Alexander Maitland talking about Wilfred Thesiger in Africa

Duration 03:10 min - 04 March 2011

SIR WILFRED THESIGER, last of the great gentleman adventurers, was, in the words of David Attenborough, '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.' Born at the British Legation in 1910 in Addis Ababa, Thesiger spent his early years in Abyssinia. He was educated at Eton and Oxford and in 1930, aged twenty, attended the coronation of Haile Selassie at the Emperor's personal invitation. Throughout his life he journeyed through some of the remotest, most dangerous areas of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, witnessing and photographing fast-changing cultures to great acclaim. His many inspiring travels involved explorations in Ethiopia, wartime service with the SOE and the SAS, crossings of the Empty Quarter of Arabia, sojourns in the Iraqi marshes and many loyal and sometimes turbulent friendships. During the 1960s he travelled extensively in East Africa, and from 1978 he spent the greater part of each year living among the pastoral Samburu in Kenya, until retiring to England in 1994. He was knighted in 1995 and died in 2003, aged ninety-three. His books, including Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964), have been hailed as classics of modern travel writing. Published to coincide with the centenary of Wilfred Thesiger's birth and a major exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum, this book is a moving celebration of Thesiger's enduring relationship with the African continent ...