Victor Englebert

Photo-illustrated Memoir 

(here, manuscript excerpts plus

additional adult-book concepts)

Peruvian girl and her puppy

Children’s book: Photos by Victor Englebert Text by David M. Schwartz

SAHARA TUAREG

Victor Englebert is the sole photographer of 17 photo books, of which he is the author of seven, including the award-winning Wind, Sand and Silence: Travels with Africa’s Last Nomads (Chronicle Books). His other books include Aborigines of the Rain Forest: the Yanomami (Time-Life Books), five children’s books, and nine self-published books on Colombia while he lived there. His photo stories have appeared in National Geographic, The Smithsonian, International Wildlife, Natural History, Paris Match, The Sunday Times of London, Archaeology, Geo’s German and French editions, and many other magazines.

Under contract with Time-Life, he was the first professional photographer to photograph the Amazon’s Yanomami, thereafter making multiple visits. By horseback, he’s traveled the Moroccan High Atlas and the Peruvian Andes, as well as Patagonia from coast to coast. He’s hiked extensively through tribal regions of Ethiopia, Kenya, Afghanistan, Bolivia, and Borneo.

    His crossing of Borneo coast to coast required travel by houseboat, canoe, and foot. For the weeklong hike over Borneo’s central jungle, Victor needed eight porters because the Dyak did not use money. They instead carried their payment of heavy trade goods. There, he walked barefoot so he could spot leeches that had been squeezing through eyelets in his tennis shoes and under his toenails.

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How I Became a

National Geographic Photographer

By Victor Englebert

Note: Further below, you’ll find excerpts from Victor’s 75,000-word memoir through age 32, in 1965, when his first National Geographic assignment was published. Full manuscript with journey maps is available by return email.

    We’ve assumed that production cost estimates will determine Publisher’s relative interest in a large number of photos vs. a small number (photos throughout vs. an 8-page photo insert or two) documenting Victor’s early years and his initial three African journeys, the third earning him his first of nine National Geographic assignments. Of course, the e-book version would have almost unlimited room for photos.

    Sequel books could feature Victor’s other journeys, one of the books concentrating on South America, another consisting of Victor’s favorite individual photos worldwide, richly captioned to convey context, personal relationships, and high drama.   

    As a supplement, all books could also include Victor’s tips on photographing people: How to gain their trust. How to avoid staged looks. How to photograph people in action without drawing attention, and more such tips. As to protecting camera gear from sandstorms, Victor confesses recklessness with “Sometimes the picture is worth more than the camera.”

Encompassing Victor Englebert’s first 32 years, this memoir begins in 1930s Belgium and ends when Victor achieved his childhood goal of becoming a world explorer, enabled by photography. In 1964 Victor submitted black-and-white photos of a self-financed Sahara camel journey to National Geographic. Although the editors loved his photos, they told Victor they had just committed to doing only full-color stories. So Victor offered to revisit the Sahara to photograph a salt-caravan trip, typically made with 100 or more camels.

   On the third of four African journeys covered in this memoir, Victor’s fearless wife, Lucienne, insisted on accompanying him. Their trip included a riot of hitch-hiking adventures that began in Algiers, ventured into Niger and Benin and then into the Sahara for a 650-mile camel trek with Tuareg nomads.      

    At the outset of the fourth and final African trip in this memoir, this time solo, Victor suffered a knee infection that forced him to fly back to Belgium for medical treatment before returning to the Sahara. He hoped to begin a month-long Sahara salt-caravan journey. Because the detour to Belgium cost Victor most of the grubstake National Geographic had given him to spend four months among the Tuareg, Victor decided he couldn’t afford to buy his way onto a salt caravan as guest. Yet aside from money, every group of Tuareg caravanners laughed at him, assuring that no Westerner would survive such a difficult journey. Some sneered that they would rather not have to bury his bones in the desert. Finally, after demonstrating he was an accomplished camel rider, Victor persuaded a small undermanned group to let him work alongside them in exchange for opportunities to photograph them. He agreed to shoot pictures only when they didn’t need his help.    

