewodros (Theodore) II. As General Lord Chelmsford, Frederic Thesiger later commanded the British force in South Africa, in 1879, during the Xhosa and Zulu Wars. Although he finally defeated the Zulu army at the battle of Ulundi, Chelmsford would be remembered not for this crucial victory, but for the massacre of more than 1,300 of his troops by the Zulu army at Isandhlwana. At Wilfred Thesiger’s home in the Welsh borders were the assegais, clubs and shields that his grandfather had brought back from Zululand. Memories of conflicting emotions stirred by the Zulu relics caused Thesiger to write in The Life of My Choice(1987): ‘my grandfather … had shattered the Zulu army at Ulundi … but I never begrudged those peerless warriors their earlier, annihilating victory over a British force on the slopes of Isandhlwana’. ⁶

Abyssinian impressions

Thesiger’s father, Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger, died in 1920. The third son of Lord Chelmsford, he joined the consular service in 1895, and was posted first of all to Lake Van in eastern Turkey, followed by Taranto, in southern Italy, Belgrade, and then St Petersburg. In 1907 he was posted to Boma in the eastern Congo. In Belgrade he proved his ability and courage by running single-handed the British Legation, after anarchists had murdered King Alexander and Queen Draga. In the Congo, Wilfred Gilbert investigated Sir Roger Casement’s shocking reports of atrocities inflicted by Belgian officials on native workers employed in the plantations. He performed these duties so efficiently that, in 1909, he was appointed HM Consul-General and Minister Plenipotentiary in charge of the British Legation at Addis Ababa, which his immediate predecessor, Captain John Harrington, had helped to establish only a few years before the Thesigers’ arrival there.

On 21 August 1909, Captain the Honourable Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger DSO married Kathleen Mary Vigors at St Peter’s Church, Belgrave Square, London. The couple arrived at Addis Ababa in early December, after they had trekked for a month with mules, across the Tchercher Mountains, from the railhead at Dire Dawa in eastern Abyssinia. Wilfred Patrick, eldest of the Thesigers’ four sons, was born at 8 p.m. on Friday 3 June 1910 in one of the circular, thatched mud huts known as tukuls,which originally housed the British Legation. These huts were less primitive than Thesiger’s descriptions suggest. The better furnishings were shipped from England, and then transported by camel-caravan across the Danakil Desert. The wattle-and-daub walls of the Thesigers’ tukulwere tastefully papered and decorated with framed pictures, and the exposed roof lathes were interlaced with coloured ribbons. Kathleen Thesiger thought them ‘enchanting’ and described the Legation tukulsas ‘wonderfully spacious and most comfortable to live in’.⁷ The single-storey building housing the new Legation had a pedimented façade and shuttered windows. Sited in a compound that according to Kathleen was the size of St James’s Park in London, it was completed in 1911, and became the family’s home for the next eight years. Thesiger’s parents were both energetic gardeners and the gardens they laid out and planted have remained to this day very much as they left them.

Thesiger’s early upbringing in Addis Ababa was immensely significant, and, he maintained, affected the whole course of his life from then on. His brother Brian, a year younger, who joined in everything Wilfred did, remained almost untouched by their shared experiences. The two youngest children, Dermot and Roderic, were aged 5 and 3 when the Thesigers left Abyssinia early in 1919. As a result, neither the country nor its people left any lasting impression on them.

Thesiger remembered vividly sitting on the Legation steps in the evening, and listening to his father read aloud from his favourite books. Among them were Jock of the Bushveld(1907), Sir Percy Fitzpatrick’s story of a dog’s adventures in the South African wilds; A Sporting Trip through Abyssinia(1902) by Major P. H. G. Powell-Cotton; and African Nature Notes and Reminiscences(1908) by Frederick Courteney Selous. Edmund Caldwell’s beautiful drawings in Jock of the Bushveldmay have inspired Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger’s sketches of big game in his letters to Wilfred and Brian. These books fired Wilfred’s boyhood passion for big game hunting, and encouraged a lifelong fascination with African peoples.

