Grove Koger

As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with an account by Wilfred Thesiger (1910-2003) of his experiences in southern Iraq in the 1950s.

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The Marsh Arabs (London: Longman, 1964)

Wilfred Thesiger, whose father was ambassador to Ethiopia, was the first English child born in that country. He went on to record his delight in the culture and ceremonies of the pastoral, so-called primitive peoples of Africa and Asia, as well as an intense hatred of progress and the “drab uniformity” it engenders. Called by an admirer a “great crag of a man,” he reserved a particular antipathy for the internal combustion engine.

As I noted in my post for June 3, 2019, which dealt with Thesiger’s 1959 classic Arabian Sands, he believed “that in those empty wastes [he] could find the peace that comes with solitude, and, among the Bedu, comradeship in a hostile world.” The traveler and writer was to seek a similar comradeship among the peoples of al Hor in southern Iraq, an area that he first visited in 1950. Inhabiting the marshy lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, an area of some 6,000 square miles, the region’s people had evolved a striking way of life based on fishing, raising water buffalo, and hunting giant wild boar. They built reed houses on floating islands of vegetation and moved from place to place in long, graceful canoes.

Although fascinated by them, Thesiger (seen above in a 1944 portrait by Anthony Devas) was not accepted by the Marsh Arabs until they discovered that he could perform circumcisions, a role that established his bona fides! Thesiger subsequently tried to spend part of every year among the Marsh Arabs, abandoning his visits only when revolution swept Iraq in 1958.

Thesiger insists that his account of al Horis is “not properly a travel book.” Yet it succeeds as a poignant record of a unique and delightful way of life—one that began to disappear when Iraq’s government started draining the wetlands (known as the Mesopotamian Marshes or Iraqi Marshes) in order to subjugate the region’s unruly inhabitants. Fortunately, restoration efforts have been undertaken since the American-led invasion of 2003.

Thesiger’s other travel works include Desert, Marsh, and Mountain: The World of a Nomad (1979; also published as The Last Nomad: One Man’s Forty Year Adventure in the World’s Most Remote Deserts, Mountains, and Marshes); Visions of a Nomad (1987); The Life of My Choice (1987); The Thesiger Collection (1991); My Kenya Days (1994); The Danakil Diary: Journeys through Abyssinia, 1930–34 (1996); and Among the Mountains: Travels through Asia (1998).

For further information on Thesiger, see: Michael Asher, Thesiger: A Biography (1994); Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing (1992); Timothy Green, The Restless Spirit: Profiles in Adventure (1970); and Richard Trench, Arabian Travellers: The European Discovery of Arabia (1986).

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