    Water shortages during the ensuing four-week trek over one of the Sahara’s most dread deserts nearly killed them all, bringing camels to their knees at times. “To this day,” Victor says, “the Tuareg, whom I have visited again and again over the years, three times for National Geographic alone, remain my favorite people. But besides owing them my career, I never had more wonderful friends anywhere. And never did a people initiate me to a more extraordinary world than their own.”

   

Flashback: During Victor’s impoverished childhood in war-torn Brussels, Victor had an epiphany that made him dream of becoming an explorer, discovering unknown civilizations. Even though Victor excelled in school, his parents made him quit to help support the family. Initially deeply crushed but unwilling to relinquish his dream, Victor decided to self-educate. He mastered four languages while also learning a trade that would guarantee work whenever he traveled. After obligatory peacetime military service, he signed aboard a freighter bound for the Belgian Congo. There during a mere two days ashore photographing hospitable natives, he realized that photography might become his ticket to exploring the world.

But before winning that ticket, Victor endured years of frustrating delays. To escape Brussels, he risked all by commencing a trip by motor scooter from Belgium to Morocco and then the entire length of often-roadless Africa, where this memoir begins.

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LEAD EPISODE <maps will accompany>

Under the stars, the West African savanna stretched all around me. At the end of a hard day on a Vespa scooter, I lay on my sleeping bag, tormented by mosquitoes but too hot to slip inside. Like a faithful little horse, the Vespa had carried me all the way from Brussels, my Belgian hometown. I hoped it would take me as far as Cape Town, at the southern tip of Africa.

     From Belgium I had traveled through France, Spain, Morocco, the Sahara, and French Sudan (today called Mali).

I was now in Ansongo, along the Niger River in the Niger Republic. The year was 1957, and I was 24. 

    Though tired, I could not sleep. Here in the dry Sahel, savanna that stretches along the Sahara’s southern fringe,

as in the Sahara itself, the clear night air seemed to draw

the stars much closer. Each night, sleeping out, I had been transfixed by them.

     Such nights always remind me of a sleepless night in Belgium when I was 15. Then, as now in Niger, I was staring at the stars and thinking that they were smiling at me. I had just overcome the most daunting challenge I had known. Ever since boyhood, I’d hoped to become an explorer and experience nights like those I was now experiencing—far, far from small crowded Belgium.

     At 15, I had accepted the stars’ twinkling as a promise. In Niger I was beginning to achieve my boyhood dream. But I desperately needed the stars to keep winking at me supportively. For until recently, my life and efforts had led me nowhere. To have ridden my small Vespa all the way here was a first encouraging step. But the odds against me were mind-boggling, and my future remained a blank slate.

    Though I had read widely, I had only a ninth-grade education. In a confused way, I still hoped one day to become an explorer and documentary photographer, a magazine photographer. I knew of only one great photo magazine. And that was Paris Match, which was the French equivalent of Life magazine in the U.S.

     But how do you get the opportunity to work for such a publication? I had recently heard mention of National Geographic magazine, but that was across the Atlantic, in another world. Yet I had no idea how small the world really was. Nor could I know that my stories would eventually appear in both Paris Match and National Geographic, and in other prestigious magazines as well as in books for adults and children, some that I would also write.

     For now, I simply hoped to write a book on my journey. I had read countless books on exploration and adventure travel. Perhaps I could make a living from writing books on my explorations.

    That night, as a great wind finally blew the mosquitoes away, I fell asleep. But soon all hell broke loose. Great black clouds obliterated the stars. A tempestuous wind was walloping the savanna, bending trees in its way. I looked for my tent, but realized I had lost it. No doubt like other things I had lost, it had probably fallen from the Vespa as it rattled over washboard trails.

     Lightning began striking trees that then crashed in flames around me. Although the Vespa had long lost its headlight to

a fall, flames surging toward the sky gave me enough light to try to ride away. But fires spread ahead of me faster than I could outrace them. So I stopped in a clearing, away from big trees and encircling fires that could reach my gas tank. Just then the black sky dumped torrential rain, little by little extinguishing the fires. With no protection other than a light sleeping bag, I was quickly soaked to the bone and no longer able to think clearly.

