Looking for Somewhere to Belong – Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands | Book Review

7 MINUTE READ

Yang-May Ooi explores Wilfred Thesiger’s classic travel book Arabian Sands through the restless man at its centre. Born in Africa but educated in England, Thesiger never seemed entirely at home in the modern British world he inherited. Was his great journey across the Empty Quarter also a lifelong search for somewhere he could belong?

Arabian Sands – by Wilfred Thesiger: Looking for Somewhere to Belong | Book Review

I was born in Malaysia but have spent most of my life in Britain. So perhaps it is not surprising that I am fascinated by people who make their home somewhere other than the culture and society they inherited.

But reading Wilfred Thesiger’s Arabian Sands made me wonder whether I have been thinking about this the wrong way round. Perhaps it is not always the attraction of somewhere else that sets some people wandering. Sometimes it is the feeling that we do not quite belong where we are supposed to that pushes such wanderers to look for home somewhere else.

Thesiger seems to me to be one of those people.

The World He Was Supposed to Belong To

Thesiger was born in Addis Ababa in 1910, where his father was the British minister to Ethiopia. He spent his first nine years in Africa before coming to England for Eton and then Oxford: a typical path into the British establishment.

Yet the opening chapters of Arabian Sands give a strong sense that England never quite felt like home. His return to Africa seems almost like a physical release, with evocative writing about its landscapes, space and possibilities for exploration.

His discomfort was not simply geographical. Thesiger disliked modern Western comfort, materialism and machines. Cars and aircraft made travel easier but, for him, removed something essential. He preferred to walk, ride horses or travel by camel. He was a product of the British establishment who spent much of his life trying to escape the world it represented.

Finding the Bedu

Arabian Sands, published in 1959, recounts his travels with the Bedu through southern Arabia between 1945 and 1950, including two crossings of the Empty Quarter. For Thesiger, it feels almost like this period was the making of him. The desert offered what modern post-war Britain could not: a life dependent upon intimate knowledge of the landscape, reading the desert, knowing where the water holes were, finding food in the apparent barren land – as well as endurance, resilience and trust and loyalty to other people.

Among the Bedu – the name the Bedouin called themselves – Thesiger found courage, independence, loyalty and hospitality. More importantly, men like Salim bin Kabina and Salim bin Ghabaisha became his friends. They joke and argue with him; he worries about them when they are absent.

.

.

Thesiger never becomes Bedu. Yet among them he seems to find a belonging his “own” society – or perhaps, more accurately, his inherited society – could not give him. Eventually he leaves them for good. My sense is that he carried those friendships, the landscape, and perhaps that sense of belonging for the rest of his life.

A More Complicated Belonging

There is, however, an aspect of Thesiger’s relationship with Africa that made me uncomfortable as I was reading.

Thesiger later wrote that people mattered to him more than places, hunting or exploration, and he spent much of each year among Samburu friends in Kenya. However, in Arabian Sands, recalling an earlier expedition among the Nuer, he describes feeling intensely lonely despite being surrounded by African companions. Compared with the Bedu who later come alive as individuals, the Africans in this passage remain more in the background, although he does name one man, Idris Daud.

I found myself wondering about race and the assumptions Thesiger inherited from imperial society. Why did some people become friends while others remained at the edges? Was race part of it? Did European ideas about Arab and African societies affect him? Or was colonial power important: among the Nuer he travelled as a British officer, the leader of the expedition, whereas in the Bedu world he was a guest, dependent upon their knowledge of terrain, sources of water and tribal relationships?

There are probably no simple explanations. Thesiger could form lasting relationships across cultures while still carrying inherited assumptions. Perhaps Unbelonging may drive us into other cultures, but it does not automatically free us from what we are trying to escape.

The Price of His Paradise

In later years, Thesiger mourned the transformation of Arabia by oil, roads, vehicles and settlement – by progress and the modern world. I understand his sense of loss. We may all recognise this contradiction when places we love are transformed.

But Thesiger had a choice – and he chose the hardship of travelling by camel and living far from hospitals. He could also choose to leave. The people he admired might reasonably want hospitals, schools, reliable water and easier transport. The world that offered him refuge from modernity was their everyday life. His later experience in Kenya makes the tension sharper. The Pitt Rivers Museum here in Oxford records that some younger Samburu wanted precisely the modern opportunities Thesiger distrusted; one close companion jokingly called him “Old Stone Age”.

To want progress and a good life is valid. So are feelings of loss for how things used to be. That tension belongs to every generation.

.

.

Where Do We Make Home?

What interested me in Arabian Sands was the inner journey as much as the geographical one: Thesiger’s search for a way of living in which he could feel at home.

Perhaps some of us inherit a culture and easily feel part of it. Others find that the place or society we are told should be home leaves us restless, pushing us to look elsewhere. To me, Thesiger was a wanderer in search of belonging. For a few years, he seems to have found a place that felt like home.

But when we enter another world because it gives us something our inherited world could not, how fully do we see the people already there? Do we make distinctions based on our old inherited assumptions about them even as we believe ourselves to be taking those others for who they are? 

And if the place where we finally feel at home begins to change, can we accept that it does not belong to us anymore – and maybe never did? 

Perhaps belonging is not about finding the place where we cease to feel like an outsider. Could it be about learning how to make a home among others without attachment – in that Buddhist sense of grasping and wanting to hold on to it all without ever allowing change?

–

Sources:

Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford — Wilfred Thesiger in Africa – https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/event/wilfred-thesiger-in-africa 

Pitt Rivers Museum — Thesiger biography and Southern Sudan collections – https://southernsudan.prm.ox.ac.uk/biography/thesiger/index.html 

The Guardian — Wilfred Thesiger obituary – https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/aug/26/guardianobituaries

–

Photos:

Wilfred Thesiger – https://prmprints.com/ 

Arabian Sands book – https://www.abebooks.co.uk 

---