Michael Asher (explorer)

Michael Asher is an author, historian, deep ecologist, and notable desert explorer who has covered more than 30,000 miles on foot and camel. He spent three years living with a traditional nomadic tribe in the Sudan.

Early life

Michael Asher was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1953, and was educated at Stamford School. On leaving school at 18, he failed to obtain a British army commission, and enlisted in the ranks against his parents' wishes. He served in the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment,(1) seeing active service in Northern Ireland during the height of The Troubles there: on his last tour, in County Armagh, eleven members of his battalion were killed. Later he left the army and enrolled at the University of Leeds from where he graduated in English in 1977. He later studied at the former Leeds Polytechnic where he qualified as a teacher, specialising in English and PE, with a special interest in outdoor pursuits. Asher has also served in B Squadron of the 23rd SAS Regiment (R), and in the Special Patrol Group Anti- Terrorist unit of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) He did not have any part in the Bravo Two Zero mission in Iraq in 1991, but did make a TV documentary about it later after interviewing many eye witnesses in Arabic. Disillusioned with the military life, he resigned from the SPG in 1979, having by chance answered a newspaper advertisement for volunteer English teachers in the Sudan.

Travels

In 1979, he taught English in Dongola, Northern Sudan, where his job brought him into proximity for the first time with the Sahara desert. Asher was thrilled not only by its vast dimensions, but also by the fact that traditional camel caravans still passed through it up the ancient route known as the Darb el-Arba'in, the Forty Days Road - one of the oldest caravan routes on earth. In his first vacation he bought a camel and rode alone to Darfur, from where he joined a caravan travelling along this route - a total distance of 1,500 miles (2,400 km).

The following year, 1980, Asher transferred to Gineina a remote town without electricity or running water, on the Chad border of western Darfur, where he taught English at the local boys school. It was here that he became close to pastoral nomads whose life had been unchanged for centuries: he travelled alone by camel through Dar Zaghawa as far as Wadi Howar, and was arrested by the Sudanese Camel Corps for entering a restricted area. He returned to Gineina where he worked for two years, studying Arabic and acquiring his own camels and horses. He began work on his first book FORTY DAYS ROAD, writing by oil lamp on a borrowed typewriter. Asher lived in a hut in a stockyard at this time, and came home one day to find that the first 15 pages of his MS had been eaten by a calf.

In 1982, Asher gave up teaching job and went to Kordofan, to live with the largest and most traditional nomadic tribe in the western Sudan, the Kababish. He originally intended to prepare a Ph.D thesis on their dialect of Arabic, having registered at the University of Coleraine. After collecting his corpus of vocabulary, though, Asher decided that he was not ready to leave the field for academic work, and gave up his Ph.D to live with the Kababish as one of them. He remained with them over much of the next three years, herding camels, accompanying families on their annual migrations, travelling with a traditional salt-caravan to the oasis of El-Atrun, and twice working as a drover taking camel herds to Egypt.

While in Khartoum in 1985, having just returned from a sojourn with the nomads, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organize a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja nomads cut off by the current drought and famine. The expedition succeeded in its aims, and also turned out to be a publicity stunt for UNICEF, with a number of journalists assigned to it. It was on this expedition that Asher met UNICEF publicity officer Mariantonietta Peru, an Italian, whom he married in 1986. A graduate of the University of Rome, Peru was a fluent Arabic speaker who had studied at the White Fathers institute, the Bourghiba School in Tunis, and at Ain Shams University in Cairo: she was also a UNICEF-trained photograher of some talent.

Following their marriage in London, in 1986, Asher and Peru arrived in Mauretania, to make the first west-east crossing of the Sahara desert by camel and on foot. After three months in the oasis of Chinguetti training with camels and learning the local dialect of Arabic, Hassaniyya, they set out in August 1986. Passing through Mauretania, Mali, Niger, Chad, and the Sudan, they finally arrived at the Nile at Abu Simbel in southern Egypt in May 1987, having made an unbroken journey of nine months and 4500 miles by camel, the first recorded crossing of the Sahara from west to east by non-mechanical means. The feat was lauded by a report in Reuters as 'the last great journey man had still to make.'

From 1989-90 Asher returned to the eastern Sudan, where he was employed by UNICEF as Project Officer for the Joint UNICEF/WHO Nutrition Support Project, working among the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills, the so-called 'Fuzzy Wuzzies' of Kipling's poem who were among the fiercest fighters of the Mahdist wars.

In 1991 Asher crossed the Western Desert of Egypt, the most arid region on earth, by camel, from Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, to Aswan in southern Egypt. He travelled with a single Bedouin companion of the Awazim tribe from Kharja: for almost a month the two travellers did not see another human being. Two of Asher's five camels died on the way.

In 2001, while living for two years in Morocco, Asher started Lost Oasis Expeditions, a company organizing small-group treks by camel, mainly working with the British travel company, Exodus. In 2004, after moving back to Nairobi, he extended these treks to the Sudan, becoming the first operator of camel expeditions in that country.

In 2008, Asher returned to Darfur with team from Tufts University, on a mission sponsored by UNEP, to assess the impact of the civil war there on the livelihoods of the Northern Rizaygat camel herders, among whom he had travelled and lived 28 years earlier.

Asher currently lives in Nairobi with his wife, Mariantonietta, their daughter, Jade (8), and their son Burton (18). They live in a house at the foot of the Ngong hills, on the edge of indigenous forest, from where wildlife wanders into their garden, including Rosthschilds giraffes, leopards, hyenas, bushbuck, dikdik, warthogs, Sykes monkeys, bush hyrax, bushbabies, pythons and many species of birds.