**********

     My luck started at age nine with an epiphany that would set the course of the rest of my life. At a public library in my native Brussels, as I opened a comic book on the life of Christopher Columbus, my eyes fixed on an illustration still engraved in my mind. It showed Columbus wading through the surf toward a golden Caribbean beach shaded by palm trees. Armored crewmen followed, and in the background

their anchored caravel floated on a quiet blue sea. On the beach, Indians bedecked with feathers and gold awaited on their knees to greet the explorers. 

     How beautiful the world must be, I thought. And how many people like these must be awaiting my discovery. How wonderful it would be to seek them out.

     I resolved that I, too, would become an explorer.  Like Columbus, I would one day command a caravel and sail it to new continents.  I had no idea of how preposterous that dream was, but little by little, overcoming challenge after challenge, never giving up, never listening to reason, I would end up living my dream beyond my wildest imagination.

*********

    

    During the war, we were constantly hungry, and long after the war we still resembled walking skeletons. At noon we ate at a free soup kitchen––a slice of salami so thin it was nearly transparent, one lettuce leaf, and half a small potato, and such.    

    While the British and Americans bombarded us, Jean-Pierre and I spent many of our school hours underground. At night, with no basement of our own and no nearby bomb shelter, we covered our heads with our pillows. Unable to afford firewood or coal, we tried to keep warm during winter nights by sleeping in the same bed with our mother.  Sometimes Mother sent Jean-Pierre and me out with a bucket to pick pieces of coal dropped by trains on a railway a couple miles away. If we failed to bring back enough, she sent us back. One day when the three of us were out in the street, bombs started falling nearby. We flattened ourselves against a door as shrapnel whizzed past us and bounced off the pavement.

*********

     After the war, my father had returned to a waiter’s job. But he was too proud a man for such a job. He was friendly and warm, but he would quit his jobs over the slightest affront to his dignity, whether coming from a boss or a customer. And in defending that dignity he did not hesitate to grab the offender by the tie. That occurred often, for waiters in Belgium were not treated well in those days. Yet since he was very handsome, well-bred, and professional, he never lost a day of work.

    After eight months of clerking, I saw no future in my office job. So my father suggested, “Why don’t you learn to be a mechanic?  With those skills, you could buy an old motorcycle, repair it yourself, and use it to travel.”  I liked that idea, and my mother bought me a blue coveralls. I was to start at 6 a.m. the next day as an apprentice in a garage, on the square down the street.

     That night, from my bed in our small apartment, I heard

my father crying as he talked to my mother.  His restaurant colleagues had asked him if he did not feel sorry for his son, who would soon be sitting on the garage sidewalk, his back against the wall, eating his lunch sandwich with black greasy hands. So the next day, my parents stopped me from going

to the garage, and my father came up with a better idea.

     He asked, “Why don’t you become a waiter too? You will earn more than you do now and save more money to travel.  As a waiter, with your good breeding and language skills, you will never be unemployed, whether in Belgium or wherever your fantasy will take you.  And when, having spent the last

of your money on a trip, you will find a new job the day you return.”

*********

    About that time, a friend at work would sometimes taunt

me with a few playful soft punches. Unable to elude or block

his punches and return them annoyed me a lot, for I could

not tolerate being the underdog. So I enrolled at a boxing academy. I quickly became so good at boxing that I started wondering whether boxing could someday pay my way to the world’s wild places. However, as I began facing better boxers, my face started showing the blows in ever grimmer colors. At the time I was working in Brussels’ most elegant restaurant, the Savoy, whose first maitre d’hôtel was my uncle.

     “You’re starting to look like a street fighter,” he said. “Think how our refined customers must feel looking at your face when you place their lobster bisque in front of them. If you continue coming to work with black eyes and scraped cheeks, I will have to ask you to stop working here.” As I had no choice, I stopped boxing and took up judo. Still, my good friend who initially sparred with me knew better than to challenge me now.

*********

    As soon as the Belgian army released me from duty

in 1954 at age 21, I took a train to Antwerp, hoping to find employment on a ship bound for South America. Once across the ocean, I planned to run off and find my way to the Amazon.  But at Antwerp, only one ship would be leaving soon, and it was bound for the Congo, then a Belgian colony. Though disappointed, I signed on.

