This exhibition marks the centenary of Wilfred Thesiger’s birth in Addis Ababa, Abyssinia, now Ethiopia. It is the first exhibition ever to explore Thesiger’s long-standing relationship with Africa, a continent to which he was to return again and again and in which he aspired to end his days.

At the time of Thesiger’s birth, his father was the British Consul in Addis Ababa, and Thesiger spent the first nine years of his life there.

A unique opportunity to return came in 1930 when Thesiger was aged 20 and up at Oxford.

In 1916, Thesiger senior had sheltered Ras Tafari’s infant son during the rebellion that ousted the heir apparent to the Ethiopian crown. This act led in part to Tafari’s personal invitation to Thesiger junior to attend his coronation as emperor.

The invitation is one of the artefacts in the exhibition, in both the original Amharic and its English translation.

This invitation and trip gave Thesiger an opportunity to undertake an exploration of the Awash River, during which he discovered why it disgorged nowhere: it dissipated into the desert sands. A significant discovery that contributed to his subsequent reputation.

The exhibition is drawn from 17,000 photographs from North East Africa, along with a fascinating array of artefacts and ceremonial and other clothing.

These photographs make up 40 per cent of Thesiger’s total collection, which was accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 2004. The exhibition has been superbly curated by Philip Groves and Christopher Morton, both of the Pitt Rivers Museum.

From this enormous mass of material they have created a manageable exhibition that celebrates Thesiger’s skill as a photographer, provides an excellent introduction to the lives of the people and peoples with whom he lived and hunted whilst also documenting his remarkable travels in remote and often violent regions.

Although he is best known for his Arabian travels and writings and his documentation of the lives of the Marsh Arabs, Thesiger did in fact spend 50 of his 70 years of travelling and exploring North and East Africa.

The exhibition draws from photographs from across those 50 years.

It is divided into four geographic sections: Ethiopia, Sudan and Morocco, Kenya and Tanzania, and Kenya My Sanctuary (where Thesiger hoped to make his final home).

The artefacts and the photographs interact well and together tell very good and intriguing stories.

As with the portrait of the Afar warriors of Ethiopia and the display case containing their knives, where status is represented by the number of leather thongs on a bag or a knife: each thong representing a man killed, and each of these warriors and weapons carries a good number.

Although remembered for his beautifully captured landscapes Thesiger was clear that they were purely “a setting for my portraits of inhabitants” and that “it has been people, not places, not hunting, not even exploration that have mattered to me most”.

As illustrated in the photograph of Thesiger and Erope, a Turkana companion near Chanler’s Falls on the Uaso Nyiro in Kenya.

The river perceptibly snakes its way behind them taking the eye to the unfolding vista beyond, only to be brought sharply back by the figures of man and boy erect in the foreground.

And in Ethiopia a perfectly composed photograph which records a view looking north from Tanat, where the confident figure of an unknown boy frames, and is framed by, the extraordinary and magnificent escarpment beyond and to the boy’s right.

In all, the exhibition provides a succinct and rewarding insight into the traditions and lives of the tribal people of North East Africa with whom Thesiger felt he belonged, to Thesiger himself and to the way in which he so much wanted to be an integral part of their world, an aspiration that played out over half a century.

Accompanying the exhibition is the publication of the book Wilfred Thesiger in Africa, a joint publication by the Pitt Rivers Museum and Harper Press.

The exhibition is being staged at the Pitt Rivers Museum and continues until June 2011.