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 caravan 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 Hill, 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.
Asher has a deep ecology website at www.deep-ecology.com and writes a regular deep ecology column for the Nairobi daily, The Star
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.
- US author and historian Dean King, author of Skeletons on the Zahara and Unbound wrote of Michael 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." ref. Dean King intro to Death in the Sahara by Michael Asher 2008 x
