Thesiger, Wilfred (1910-2003), a British writer, photographer, and explorer, was the first European to visit many largely unexplored and remote parts of North and East Africa and the Middle East. He wrote vividly about his experiences among cultures that had remained untouched by Western civilization and technology.
Wilfred Patrick Thesiger was born on June 3, 1910, in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), where his father was in the British diplomatic service. He was educated in England at Eton College and at Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he became known as a boxer. He returned to northeastern Africa in 1933 and solved one of Africa’s last remaining mysteries by finding the mouth of the Awash River, one of Ethiopia’s principal rivers. To do so, he had to make a perilous journey across the Denakil Plain, a low-lying desert in northeastern Ethiopia—a feat that no European had survived before.
In 1935, Thesiger joined the Sudan Political Service as a district commissioner. During World War II (1939-1945), he spent time in the Western Desert and joined the Special Air Service (SAS). After the war, he spent five years living among the Bedouins in Saudi Arabia, later writing his adventures in Arabian Sands (1959), considered by many to be a classic of travel literature. He also spent seven years with the Madan people in southern Iraq. His account of this time appeared in The Marsh Arabs (1964).
From 1960 to 1994, Thesiger spent most of his time living among the pastoral Samburu people of northern Kenya.
Returning permanently to live in London, he received a knighthood in 1995. He won many awards from learned societies, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. Thesiger’s other books include Desert, Marsh and Mountain: The World of a Nomad (1979), Visions of a Nomad (1987), The Life of My Choice (1987), My Kenya Days (1994), The Danakil Diary (1996), Among the Mountains (1998), and Crossing the Sands (1999). Thesiger died on Aug. 24, 2003.
