THESIGER, Wilfred.

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Signed jacket artwork from My Kenya Days. Number 26 of 130 copies, signed by the author at the foot. This image of Thesiger on the escarpment near Maralal was taken by Guy Hobbs for Colorific!. It was the cover art for The Ecologist in May 2000. Maralal is the market town in northern Kenya where Thesiger made his home. From 1978 he spent nine months a year at his cabin there before retiring to England in 1994. He was so enamoured that he writes in My Kenya Days, published in the same year: "it is here, among those whose lives I share today, that I hope to end my days" (p. 210). According to his obituary in the Geographical Journal, Thesiger would have fulfilled this desire "but for failing sight and the deaths of Laputa Lekakwar and Lawi Leboyare, his Samburu adoptive 'sons'" (p. 94).My Kenya Days is a postscript to Thesiger's 1994 autobiography, which he dictated from 1992 to 1993 to Alexander Maitland because of his failing eyesight. "During more than fifty years spent travelling Thesiger documented magnificently, by his photography and prose, peoples and ways of life which by the time of his death had changed irrevocably or else had vanished altogether" (ODNB).

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