Wilfred Thesiger ...

The Danakil Diary.
In 1930 Wilfred Thesiger attended the coronation of HIM Haile Selassie at the Emperor's personal invitation. Afterwars he spent a month alone in the hostile Danakil desert of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), which led three years later to his succesful exploration of the Awash river.

Aged only twenty three, Thesiger thus became the first European to travel through the fabled Sultanate of Aussa, an expedition which he regards as the most dangerous he ever undertook, and which established the reputation of a man now considered by many to be the century's greatest explorer.

A vivid, compelling narrative, the Danakil Diary records how the young Thesiger surmounted overwhelming obstacles and survived the constant threat of death and mutilation by the Danakil, warriors whose tribal status depended on the number of men they had killed and castrated.

Interspersed with letters to his mother, Thesiger's diary is illustrated with original sketch maps and drawings and many of his previously unpublished photographs.

Warning! Reading this book might make you book a unique holiday in a unique remote part of Eastern Africa... a must!

Wilfred Thesiger
was born in 1910 at the British legation in Addis Ababa, and spent his early years in Abyssinia. Educated at Eton and Oxford, where for four consecutive years he won his Blue for boxing, he joined the Sudan Ploitical Servicess in 1935. During the next five years Thesiger visited little-known areas of the Sudan, Libya and the French Sahara. In the war, serving with the patriots under Orde Wingate in Abyssinia, he was awarded a DSO. He later served with the SOE (in Syria) and the SAS in the Western Desert.

From 1930, always using traditiona means of transport, Thesiger travelled through remote areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. For over twenty years, untill 1994, he lived mostly among the pastoral Samburu at Maralal nothern Kenya. He lived in London untill his death in 2003.

Thesigers' journeys have won him the Founder's Medal of the Royal Geographical Society, the Lawrence of Arabia Medal of the Royal Central Asian Society, the Livingstone Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and the Burton Medal of Royal Asiatic Society.

His writing has won him the Heinemann Award; Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature; an Honorary D.Litt. from Leicester University and an Honorary D.Litt. from the University of Bath.

In 1968 he was made a CBE. He is Honorary Fellow of the British Academy and Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. He was honoured with a KBE in 1995.

Wilfred Thesiger's previous books include Arabian Sands, The Marsh Arabs, Desert, Marsh and Mountain, Visions of a Nomad, The Life of My Choice and My Keny Days.

text and pictures: copyright: Bart Coudenys... mail me