During visits to Addis Ababa, Arnold Wienholt Hodson, who served as a consul in Abyssinia from 1914 to 1927, enthralled Wilfred with tales of big game hunting and tribal warfare. Besides Hodson’s books, Seven Years in Southern Abyssinia(1927) and Where Lion Reign(1929), Thesiger possessed photographs taken by Hodson on safari, many of them captioned in Hodson’s handwriting. According to a letter written by Thesiger’s father, and his own recollections, the urge to hunt originated in Thesiger’s earliest childhood. He had tried as a toddler to knock down birds in the garden with a bat and an empty cartridge-case his father had given him, perhaps to play with instead of a ball. Aged 3, he had watched his father shoot an oryx, and remembered how the wounded antelope galloped madly away before it collapsed in a cloud of dust. He remembered later sitting up with his father, near the Legation, anxiously waiting for him to shoot a leopard that never appeared. He said: ‘My father enjoyed hunting big game, but he wasn’t very successful. He did some shooting while he was in the Congo and [hunted] in Abyssinia as well as India and Kenya. I liked being there with him and it was probably doing this that got me started.’⁸

Among his other memories of childhood in Abyssinia were vague impressions of camels and tribesmen at waterholes; of white-robed priests with their prayer-sticks and silver drums dancing before the Ark of the Covenant at Timkat, or Epiphany; watching in horror, one day when he and Brian were riding, as their escort dismounted from his horse, and, in doing so, stabbed himself accidentally through the shoulder with his lance; seeing Ras Tafari’s victorious army march their prisoners past the Empress Zauditu, after the battle at Sagale north of Addis Ababa, which crushed the Revolution in 1916 ( overleaf). He also remembered a boy-soldier, in Ras Tafari’s army, being carried shoulder-high, and how he would have given anything to change places with him. The deep impression made on him by such extraordinary experiences he felt certain was a key to understanding the adventurous life he would lead, years later, in Africa and elsewhere.

Stimulated by his upbringing in Abyssinia, Thesiger’s powers of observation were no doubt focussed and sharpened by his passion for big game hunting and bird life. As his fascination with birds grew, he progressed from merely shooting, to studying birds and recording their behaviour. Lying awake at night in his preparatory school near Brighton, he often pictured his home in Addis Ababa, and the brilliant green-and-chestnut bee-eaters and crimson touracos fluttering among the trees in its large garden. Throughout his life, Thesiger was always more sensitive to visual images than he was to sounds. He was tone-deaf; and he confessed that music, however beautiful or melodious, meant little more to him than a ‘jumble of noises’.⁹ For the same reason, bird-song and the call-notes of birds may have been essentially meaningless to Thesiger–although he insisted these never failed to evoke for him atmospheric, vivid memories of the African bush. Having no ear for music, he was not particularly receptive to nuances and variations in people’s voices. As a result, his publishers complained that his attempts to reproduce direct speech were seldom convincing. Thesiger’s companions in Morocco said that he spoke French haltingly, and with a bad accent. Yet his spoken Arabic was fluent and slightly flavoured by the accent and intonation of Darfur’s Muslim tribes and the dialects of the Bedu with whom he travelled in Arabia. He enjoyed listening to drums and to the rhythmic stamping of tribal dancers’ bare feet; but, unlike his brothers, he never learned to dance. In his autobiography The Life of My Choice(1987), he recalled with dry self-mockery his clumsy effort at dancing with the wife of Sir Angus Gillan, the Sudan’s Civil Secretary, in the 400, a fashionable Mayfair nightclub.¹⁰

The Afar (Danakil) and the Awash River

In The Danakil Diary(1996) Thesiger describes in more detail the hunting trip he made to Bilen after the coronation of Haile Selassie:

I had gone down there to hunt, but this journey meant far more to me than just the excitement of hunting … [T]here had been the constant and exciting possibility of danger … with no possibility of getting help if we needed it. I had been among tribesmen who had never had any contact with a world other than their own.¹¹

Among the Oromo (Itu Galla), Thesiger had ‘an unpleasant feeling … of being in a hostile country … constantly being watched from the hilltops’.¹² That ‘wonderful’ month gave his boyhood dreams a thrilling reality and made him even more determined to live a life of ‘colour and savagery’.¹³