    Fifteen days later, I woke at dawn to realize that the ship had stopped pitching. Looking through my cabin’s porthole I saw that we were now gliding up the majestic Congo River. The river flowed between two walls of rainforest whose banks were dotted with huts and smoking breakfast fires. In our wake, athletic fishermen were throwing nets into the water from small dugouts that danced in the waves the ship created in its wake. Like that comic-book illustration of Columbus once had, the scene had a fantastic impact on my brain. What was there not to love about Africa as well?

     During the only two free days that I was given during the ship’s two weeks at the Matadi Harbor, I hiked to a distant village where the people gave me a hut to spend the night. Unaware of colonial rules, I politely addressed everyone as Monsieur and Madame, which would later raise my compatriots’ anger. But it probably made me the most popular white man the natives had ever dealt with. When I left the village, those wonderful people wanted to load my arms with live chickens, eggs, pineapples, and bananas. Yet I was the one in their debt, for photographing them had given me a second epiphany.

    It occurred to me that my small camera could be my key to the world. I could one day shoot pictures for Paris Match. That quest was far sooner conceived than achieved. But now at last I could see the path I had been seeking for so long. I was blissfully ignorant of the challenges ahead but ready to face anything in order to live a life of my choice.

*********

    In 1957, Algeria was fighting its independence war against France, and its fellaghas, or rebels, had a penchant for slitting the throats of captured enemies. Talking to French soldiers, who boasted of murderous cowardly acts, I learned that the French were just as barbaric as the fellaghas. Unfortunately, wars bring out the worst in men.

     Because of my youthful impatience to begin the journey, though partly also to keep from dipping into our savings

while in Brussels, I left at the very worst season. I would reach the Sahara at the beginning of summer. I wasn’t carrying a thermometer, and so can’t say how hot it grew as I rode southward. But the Sahara is one of the world’s hottest regions. In fact, the hottest temperature ever recorded, 136°F, was in the Sahara, where in summer it climbs routinely to 120°F, even when the temperature may drop below freezing during the night.

     Traveling south through Morocco forced me to ride into Algeria over seldom-used and unpaved scooter-rattling stone-strewn roads that were rebel infested. Going too fast, I fell and broke my headlight, which would leave me lightless for the rest of my journey.

    Somewhere before reaching Béchar, in Algeria, I stopped

in a sandy dry riverbed for a breakfast break—a piece of bread. Climbing a hill to survey the surroundings, I saw a group of armed men about 300 feet away, running my way. Frightened, I dropped the bread and took off on the Vespa at the best speed I could manage on the horrible trail, but managed to outrun my pursuers.

********* 

            

    Next morning, the captain ordered me to ride behind the Foreign Legion’s few vehicles, giving safe escort to a long caravan of civilian trucks that would follow us. We left in a deafening noise and a cloud of stinging hot dust rising from the scorching trail. Quickly, our caravan accelerated on the rough trail to a speed impossible for my little Vespa to match. Truck by passing truck, I fell behind....

     My exhaust pipe shook loose and disappeared under a truck that crushed it.  I feared that the same would happen to me as the trucks passed me, way too close for comfort on the narrow gravel road. If I fell, as I often did on bad trails, one of the trucks would surely run over me. Unfortunately, the drivers were just as afraid to be too far from army protection.

     Half an hour along the trail, after I’d fallen hundreds of feet behind the caravan, I heard gunshots ahead. The caravan stopped, and I quickly lay down my Vespa and dived behind it on my belly. Some fellaghas were shooting at the legionnaires but were quickly put to flight. The caravan resumed its mad race, and this time my shock absorbers broke.

*********

    Sandstorms rose every afternoon. And there were no roads. Truck drivers followed their own noses when avoiding fesh-fesh, a softer sand with the color and consistency of flour that bogged trucks down. To keep from getting lost, I followed truck tracks, which often led me round and round in disorientating directions. Of course, I knew that my general direction was southward, but I couldn’t simply have headed that way. With my inexperience in sand, I could not have gone far. Even if I had managed direct sand travel southward, the chances were enormous that I would have missed the next oasis and become stranded in the middle of nowhere, out of gas and water. There I would slowly die of thirst, my bones unlikely to be found. But I risked the same fate if a strong sandstorm suddenly erased the truck tracks.

