Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

A unique collection of essays accompany Wilfred Thesiger's own personal photographs of the Africa he experienced as one of the world's most celebrated explorers. SIR WILFRED THESIGER, last of the great gentleman adventurers, was, in the words of David Attenborough, 'one of the very few people who in our time could be put on the pedestal of the great explorers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.' Born at the British Legation in 1910 in Addis Ababa, Thesiger spent his early years in Abyssinia. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and in 1930, aged twenty, attended the coronation of Haile Selassie at the Emperor's personal invitation. Throughout his life he journeyed through some of the remotest, most dangerous areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, witnessing and photographing fast-changing cultures to great acclaim. His many inspiring travels involved explorations in Ethiopia, wartime service with the SOE and the SAS, crossings of the Empty Quarter of Arabia, sojourns in the Iraqi marshes and many loyal and sometimes turbulent friendships. During the 1960s he travelled extensively in East Africa, and from 1978 he spent the greater part of each year living among the pastoral Samburu in Kenya, until retiring to England in 1994. He was knighted in 1995 and died in 2003, aged ninety-three. His books, including 'Arabian Sands' (1959) and 'The Marsh Arabs' (1964), have been hailed as classics of modern travel writing. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wilfred Thesiger's birth and a major exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, this book is a moving celebration of Thesiger's enduring relationship with the African continent, and his fascination with its peoples and landscapes. Containing around two hundred photographs from Thesiger's personal archive, many of them previously unpublished, these essays explore and evaluate his lifetime of exploration and travel in Africa, as well as, for the first time, his photographic practice and its legacy as a museum collection.

A unique collection of essays accompany Wilfred Thesiger’s own personal photographs of the Africa he experienced as one of the world’s most celebrated explorers. While Wilfred Thesiger’s own classic writings (including ‘The Marsh Arabs’, ‘Arabian Sands’, ‘Desert’, Marsh and Mountain’, ‘The Life of My Choice’ and ‘My Kenya Days’) comprehensively cover his classic journeys amongst the Marsh Arabs in southern Iraq, or across the Empty Quarter in Arabia, they fail conspicuously to shed light on his character and motives, which have remained an enigma. Maitland’s biography had Thesiger’s support before he died in 2003, and has been written with full access, granted to no one else, to the rich Thesiger archive – vivid, intimate family correspondence, and his own letters, diaries and notebooks which are far more confiding than his scrupulously edited published accounts. Maitland investigates in depth Thesiger’s parents and family influences; his wartime experiences and the ethos of conflict; his philosophy as a hunter and conservationist; his development as a writer and photographer; his close friendships with the Arabs and Africans amongst whom he lived; and his sexuality. In all, this major biography of a great and unusual man will take its place on the shelf of outstanding lives of the great explorers.