After the coronation in 1930 Thesiger had intended to hunt in the Sudan, but was advised against this because of the expense and difficulty of arranging the necessary permits.¹⁴ Instead, Colonel Dan Sandford, who had served for five years with Wilfred Gilbert Thesiger and farmed near Addis Ababa, suggested that Wilfred should spend a month hunting in the Danakil country. While in Addis Ababa, Thesiger also met Robert Ernest Cheesman (1878–1962) who had been a consul at Dangila in Abyssinia from 1926 to 1929 and had published an account of his earlier adventures, In Unknown Arabia(1926). Cheesman recollected Thesiger saying to him, ‘I want to do some exploring. Is there anywhere I could go?’ When Thesiger showed no interest in ‘cold countries’ of the Polar regions, Cheesman suggested the Awash River which vanished somewhere in the Danakil Desert. Writing in 1959, Thesiger seemed to imply that having decided to explore the Awash River, he approached Sandford for help with the hunting trip to Bilen; not only to shoot big game but also to ‘have a look’ at the Danakil and get some impression of their country.¹⁵

During the month Thesiger hunted on the Awash, his headman on that occasion, Ali Yaya, made continual enquiries about the river on his behalf. According to the local Afar, the river ended against a great mountain in Aussa, a country of lakes and forests, forbidden to outsiders and ruled by a xenophobic sultan. Thesiger wrote: ‘I had felt then the lure of the unknown, the urge to go where no white man had been, and I was determined, as soon as I had taken my degree, to return to Abyssinia to follow the Awash to its end and to explore the Aussa Sultanate.’¹⁶

The objectives of the expedition varied, owing to differing agendas set by its sponsors. According to the Imperial Institute of Entomology, its primary object was ‘to collect material for the British Museum (Natural History)’ and obtain data for the Institute ‘respecting migratory locusts’. The Royal Geographical Society endorsed this, adding that Thesiger also wished ‘to undertake surveys and photography’.¹⁷

Replying to a letter from Thesiger in April 1933, C. W. Hobley, a colonial administrator and authority on East Africa, gave advice and useful information for any geologist, ornithologist or anthropologist attached to the expedition, and suggestions for borrowing cameras and handling supplies of film.

Cameras can be hired from various sources but I fancy only cinecameras & not ordinary ones–you might try the RGS for the latter. The Zool[ogical] Soc[iety] has a very nice hand ciné-camera, it cost £100, they might lend it to someone who was competent to work it, upon certain terms, if fully insured by the borrower against loss & damage, but I cannot say for certain … Films need special packing for hot countries … ¹⁸

He added a caution: ‘Your only hope of grants is to guarantee the scientific aims of the expedition, geographical research or mere exploration is not enough.’ Hobley’s advice on geology and ornithology, no doubt, partly explained why these aims took precedence over Thesiger’s personal motives: ‘to follow the Awash river into the fabulous Sultanate of Aussa and discover how and where it ended’.¹⁹ Of vital importance to Thesiger were the challenges offered by the ‘murderous’ Afar, as well as the many hardships involved with the journey.²⁰

Thesiger’s story of his 1933–4 Awash expedition was first published by The Times,in a series of four articles, titled ‘An Abyssinian Quest’, dated 31 July and 1, 2 and 3 August 1934. The text of his lecture to the Royal Geographical Society in November 1934, ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate’, appeared in the Geographical Journalin 1935. Other versions appeared in Arabian Sands(1959), Desert, Marsh and Mountain(1979) and The Life of My Choice(1987). The Danakil Diary(1996), edited from the original notebooks he kept as a daily journal, gives the most detailed account of this journey, one that Thesiger regarded as the most dangerous he ever undertook. The reasons he gave for describing the expedition as excessively dangerous were: his youth and inexperience; the ever-present risk of being attacked by parties of hostile Afar warriors; the possibility of being murdered in Aussa; dying from heat and thirst during the last stage of his trek. Indeed, by the end of the journey fifteen of Thesiger’s nineteen camels had to be abandoned, or had died of hunger and exhaustion. Thesiger never forgot the dogged dependability of some of those camels—Elmi, Farur, Neali and the ‘great-hearted’ Negadras—to whom he owed so much.

