A GREAT CRAG OF A MAN'
In an interview with Simon Courtauld, Sir
Wilfred Thesiger condemns the 'bloody' awful' bombing of Afghanistan
'OF course the Afghans will go on fighting each other. After fighting the British in the 19th century, and then the Russians in recent years, they've got no one else to fight.' Sir Wilfred Thesiger, explorer extraordinary and still very much with us at 91, was musing on the war. Having spent most of his life with warrior tribes, he is rather more interested in them than in the fate of Osama bin Laden. He has no love for the Americans and their 'bloody awful' bombing of Afghanistan, and thinks wistfully back to those days, half a century ago, before revolutions and the discovery of oil, when he lived and wandered as a nomad in Arabia, the marshes of Iraq and the mountains of the Hindu Kush.
In 1954 Thesiger journeyed west of Kabul through the country of the Hazaras, whom he admired as a tough farming people; but he found them inhospitable. The previous year he had trekked in northern Pakistan through Gilgit and Hunza, part of the disputed territory which led Pakistan and India this week to the brink of war. The tension 50 years ago was such that Thesiger had to endure a frustrating month's delay before he was granted the necessary permit by the minister for Kashmir affairs.
In the summer of 1956 his travels took him to the Panjshir valley, where his companions were Nuristanis and Tajiks. A previous explorer in these parts, Sir George Scott Robertson, author of The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, had written of the Nuristanis that they were thievish, greedy and took great pride in killing people. But Thesiger was not at all disconcerted; he found them to be friendly and never had anything stolen by them. (It was to Nuristan, formerly Kafiristan, that the two Anglo-Indian vagabonds went to establish their kingdom in Kipling's tale, The Man Who Would Be King — the king was beheaded.) I mentioned the city of Konduz in that part of the country, the last place in the north surrendered by the Taleban. Thesiger said how worried he was for the nomad Pathans who spend the summer further north in Badakhshan, near Lake Shiva, then come down with their camel caravan to the sheltered valleys between Konduz and Mazar-i-Sharif for the winter months. He produced a copy of his most recently published book of photographs, A Vanished World (HarperCollins £25), and we looked at the faces of the Hazaras — with their Mongol features they may be descended from a people settled by Genghis Khan — the Tajiks and the Nuristanis with whom he had travelled.
It was shortly before crossing a pass at 16,000 feet into Nuristan that he had his famous meeting with the writer Eric Newby and a diplomat, Hugh Carless, who camped for the night with Thesiger. When Newby and Carless began blowing up their airbeds Thesiger, who was about to sleep on the ground, looked on with disapproving amusement and told them, 'You must be a couple of pansies.' It was Newby's first encounter with Thesiger, whom he described as 'a great, long-striding crag of a man, with an outcrop for a nose ... an old tweed jacket of the sort worn by Eton boys, a pair of thin grey cotton trousers, rope-soled Persian slippers and a woollen cap-comforter'. Today the nose is still prominent, the eyes bright, and he has a good head of hair; but the leathery, walnut-brown face which many used to remark on is paler now. In his bedsitting-room at a retirement home in Coulsdon, Surrey, he is surrounded by memories: his books, which he is still able to read, a photograph of himself at Haile Selassie's coronation in 1930, an Arab dagger, a picture of a town in the Hadhramaut. He not only enjoys reminiscing but comments on his good fortune at having been able to travel in countries — Abyssinia, Sudan, Iraq, Iran, as well as Afghanistan — now irrevocably changed by revolution and war.
if only oil had never been discovered in the Middle East,' he said with feeling, 'then the life that I knew might well have gone on unchanged, the Americans would not have interfered, and things would have been a lot better. We wouldn't have had bin Laden to worry about.' I remembered Thesiger railing against the Americans when I went to stay with him in 1993 in northern Kenya, where he had been living for the past 25 years. He blamed them for trying to impose Western culture and democracy on his adopted country, and he thought the Gulf war had been a very risky enterprise which might have been a disaster had Israel become directly involved. We fell to discussing his life in Maralal, where he lived with a Samburu family while spending much of his time on safari. I reminded him that he had told me he wanted to end his days in Africa and for his body to be laid out for the hyenas. It would not be quite the same thing to be buried in Surrey. Mzee juu (chief elder, the name by which he was known in Kenya) managed a smile. 'I don't really mind, though I would rather not be cremated. Perhaps I could be buried in Ireland, in County Carlow, which was my mother's home.'
On his bookshelves I spotted Seven Pillars of Wisdom (one of Thesiger's great regrets is that he never met Lawrence) and The SAS at War (he fought with the SAS in its early days in north Africa, after serving with Orde Wingate in Abyssinia).
Then he went to Arabia, became the first European to cross the Empty Quarter twice, and spent most of the 1950s living with the Marsh Arabs in Iraq. It has been a truly remarkable life. In the Iraqi marshes Thesiger became a sort of travel ling doctor, handing out medicines and sometimes even performing circumci sions. Now, as I came to leave him, he was complaining about a septic toe and saying that if only he could find his penknife he would cut the pus out. When I enquired whether he would be able to sterilise the blade, he replied curtly that he had never sterilised anything in the marshes. On my way out, I suggested to a nurse that she might look at Sir Wilfred's toe, hoping that he wouldn't find the penknife first.
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