    At Béchar truck drivers had advised me not to drive inside truck tracks because the fellaghas hid mines there. But it was impossible not to because my small tires were unable to get through the deep sand outside the tracks. They found it hard enough to get through the packed sand at the bottom of the tracks. I felt safer knowing that the farther south I rode, the less likely I was to run across fellaghas.

     The weight of my baggage was now staggering. I needed enough water and gasoline and two-stroke oil to cover the great distances between wells and gas stations. And the water goatskin, swinging with every movement of the handlebar, made me fall frequently. The scooter was now so heavy that when it fell on my leg it bloodied my ankle, and pulling my leg out took painful efforts.

     Because the Vespa could not carry enough water to allow any delay along the way, and the sand slowed travel so much, I had to get to the next oases as quickly as possible. So I rode through sandstorms at the risk of getting lost, when I would have been safer waiting them out.

     Stuck to truck tracks like a train to its rails, I envied the Tuareg nomads. Mounted high on white or beige camels, veiled to the eyes, indigo robes inflated by the wind, they suddenly appeared from nowhere soon to vanish beyond another point of the vast horizon. I became obsessed with the mystery behind those people with hidden faces and their amazing freedom of movement in such a boundless and dangerous land.

*********

     Next day I exchanged some checks and picked up my mail at the post office. Lucienne’s first letter since leaving Brussels told me that she was expecting our first child. She could not join me for the rest of the trip. Anyway, how could I have navigated the mud trails with her behind if I hardly managed to do it riding solo? But now, rain or not, I would need to rush to Cape Town to be back for the birth.

     I bought food, but for several hours could not push any down my throat, which seemed to have tightened after three foodless days. Or was it the anguish of seeing my plans suddenly thrown into disarray, as happy as I was to have a child coming? So I pressed oranges into my mouth. I would eat later, little by little.

     My ignorance and increasing recklessness exposed me to greater risks than an empty stomach. But I believed in my luck, and in retrospect had every reason to trust it. For instance, when I asked a man where to find drinking water, and he gave me a cupful from the muddy Niger River, I drank it without asking questions. Days later, after the river bent to the southeast, away from my own course, which headed for Fort Lamy (Ndjamena) in Chad, and I was again desperate for water, I drank from the rain puddles on the dirt road that someone showed me, not giving a thought to the clouds of mosquitoes hovering above it. Without realizing it then, I today believe that I was building an immunity that would also serve me well in subsequent journeys.

     Throughout my journey, I got sick only once, and then only briefly. It happened in Nigeria. On my way to Kano I rode over an incredible 60 miles of paved road. Though the sun was also shining for a change, I was shivering. So every 30 miles I forced myself to stop and warm up by lying in the sun for a few minutes. That afternoon, vision fuzzy and head pounding, I sat down against a tree at the entrance of a Fulani hamlet, where a middle-aged man in flowing robe and Muslim cap brought me a reclining chair to rest on. He then pushed my Vespa inside a mud hut, prepared another hut for me, and helped me to a box bed inside.

     He would have given me food and water, but I only wanted to lie there and close my eyes. Throughout the night, every time the mosquitoes woke me up, I found this kind man sitting next to me. He would not go to sleep as I asked him to do. Next morning, rested and feeling strong again, and impatient to move on, I embraced him and rode away.    

    Throughout Africa, villagers cheered me as I rode past, gave me dates and fruits when I stopped by them, and always had a hut ready for me when I needed one. They offered it timidly, however, fearing that I might not find their hospitality up to my standards. I always made it clear how much I appreciated it.

     Too often, I would pass through a village long before dusk, hoping to find another village by nightfall. But in such cases I usually wound up sleeping along the trail like an animal. That was my real standard. In the rain to the north of the Equator that was always with no other protection than a soaked sleeping bag. (Plastic had not been invented yet.) Some time the next day, if the sun came through for a while, I spread everything out to dry and forced myself to eat something.