Intellectual Life - Deep Ecology

From 2002 onwards, Michael Asher became increasingly concerned about the destruction of the Earth's wilderness areas: this led him to the Deep Ecology Movement founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Asher became aware that the industrial system was itself the main threat to the biosphere, and that the looming ecological disaster could only be averted by changing that system. Asher is an admirer of moral philosopher Mary Midgley, the ecologist Edward Goldsmith, and James Lovelock, founder of the Gaia theory.

Asher believes that his unique experience living with desert nomads demonstrated conclusively that community-oriented, nature-based societies are viable: he believes that industrial society should draw on the universal wisdom and values associated with so-called 'primitive' cultures, such as hunter gatherers and nomads, to help develop a new earth-centred philosophy. His first attempts to encapsulate the deep ecology message in fiction failed: his novels LOST OASIS and THE CAVE OF DREAMERS were rejected by all major publishing houses, and remain unpublished.

Writings

• Asher was commissioned to write the first biography of the explorer Wilfred Thesiger whose book Arabian Sands had inspired him in his early days in the Sudan. He interviewed Thesiger's surviving Bedouin companions in Arabic.
• He was commissioned to write a biography of T.E. Lawrence. Based in Wadi Rum, Jordan, among the Howaytat Bedouin, he subsequently retraced most of Lawrence's journeys in Israel, Jordan, Syria, Egypt and Saudi-Arabia, often by camel. His non-fiction writings on the desert and its people are comparable to those of Wilfred Thesiger, Charles Doughty and T.E. Lawrence.

Awards

Michael Asher received the Ness Award of the Royal Geographical Society for desert exploration, and the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, for exploration and work with camels. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1996.

Books and articles

Michael Asher has written 19 books, including works of fiction, travel, military history, and biography. Among them are:

• In Search of the Forty Days Road, (1984) concerns his initial experiences in the Sudan and his trek with nomads up the Forty Days Road.
• A Desert Dies (1986) covers his experiences living with the Kababish in Kordofan, and was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Award.
• Impossible Journey (1988) concerns his west to east trek across the Sahara with Mariantonietta Peru.
• Khartoum - The Ultimate Imperial Adventure. a much praised historical account of the British campaigns in the Sudan, which include the Mahdist War, the Siege of Khartoum and the Battle of Omdurman, written from the perspective of an ex-soldier with an intimate knowledge of the terrain and of Sudanese and British cultures of the time.
• Lawrence - The Uncrowned King of Arabia. Praised as the best biography of T.E. Lawrence ever written, Asher covered every inch of the ground visited by Lawrence during his campaigns in Arabia as background research for this book.
• Thesiger - A Biography - The first and most esteemed biography of explorer Wilfred Thesiger: Asher interviewed almost all Thesiger's surviving Bedouin companions and travelled by camel in the Empty Quarter, Oman and in Ethiopia and Jibuti as background research, in addition to interviewing Thesiger himself at his home in Kenya on many occasions.
• Shoot to Kill (1992) - a record of his experiences in 2 Para, the SAS and the SPG.
• The Real Bravo Two Zero (2001) - Asher's quest for the truth behind Bravo Two Zero, the ill-fated Gulf War SAS mission made famous by the books of 'Andy McNab' and 'Chris Ryan'. By recreating their treks and interviewing eye-witnesses in Arabic, Asher was able to cast into doubt much of the sensationalised account given by these two authors. Serialised for 5 days in the Daily Mail, this book reached No.5 in the Sunday Times bestseller lists, both hardback and paperback.

Novels

• The Eye of Ra (1999)
• Firebird (2000)
• Rare Earth (2002)
• Sandstorm (2003)
• Death or Glory 1: The Last Commando ( 2009)
• Death or Glory 2: The Flaming Sword (projected 2010)

Non-fiction

• In Search of the Forty Days Road: Adventures with the Nomads of the Desert (1984)
• A Desert Dies (1986)
• Impossible Journey - Two Against th Sahara (1988)
• Shoot to Kill: A Soldier's Journey Through Violence (1990)
• Thesiger (1994)
• The Last of the Bedu: In Search of the Myth (1996)
• Lawrence: The Uncrowned King of Arabia (1998)
• The Real Bravo Two Zero: The Truth Behind Bravo Two Zero (2002)
• Get Rommel: The British Plot to Kill Hitler's Greatest General (2004)
• Khartoum: The Ultimate Imperial Adventure (2005)
• Sands of Death: An Epic Tale of Massacre and Survival in the Sahara (2007)
• The Regiment: The Real Story of the SAS (2007)
• Sahara (with Kazoyoshi Nomachi) (1996)
• Phoenix Rising - The UAE Past, Present & Future (with Werner Forman) (1996)

Asher has contributed frequently to leading newspapers including The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, The Independent, The Daily Mail, The Washington Post, The Observer, The Sunday Times, The Sunday Telegraph, The Scotsman, Scotland on Sunday and magazines including Reader's Digest, The Geographical Magazine, Hello, Conde Nast Traveler, and many others.

Films

TV documentaries

• In Search of Lawrence - Following the footsteps of T.E. Lawrence in Jordan and Egypt, trying to asses the accuracy of Lawrence's writings
• Death, Deceit and the Nile - Following the footsteps of Burton & Speke from Zanzibar to Lake Tanganyika and Victoria
• The Real Bravo Two Zero - Following the footsteps of the ill-fated SAS patrol in Iraq

Directed documentaries for Kenya TV

• Survivors - Tracing survivors of the US Embassy bombing in Nairobi in 1998
• Paradise is Burning - Tracing survivors of the bombing by al-Qaeda of the Paradise Hotel at Kilifi in 1990

References

website: www.deep-ecology.com

External links

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