In January 1935 the young French commandant of Dikil fort, Captain Bernard, was killed and mutilated by Asaimara Afar, less than nine months after Thesiger had stayed with him on his way to the coast. Thesiger was only too well aware how this tragedy could have happened to him and his followers. Instead, his expedition was successful. Having been granted permission by the Sultan of Aussa to cross his previously forbidden territory, Thesiger became the first European to map the Awash as far as Lake Abhebad, proving it was here that the river ended. With the assistance of Omar Ibrahim, his middle-aged Somali headman, and local interpreters, Thesiger collected a lot of information about the Afar and their customs. While some of his photographs were poorly framed, due to his Kodak camera’s damaged viewfinder, many were clear and informative.

Besides his notes and sketches describing the geography of the Awash River and features such as Afar burial sites, Thesiger collected seventy-six plant specimens and shot and preserved fourteen species of mammal including the k’ebero,the Abyssinian red wolf. His collection of 872 birds included 192 species and three new subspecies–an Aussa rock chat (blackstart) (Cercomela melanura aussae),a Danakil rock sparrow (Gymnoris pyrgita dankali)and a Danakil house bunting (Fringillaria striolata dankali).According to modern taxonomic methods, the latter two birds are nowadays generally not considered distinctive enough to merit recognition, and consequently have been sunk (‘synonymized’) into other, previously described subspecies; in this case the yellow-spotted petronia (Gymnoris pyrgita pyrgita)and the house bunting (Emberiza striolata striolata).²¹

As well as skinning and preserving the animals and birds he shot, and interviewing the Afar, Thesiger carried out many other time-consuming and sometimes intricate tasks himself. While the expedition gave no template for the style of his later journeys, he admitted he had felt relieved when David Haig-Thomas–a companion whom Thesiger’s mother had insisted he must take with him–dropped out, because of illness, after a preliminary journey in the Arussi Mountains. Yet in his lecture to the Royal Geographical Society, and an article in The Ibis,Thesiger emphasized that he had been ‘handicapped severely’ by the absence of Haig-Thomas, who was the expedition’s ornithologist. This he never repented. Some people who attended Thesiger’s lecture, however, felt he should have shown more sympathy for Haig-Thomas and paid tribute to the research into Abyssinia’s birds which Haig-Thomas had undertaken before he and Thesiger left England.

During the Awash expedition, Thesiger travelled in the same way his father had travelled in the past, ‘as an Englishman in Africa’. He fed and slept apart from the men who accompanied him. He communicated with them sometimes directly but mainly through Omar, his headman. Thesiger admired and respected Omar, but in no sense did he regard him as a friend. He felt depressed in the railway station at Jibuti, saying goodbye to his followers, all of whom had proved loyal, ‘utterly reliable’, and had never questioned Thesiger’s decisions ‘however seemingly risky’. As for Omar, Thesiger wrote, ‘I was more conscious than ever how much of my success was due to him.’²² As a travelling companion, Omar had felt Thesiger was hard to equal.²³ Later–in the Sudan–Thesiger learned to treat his men as companions, rather than servants. By the end of the Awash expedition he already inclined towards this still highly unconventional practice–due mainly to the influence of Henry de Monfreid, a French pearl-fisherman and smuggler, whose books, Les secrets de la mer Rouge(1931) and Aventures de mer(1932), he had bought at Addis Ababa and read at intervals throughout his journey. By the time he arrived at Tajura, Thesiger had fallen under de Monfreid’s spell. Crossing from Tajura to Jibuti in a dhow, sharing the crew’s evening meal of rice and fish, brought de Monfreid’s romantic world alive. At Jibuti Thesiger found de Monfreid’s dhow Altaïr II‘anchored in the bay’. ²⁴ He was told Henry de Monfreid was in France. Thesiger apparently did not know that de Monfreid had been deported by Haile Selassie after the publication in 1933 of his book, Vers les terres hostiles de l’Ethiopie.The Altaïr,whose Arabic name means ‘bird’, was for sale. On Hôtel d’Europe writing paper, Thesiger scribbled a brief summary of the vessel’s running costs. For the Altaïritself de Monfreid wanted £1,200. Fuel (crude oil), repairs, wages and food for the crew totalled £65 per month. The owner 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.