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.^[1]

Biography

Michael Asher was born in Stamford, Lincolnshire, in 1953, and attended Stamford School. At 18 he enlisted in the army. He served in the 2nd Battalion the Parachute Regiment,^[1] seeing active service in Northern Ireland during the height of The Troubles there.

He studied English at the University of Leeds^[2], at the same time serving in B Squadron, 23rd SAS Regiment (R). He also studied at Carnegie College, Leeds, where he qualified as a teacher of Physical Education and English.

In 1978-9 he worked for the RUC Special Patrol Group anti-terrorist patrols, but left after less than a year. He took a job as a volunteer English teacher in the Sudan in 1979.

The author of twenty published books, Asher has lived in Africa for much of his life, and speaks Arabic and Swahili. He is married to Arabist and photographer Mariantonietta Peru, with whom he has a son and a daughter, Burton and Jade. He currently lives in Nairobi, Kenya.

Travels

In 1979, Asher taught English in Dongola, Sudan, on the edge of the Sahara desert,where camel herds still passed up the caravan route known as the Darb el-Arba'in, the Forty Days Road. He later bought a camel and rode alone to Darfur, from where he joined a herd travelling along this route – a total distance of 1,500 miles (2,400 km)^[3]

in 1980, Asher transferred to Gineina in western Darfur, where he taught English. He became interested in the life of pastoral nomads, travelled alone by camel through Darfur and was arrested by border police. He returned to Gineina where he worked for two years, learning Arabic and acquiring his own camels. He began work on his first book IN SEARCH OF THE FORTY DAYS ROAD.

In 1982, Asher gave up teaching and went to Kordofan, to live with the Kababish – a nomad tribe - as one of them. He claimed that, at this time, elements of the tribe were almost entirely isolated from the outside world. He remained with them over much of the next three years, herding camels, accompanying families on their annual migrations, travelling with a salt-caravan to the oasis of El-Atrun, and accompanying camel herds to Egypt.

In 1985, Asher was asked by UNICEF Sudan to organise a camel caravan in the Red Sea Hills to take aid to Beja nomads cut off by the current drought and famine. On this expedition Asher met UNICEF publicity officer Mariantonietta Peru, an Italian: they married in 1986. A graduate of the University of Rome, Peru was a fluent Arabic speaker who had studied at the White Fathers institute, and at Ain Shams University in Cairo: she was also a UNICEF-trained photograher.

Following their marriage in London, in 1986, Asher and Peru arrived in Nouakchott 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 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 a 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 was employed by UNICEF as Project Officer for the Joint UNICEF/WHO Nutrition Support Project (JNSP), working among the Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills, in the eastern Sudan.

In 1991 Asher crossed the Western Desert of Egypt, by camel, from Mersa Matruh on the Mediterranean coast, to Aswan in southern Egypt. He travelled with a single Bedouin companion: for almost a month the two travellers did not see another human being, and two of Asher's five camels died on the way. Asher commented that this journey was '"as near as one could get to travelling on another planet'.

In 2001, while living for two years in Morocco, Asher started Lost Oasis Expeditions, organising small-group treks by camel, mainly working with the British travel company, Exodus. Having moved back to Nairobi, he extended these treks to the Bayuda Desert of the Sudan in 2004, 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 - the so-called 'Jinjaweed'.

Asher has made expeditions in many other desert areas, including the Cholistan and Thar Deserts, Western Australia, Sinai, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Algeria, Oman, Yemen, Saudi-Arabia, Jibuti, Ethiopia, and Morocco, and has also travelled on foot in Tibet, and by canoe in Papua New Guinea.

Themes

Asher's early writings were influenced by ARABIAN SANDS, explorer Wilfred Thesiger's account of his travels among the Bedouin of Arabia's Empty Quarter in the 1940s. Though Asher later knew Thesiger and wrote THESIGER - A BIOGAPHY, he claimed that there was an ambivalence in the explorer's attitude to the industrial world: he despised machines and mass culture, yet enjoyed his privileged place in the establishment. Asher has claimed that Thesiger was never able to reconcile this paradox, or to admit that the destruction of pre-industrial cultures emanated from the very element of society of which he was proud to be part.

