Sir Wilfred Patrick Thesiger, Unedited

by Geoffrey Clarfield (March 2011)

A Chance Meeting

I had not taken a shower for a week and as I walked into the restaurant in the northern frontier town of Maralal in Samburu country, the scent of sweet tea and roasted meat was the first sign that told me that I had left the desert behind, with all its demands for self control, independence of mind and spirit and the continuing search for ethnographic data. Like many other anthropologists, I was convinced that preindustrial life was fast disappearing and that it was the task of me and my colleagues to record as much of these disappearing worlds as was humanly possible, giving the growing under funding of the humanities and social sciences within the Western World.

As I sipped my warm and milky cup of tea celebrating the fact that I had come out of the Kaisut desert, without a breakdown and without me and my Rendille research assistants having been set upon by Turkana raiders (who I had been told by my adopted Rendille lineage elders were once again trying their luck in Rendille land after an absence of a few months) I studied the gentleman more closely.

Remembrance of Things Past

He asked what I was doing in Maralal. I briefly told him that I had spent the last year and a half among the Rendille, a group of archaic Somali speaking camel herders who had never converted to Islam. And, that I was trying to record and understand their expressive culture, that is their language and categories of thought, ritual, myth, music and dance.

Knowing that anthropologists were puzzled over the common origins of the Semitic speaking Arab camel nomads of the Near East and Arabia and their recently investigated distantly related linguistic cousins, the Cushitic speaking camel nomads of the Horn of Africa, peoples like the Rendille Somali and Gabra of the northern frontier, both groups among whom Thesiger had travelled widely, I asked him if having lived among these peoples had he noticed any deep cultural similarities.

We could hear the owner of the restaurant talking to his wife in the back of the restaurant, an exile from Yemen, who had so hospitably served up our greasy but satisfying meal. Hearing the Arabic language in the background seemed to trigger something that he wanted to say.

Thesiger had spent many years in the marshes of southern Iraq and had described his experiences in his book The Marsh Arabs. I wondered whether, if in addition to his writings and photographs, had he taken the opportunity to make any recordings of their poetry and music. I then asked if during his time among the Marsh Arabs of Iraq had he had the opportunity to make recordings of their traditional songs, as I was doing among the Rendille.

Studied Hesitance

I felt that Thesiger was doing just that, letting out bits and pieces of his opinions as if they were afterthoughts. However, when I later looked over the notes I had kept of our conversation a clear worldview emerged from his apparently random responses to my questions.

Apocalypse Now

I had almost finished all the meat on my plate when Thesiger abruptly asked me,

Roundhead and Cavalier

We went back to our food and after having cleaned our plates started sipping our tea.

Thesiger had spent much time fighting with the legendary Orde Wingate during their guerrilla operation against the Italians in Ethiopia during WWII and in support of the late Haile Selassie, who just a few years ago had been murdered by the exiled Ethiopian leader, the Marxist Leninist Haile Maryam Mengistu (who lives in Zimbabwe) and who Thesiger detested with a passion that distorted the features of his face every time he mentioned his name.

Blood Libel

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