     Ironically, when mosquito clouds kept me awake, I prayed for rain. Mosquito bites, many of them festering, would eventually cover virtually all of my exposed skin.

     At bigger towns, mechanics patched my tires inside with pieces of old inner tubes. A couple of times, while I was repairing my tires, a truck stopped and a crowd of black fellows got down, shoved me good-naturedly aside, and repaired the tires for me. They hardly gave me a chance to thank them before they climbed back on their trucks and rode away laughing, as if they had played a neat trick on me.

     If some nights were rough, every day was worse—usually raining. Now, every time my front wheel dropped into a hole,

I landed not just next to the scooter or under it, as in the Sahara, but often far from it, catapulted away. My judo training may have helped me avoid bone breaks.        

     One afternoon, a deep hole I saw too late sent me flying into a ditch. The plunge tore away the whole crust covering a festering six-inch wound on my right forearm, as would happen again and again. After the tumble I felt so badly hurt and momentarily discouraged that I just wanted to keep lying there. But some villagers, having heard the crash, came out

of the bush and uneasily watched me from a distance, pitying me but afraid to come close. I pulled myself up to let them know I was still whole, and surprised myself that I was. I forced a smile and moved on, comforted by their empathy.

      Thus slowed and desperate to leave the rains behind, I rode from pre-dawn till after sunset. This was no longer a journey but an odyssey.

     For food, if I recently passed through a town, I ate bread and cheese and sardines. Or, if available at village market, fresh peanuts, bananas, oranges, tomatoes, and hard-boiled eggs. However, few markets had much to offer besides stinking smoked fish and manioc paste. So I ended up sometimes buying a muscular live chicken. A few miles out of the village, I built a fire, killed the chicken, plucked it, opened it in the middle, and grilled the two parts flat over the embers of my dying fire. I ate it all before the warm air could spoil it.

     Had I not been hurrying to get back home for the birth of our first child, I could have stopped in villages here and there. I would have cleaned up, photographed the people, and found a dry corner to jot travel notes.  With cleaner hands after leaving the village, I could even have photographed some of the many wild animals that appeared along the way. I could have enjoyed myself immensely.

*********

    In Southern Rhodesia, when daylight was failing and I was about to stop for the night, I saw a lion at some distance. It reminded me of the danger of sleeping outside, as I did much of the time. It reminded me of what I had read about prowling hyenas running away at night with a face, arm, or foot of homeless Ethiopians sleeping in town streets.

     Fearing there might be many more lions around, I wondered what to do. I could ride away into the night. But forced to drive slowly for lack of light I would not go far, and lion country probably stretched much farther. So I stood my Vespa against a tree and climbed into it to spend the 12-hour night there until dawn. For an hour or so it seemed like the right thing to do. But that became very uncomfortable, the more so because of the growing assaults of mosquitoes and crawling insects. So I climbed down and rode on for a while, hoping my noisy, mufflerless Vespa would scare predators away. Besides, any time on the Vespa would be that much less time sitting at the foot of a climbable tree, knife in hand, and fighting off sleepines.

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     At the South African border, I was nearly refused entry because I carried too little money and no ship ticket to leave the country. But my battered Vespa ended up softening the authorities.    

     One afternoon, I was distracted looking for opportunities to photograph low volcanic cones and baobab trees that dotted the vast savanna. Suddenly, l passed two lions that were preparing to cross the road. Fortunately they seemed uninterested in me. They startled me, but I was past them too quickly to get really frightened. However, I did not stop for a photo but kept full speed ahead.

*********

     More than anything at this point, I had accomplished something I had desired above anything in the world, something I would have been willing to risk death for––and which I did in fact do. I had learned that a dream journey should never be a one-time goal. Africa, like a drug, had now entered my veins and become an addiction. Soon I would buy my first typewriter and see what stories I could peck out, using just two fingers, which I’m doing on a computer keyboard to this day.

