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and sixty years later he still felt bitter, writing: ‘I never forgave Hall.’¹¹ At Jibuti, three months before the Board’s interview, Thesiger had been reprimanded by the Governor, Chapon-Baissac, for bringing Abyssinian soldiers into his territory and for not handing over his weapons at Dikil. He may have been reminded of this ‘corpulent, pompous, short-tempered little man’¹² when he felt tempted to provoke his interviewer at the Sudan Agency, whose arrogant manner threatened to bring out the worst in Thesiger, perhaps to test him.

      The Sudan Political Service had been founded by Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer, British Consul-General in Egypt and author of a two-volume study of modern Egypt, who controlled the Egyptian government from 1883 to 1907. In 1877 Muhammad Ali’s grandson, the ruler of Egypt, had appointed General Gordon as Governor-General of the Sudan. After Gordon was killed by the Mahdi’s dervishes at Khartoum in 1885, the Mahdi’s Caliph ruled for thirteen years until he was defeated by Kitchener, and the Sudan was reconquered by Britain. In 1930, after a lengthy tour of the Sudan, the writer Odette Keun commented: ‘The success of the Sudan experiment is due to the quality of its British civil administrators…The little body of alien men that governs this country has alone made it what it is. But how this body of men manages to be so indisputably first-rate is a mystery which I cannot solve. They are all drawn from British Universities. They are all appointed when they are very young. The Commissioners of the Sudan who examine them personally in England make a point of knowing their athletic record, and their physique is taken into consideration. (Many of these Civil Servants were rowing Blues in their time, or well-known cricketers or football-players.) Their moral reputation is investigated.’ Keun added the measured caveat: ‘Still, such enquiries are at best only precautionary measures and involve no guarantee that the candidates will turn out well.’¹³ She outlined some of the responsibilities and tasks facing any young recruit, such as Wilfred Thesiger, when he arrived in the Sudan:

      His governing of [the Sudanese] includes the dispensing of justice – and to be just he has not only to assimilate a hitherto unheard-of legal code, but to understand impulses and mainsprings of emotions which he cannot possibly feel himself, and motives of behaviour and conceptions of morality which have nothing to do with his own experience. He is obliged to learn a very difficult language in a very short time, often with no other instructor than a text-book…He is forced to turn his hand…to every sort of…work that crops up in lonely far-away understaffed places…He has to be well-groomed and dignified in his person pour l’exemple; cheerful and helpful in the society of his equals, who sum him up with great quickness and acumen; unselfish professionally – not out for personal kudos, but falling readily into teamwork – tenacious to overcome obstacles, stoical to resist the material discomforts and dangers of the climate and the special colonial temptations of drink, drugs and bodily neglect; sexually austere (that is to say, continent, when he is unmarried, for some nine months out of twelve – until his leave comes – for there are no free unattached women of his own kind established in the Sudan and the English social code, poles apart from the Latin, vetoes liaisons with native women pitilessly). In short [the new recruit] has to become one of an order of Samurai. And he becomes one of these Samurai!¹⁴

      Many of the issues raised by Odette Keun had a particular significance for Wilfred Thesiger. His powerful physique had been developed and tested as a boxing Blue at Oxford, and again during his Danakil expedition. His determination to join the Sudan Political Service, however, was not matched by a determination to acquire classical Arabic. He became fluent years later in Arabia, but among the tribes in Darfur he had great difficulty in making himself understood. As for his tastes and lifestyle: unlike either his parents or brothers, he had never smoked, and he drank little. From his teens he had empathised with ‘races other than [his] own’. He took his code of personal discipline and moral integrity from his father, his ultimate role model, whose memory he treasured.

      All his life Thesiger took infinite care to dress in exactly ‘the right clothes for the occasion’.¹⁵ At Kutum in Northern Darfur, where he was posted, he wore khaki-coloured knee-length woollen stockings his mother had ordered at his request from Fortnum & Mason.¹⁶ His khaki uniforms were made in London by well-known military tailors; the Khartoum firm of Abdi Awad tailored his elegant cream cotton three-piece suits.

      According to his autobiography, Thesiger had felt ‘untroubled’ by living for long periods of time without a sexual relationship. Although sexual liaisons with native women were frowned upon, they were not unknown. Thesiger remembered: ‘Once, in the Nuer country, I walked into a hut and trod on the DC [Wedderburn-Maxwell] who was on the floor with a woman. Apart from my intrusion, he wasn’t very pleased that I’d trampled on his bottom.’¹⁷ Some writers have asserted Thesiger was ‘asexual’, which is untrue. He himself wrote: ‘Sex has been of no great consequence to me, and the celibacy of desert life left me untroubled. Marriage would certainly have been a crippling handicap. I have therefore been able to lead the life of my choice with no sense of deprivation.’ This published statement was a modified version of an earlier draft: ‘For me sex has never been of any consequence, a diverting but trivial pleasure. Marriage would have been a crippling handicap in my life, a bond I could never have tolerated, the same demanding fem[ale] morning, noon and night.¹⁸

      Judging by his remarks, Thesiger (like van Gogh) regarded sex as a necessary function of personal ‘hygiene’. He never talked about physical sex as an expression of love, or even of affection. His attitude to sex was perfunctory, immature and selfish. He firmly declared that he had no sexual relationships during his years in the Sudan, suggesting instead that he had channelled his sexual energy into other ‘diverting’, physically demanding pleasures such as hunting dangerous game and arduous desert journeys by camel across Northern Darfur and the Sahara. Sex, for Thesiger, was something one dealt with, rather than enjoyed. Once, when asked if he thought T.E. Lawrence had been actively homosexual, he replied: ‘I don’t know. But if he was, and it bothered him, he should have slept with half a dozen of ‘em and got the damned thing out of his system.’¹⁹ In a revealing memo, he defined his view of women as remote functionaries rather than objects of desire: ‘I have lived among men in a society in which women did not intrude. They stayed [on the] other side of the curtain, busy with household tasks.’²⁰ He wrote approvingly of Mrs Dupuis, who joined her husband, Darfur’s Governor, at a tribal gathering in 1935: ‘In this male society she was never obtrusive.’²¹

      Colonel Sandford had been right in assuming that Thesiger’s heart was not set on the Sudan Political Service, insofar as Thesiger viewed the Service as a means to an end, rather than a long-term career. His choked-back retort to the Board’s interviewer – that his reason for wanting to join was to shoot lion – was over-simplistic, yet very near the truth. Thesiger’s lack of interest in administrative duties, his addiction to travel and his passion for big game hunting, culminating in a dangerous, gladiatorial obsession with hunting lion, did not pass unnoticed either by his peers or by his superiors. The Sudan’s Civil Secretary from 1939 to 1945, Douglas Newbold, wrote to Thesiger’s District Commissioner, Guy Moore, in May 1939: ‘Your picture of WT is very accurate. He now realises he is a misfit, but a misfit only in a Government and owing to excess of certain ancient virtues and not because of any vices – a brave, awkward, attractive creature.’²²

      Before he left for the Sudan, Thesiger should have completed an Arabic language course at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. But he neglected this, and instead worked on his maps and diaries, preparing his autumn paper on the Awash for the Royal Geographical Society. He also wrote the introduction and field notes for a thirty-three-page report on ‘Birds from Danakil,

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