In love with Abyssinia

Press, 18 March 1989, Page 27

In love with Abyssinia

The Life of My Choice. By Wilfred Thesiger. Fontana 1988. 444 pp. Glossary and index. $18.95 (paperback). (Reviewed by Margaret Quigley) David Attenborough described Wilfred Thesiger as “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.” His name will be well known to those who are avid readers of travel books; "Arabian Sands” and “The Marsh Arabs” being just two of his well regarded publications. In “The Life of My Choice” he turns to autobiography and reveals himself as a curious mixture of a man. All of us have some contradictions in our characters, but Wilfred Thesiger is a mass of them. Immensely proud of his family name and its place in British history, he preferred to live his life largely outside England. Deeply appreciative of the beauty of lonely deserts and mountains and their wildlife, he can yet write casually, “Crocodiles were very common. I disliked these malevolent-looking reptiles and used them as targets, to impress the Danakil with my marksmanship.” He represented British authority in the Sudan Political Service, yet wished with all his heart that the tribes could be left alone in their age-old ways. He desired to share the life of the people he travelled with, yet made scarcely

any attempt to learn their language. To the modern reader many of the attitudes he strikes will seem obvious evidence of the arrogance of the upper-class Englishman abroad, and Thesiger does little to mitigate this judgment. There are occasionally a few tentative efforts to analyse his

own character and motives, to resolve

(or at least investigate some of the

reasons for) the contradictions, but the

attempt is barely started before he shies nervously away from revealing

too much of himself. He describes instead the events of his life, in particular the early hunting and exploring trips in the wilds of Abyssinia. There are gaps of some years which he covered in other books, so this one appears somewhat

episodic and disjointed; lacking in shape, with the main unifying thread his love of Abyssinia and his involvement in its turbulent history through the twentieth century. There is no doubt Thesiger has an interesting story to tell — the life he chose was one of hardship and adventure — and he has been called “last of the great British eccentric explorers.” It was a life which also brought him in contact with great figures, events and movements of this century. There are many interesting comments on such men as Haile Selassie, Orde Wingate, and Glubb Pasha, such events as Haile Selassie’s coronation and the Italian defeat in Abyssinia, and such movements as the missionary efforts in north Africa. “How many missionaries, I wondered gloomily, representing rival denominations from Catholics to Nonconformists were now at work, gratuitously disrupting the life of these tribal people?” So there is in the book much of interest, and few readers will be bored by this autobiography of a man who seemed out of step with his times yet managed to live the life he chose. It does, however, lack the spark which would make it a great book to be recommended whole-heartedly. Form, style and presentation are all rather pedestrian and uninspired.