     After my return to Brussels, the Vespa Company, which had refused to give me as much as a well wish before leaving, now convened a press conference. To a crowd that included the South African ambassador, several mayors, and many journalists, I told my story, which next day appeared in Belgium’s newspapers. The Vespa Company asked me to accept a brand new 150cc Vespa in exchange for my battered 125cc one, which I accepted. They would exhibit my old little horse all over Belgium, and God knows where else.

     At the end of the press conference, a magazine editor asked whether I would be willing to become a contributor of adventure travel stories. I was thrilled and spent three months writing my story. But after reading it, he found it unpublishable and withdrew the offer, though not before giving me a few tips on how I could have written it better. His tips helped me get the story published in the Belgian Vespa Club magazine, though without payment.

     Next, I took the train to Paris to show my curled grayish black-and-white prints to staff at Paris Match. The receptionist took them inside, and returned with them within minutes shaking her head negatively. My glory had lasted just one day. I sadly realized that I needed to learn how to write for publication and to improve my photography.

*********

    In 1963, after my family and I arrived in New York, a restaurant patron took interest in me and suggested I use his name in gaining an interview with his friend, Mr. Demargitay, at the Magnum photo agency. I did so on my next day off. Having always worked too many hours to sleep long enough, let alone to take photographs, I had little to show––all of it in black-and-white. This included better prints of my Vespa journey, some shots of my kids, and photography-school assignments. However, as happened at Paris Match, Mr. Demargitay quickly laughed me out of his office. I learned much later that Magnum was the world’s most prestigious photo agency, open only to the world’s top photojournalists.

     Though that rejection was another blow, I knew I could shoot better photos. Much better. Just give me some shooting time, I told myself, and you’ll see what I can do. Rather than discouraging me, negative comments always stimulated me to prove my critics wrong. On my subway ride home, I decided that now was the time to return to Africa. This time Lucienne put a condition on it: “Only if you take me along.”

*********

    As I’m demonstrating in the photo below right, Tuareg saddle their camels in front of the hump, where the rider’s legs have no place to go but forward, with bare feet resting on the animal’s neck. The more so since their saddles are wide and flat rather than convex, and would cut into the inside of a rider’s thighs if he let his legs hang down either side.  The great advantage of the Tuareg saddle is that it gives the rider additional control over his mount.  Pushing a foot repeatedly against the vertical part of the swan-like camel’s neck will make it accelerate. After stopping the camel by pulling on its nose line, repeated pressure downward on its neck tells the camel to drop on its knees and then settle backward, allowing you to dismount. So the Tuareg use whips only sparingly.

     In my distress, I had done everything wrong. I had left two cameras dangling from my neck instead of first putting them back into my camera bag. And while holding them with both hands to keep them from banging against each other, I had dropped the nose rope so that I had no way to stop or at least slow the camel down. I also had to control the camera bag, which swung wildly from my shoulder.

     Somehow I managed to stay on board until catching up with Lucienne and our guides, who had traveled far ahead. However, there the camel stopped so abruptly that I was thrown headlong at the feet of the other camels. Fortunately, both the cameras and I suffered only minor damage.

*********

That evening Abdullah returned with Lucienne’s sandals, and we received new visits from another Tuareg camp nearby. Later, the wind brought us a song, based on women’s voices and a rhythmic drumming. We stopped to listen, and seeing our interest, Adambo and Abdullah offered to take us there, which we accepted.    

    We found two young girls sitting on the ground facing each other while nasally singing a monotonous yet beautiful song, on a blend of plaintiff minor notes and major notes which seemed to bounce off each other. One girl kept rhythm by beating an empty oil can, the other by hitting the ground with a calabash. A young man rode a camel around the girls in such a way that the camel appeared to be dancing. Silhouettes of other camel riders were approaching.

     This had started spontaneously, but as the girls intensified their efforts, an older woman recognized a performance developing. She fetched a goat skin and gave it to a third girl to wet it inside a basin. Abdullah returned with a tendé, a wooden mortar, and some palm leaves. With Adambo he quickly braided a rope out of the leaves and used it to tie the wet skin over the tendé. Now the girls had a real drum to beat, and the increasing gathering of young women and men had a reason to also be known officially as a tendé, taking its name from the mortar at its base.