Like Thesiger, Asher admired and even idealized the nomads: he claimed that while living with them he wanted simply to become one of them, but realized that this was ultimately impossible, as their world too was on the brink of change. In THESIGER and LAST OF THE BEDU, Asher rejected what he claimed was Thesiger's 'paternalism', citing the questionable spectre of 'a rich man telling poor men that they are better off poor.' Asher declared that it was for the nomads themselves to decide their own future.

Asher later revoked this attitude entirely: as a member of the Deep Ecology Movement he came to believe that indigenous peoples had no choice, but were drawn inexorably into civilization, where, having given up their sustainable way of life, they became dependent on an unsustainable system. He claims that this system will ultimately disintegrate as a result of overshooting the earth's carrying capacity, and that the ecological crisis has already gone beyond tipping point.

Asher maintains that the key to understanding the relationship between non-industrial and industrial peoples is the concept of 'poverty'. Though the nomads lacked material goods, he has said, they were not actually 'poor' - they had all they needed for a sustainable life. Poverty, he says, is a product of civilization, in which some groups have more wealth than others, maintaining their access to benefits by the threat of force.

Asher has suggested that pastoral nomadism may be increasing in some places, as a result of peak oil and record food prices, and that, as it makes sustainable use of marginal land, pastoralism may be one of the best ways of adapting to the ecological crisis.

Military History

In 2000, Asher was commissioned to go to Iraq with a film crew to investigate the story of the ill-fated SAS patrol, Bravo Two Zero, celebrated in the popular books of two of its members, under the pseudonyms Andy McNab and Chris Ryan. Following in the patrol's footsteps in the Iraqi desert, Asher interviewed many eye-witnesses in Arabic, and was able to cast doubt on the authors' sensationalised accounts.

The results were published in his book THE REAL BRAVO TWO ZERO, and in the Channel 4 TV documentary of the same name, and serialised for 4 days in the Daily Mail. Asher's book reached No.5 in the Sunday Times best-seller chart, and raised a storm of controversy. Asher claimed that his main achievement, though, was in exonerating Sgt. Vince Phillips, who died on the mission, and who had been blamed for its failure. Phillips' family received an official letter of exoneration from the Ministry of Defence as a result of Asher's work.

Following the success of this book, Asher was commissioned to write a number of other non-fiction works combining military history with North Africa, the Middle East, and the desert environment. These include GET ROMMEL, SANDS OF DEATH, THE REGIMENT, and KHARTOUM, THE ULTIMATE IMPERIAL ADVENTURE. Asher has also written a biography of T.E. Lawrence - LAWRENCE, THE UNCROWNED KING OF ARABIA, and is currently working on a military adventure series entitled DEATH OR GLORY, set in North Africa in WW2.

Awards and Acclaim

• 1996 - Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature
• ? - Awarded the Ness Award of the Royal Geographical Society, for desert exploration and work with camels
• 1997 - Awarded the Mungo Park Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for desert exploration on foot and with camels
• 2008, US author and historian Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and Unbound, wrote of Asher, "Having walked the entire breadth of the Sahara himself & examined the lives of Wilfred Thesiger and T.E. Lawrence, 2 of the greatest desert explorers of the past century, Asher understands this passion, this place and these people as well as any Westerner alive."^[4]

Published Works

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 (2010)
• Death or Glory 3: Highroad to Hell (TBD)

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 the 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)

Various of Asher's books are published in 12 languages, including French, Italian, German,Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Polish, Chinese, Arabic, Hungarian, Czech and Korean.

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
• Death, Deceit and the Nile'
• The Real Bravo Two Zero
• Stalking Hitler's Generals
• Survivors
• Paradise is Burning

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Michael Asher – Penguin UK Authors – Penguin UK
2. ^ Arts: Who's been here: About the University: University of Leeds
3. ^ Michael Asher biography in Khartoum - The Ultimate Imperial Adventure Penguin 2005
4. ^ Dean King. Introduction to Death in the Sahara by Michael Asher, 2008.

• Personal website

External links

• [1]

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Name	Asher, Michael
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Date of birth	1953
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