A Real Day of Rest

A real day of rest is a day when it doesn’t really matter if you lie in bed for a few hours in the morning and finish a book.  I started Wilfred Thesiger’s book “The Life of Choice” a few days back and was determined to finish it this morning. 

Born in 1910, in Addis Ababa, son of the British Counsel General to Abyssinia, an autobiographical book like this, necessarily has a chapter entitled, “The War Years.” How breezy it is to begin a journey like that.  We don’t have to bother much for the fate of Abyssinia, when the Italians douse the Ethiopians with mustard gas.  The fall of Paris, the sinking of the Price of Wales, are all registered with dread as they befall.  But we already know that Emperor Selassie will return to power, Rommel will start to retreat before long and we’ll all have the last laugh on Mussolini.  

Thesiger served under a number of colorful figures during the war including Orde Charles Wingate who comes across as brilliant and repulsive.  Brigadier Sanford who oversaw the British plot to arm local insurgents and restore Haile Selassie to the throne, and Sir David Stirling, with whom he raced about North Africa in a guerilla band, behind German lines and who later applied his disruptive skills against the British labor movement.

It is Haile Selassie himself though, whom Thesiger singularly reveres, above all other men. From his earliest memories of meeting him in England, his dignified bearing in the face of Parliament’s craven capitulation after the Italian invasion, his magnanimity towards his enemies, Ras Tafari appears throughout the narrative as a supernatural presence, impassively bearing all with an Imperial mein, until he is smothered by Mengitsu of the communist Derg, with a pillow, in the 1975 coup d’etat.  Inundated as my generation with the popular and impossible Jamaican hagiography of the man, it was fascinating to consider the beatification cast by a sober, British explorer. 

Considering Thesiger’s various photos on Google images, it strikes me that he would probably be on a ‘no-fly’ list today.  All of his various travels were through areas that today would be considerably less remote and arguably even more dangerous.  As he rightly points out in the conclusion of his epilogue, he was fortunate “in so many of my travels to have been there, just in time.”