Wilfred Thesiger
Sir Wilfred Thesiger was a British travel writer and explorer whose two best-known books, Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs documented life among nomadic Bedouin in The Empty Quarter, the tribes inhabiting the marshes of Southern Iraq. Other areas documented in his photographs and described in Visions of a Nomad include Ethiopia, Kenya, Kurdistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Oman, the UAE, and Yemen. Thesiger’s writings celebrated the friendships and cultures of Bedouin he traveled with, recording his impressions of the Middle East just as the region was being transformed by oil exploration.
Image courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum
Biography
Born in Addis Ababa in a setting his autobiography, A Life of My Choice, described as being “isolated from the modern world,” Thesiger was educated at Eton and Magdalen College Oxford, where he read Modern History. At Oxford Thesiger was fascinated by books by T. E. Lawrence and Henry de Monfreid. Thesiger’s initial experiences with exploration took place in Ethiopia, where he was the first European to identify the terminus of the Awash River.
Following service in North Africa with the British SAS, Thesiger was hired by the UN Anti Locust Unit to document locust movements in the Empty Quarter. Thesiger was, like Bertram Thomas and Harry St. John Philby, one of the early Europeans to successfully cross the Empty Quarter, and his experiences served as the basis for his subsequent book Arabian Sands. Accompanied by his guides and friends, Salim bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha, Thesiger’s laudatory assessments of the Bedouin offer a fascinating insight into the relationship between modern existence and hardship, technology, commercial society, and the transformation of the Middle East by oil wealth and mass tourism.
Standard biographical accounts of Thesiger’s life were written by his authorized biographer, Alexander Maitland, who wrote Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, and the biography by Michael Asher, Thesiger: A Biography, includes fascinating interviews with Thesiger as well. The principal collection of Thesiger’s papers is held in the archives of Eton College. Additional papers are held in the Royal Geographical Society’s archives. There are a number of documents discussing Thesiger in the British Library’s India Office Records and Private Papers (see IOR/R/15/2/599). One particularly interesting letter written by oil company representative Dick Bird complaining of Thesiger’s hostility toward technology, progress, and the automobile can be found here.
In addition to his time in the Empty Quarter, Thesiger also wrote Marsh Arabs, which discussed his experiences among the tribes inhabiting the marshes of Southern Iraq. During his time in the Iraqi marshes, Thesiger became close friends with Amara bin Thuqub and many others. Thesiger documented many of his journeys in numerous photographs of the people and places he visited along his journeys. Although he never received formal instruction in photography, his images have a natural sense of composition. Thesiger’s photograph collection, which includes thousands of images captured during his travels across the world, was donated to Oxford and is held in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