     By now several young women were sitting around the two girls and their improvised drum and adding their voices to the choir while clapping their hands. More mounted camels were now dancing around the girls. The rest of the Tuareg had formed a larger circle around the young performers and other women. Lucienne and I sat on the ground near the girls, also rhythmically clapping our hands.

The riders, majestic and tightly veiled on high camels acted haughtily.  Once in a while, one of them pranced his camel through the circle. Later, from opposite sides of the circle, two riders crossed their camels simultaneously, and then three. Displaying the grace and elegance of ballerinas, the camels hardly seemed to touch the ground.

The highly mounted Tuareg silhouettes that brushed past us seemed gigantic from our sitting position as they threw their long shadows over us.

     In striking contrast, bareheaded adolescents on smaller but nervous camels, galloped wildly across the circle. Not old enough to wear the tagilmust, the boys’ heads were shaven except for a long crest of hair, somewhat like that of Mohican Indians. Rowdily whooping and brandishing whips or lances, they pulled loud protests from their mounts. In one of those rushes, one of the young riders and his camel fell head over heels into the center of the circle. But he was up again in a jiffy, helping his moaning young camel stand up. The poor beast’s neck was crooked under its ungainly body, but it was quickly galloping again. The adults showed no disapproval. With the full moon casting a silvery light on the event, more Tuareg arrived to join in the fun, now numbering about 20 people.

At one point, one woman unceremoniously placed her baby in Lucienne’s lap so she’d be free to clap. The women’s high-pitched voices sounded as if wrested from deep down their throats. Their songs, rising to the sky, left us bewitched.

     Reluctantly around midnight, as the tendé was winding down, Lucienne and I departed to our sleeping bags so we could rise early in the morning. This left only the younger ones, including our two Tuareg friends, to keep the gathering going a bit longer. Now the evening would end with an ahal.

     For this, the most popular girl, or girls, would move apart to sit on a blanket, followed by one or more suitors who would delight in their poetry, or their skill with the imzad, the one-string Tuareg violin. Later, a young couple would perhaps move away to rub noses (the Tuareg do not kiss on the mouth), or indulge their sexuality further. Virginity is not required from Tuareg women.

************

     On Lucienne’s and my return from Africa, I had sent my black-and-white photos to National Geographic. Then, a year later, finding myself in Washington, I visited the magazine unannounced, as I had done at Paris Match, and was directed to Charles Allmon, the assistant illustrations editor, who had been given my pictures. It was that easy in those days to see an editor, and I did not know the recommended protocol anyway.

     “I apologize for sitting on your work for so long,” he said. “The fact is that we liked it enough to have considered publishing it. To do it would be exceptional, for we recently stopped using black-and-white photography. To be honest, the chances we end up doing it are getting remote.”

     “I’ll go back to the Sahara,” I offered. “I’ll travel with a Tuareg salt caravan if you want. And I’ll shoot color this time.”

     “Sounds good. I’ll discuss it with my colleagues.”

     A few days later, he and two other editors were on the phone with me. They said they would send me money and a contract that would state, among other things, that I would be undertaking that adventure at my own risk and would not get a penny more. 

*********

Agent’s note: With that financial grubstake from NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, Victor returned to the Sahara. At the outset of this fourth and final African trip in the memoir, Victor suffered a knee infection that forced him to fly back to Belgium for medical treatment before returning to the Sahara. He hoped to begin a month-long Sahara salt-caravan journey. Because the detour to Belgium cost Victor most of the grubstake National Geographic had given him to spend four months among the Tuareg, Victor decided he couldn’t afford to buy his way onto a salt caravan as guest. Yet aside from money, every group of Tuareg caravanners laughed at him, assuring that no Westerner would survive such a difficult journey. Some sneered that they would rather not have to bury his bones in the desert. Finally, after demonstrating he was an accomplished camel rider, Victor persuaded a small undermanned group to let him work alongside them in exchange for opportunities to photograph them. He agreed to shoot pictures only when they didn’t need his help.    

    Water shortages during the ensuing four-week trek over one of the Sahara’s most dread deserts nearly killed them all, bringing camels to their knees at times.

    The following concludes Victor’s 9,000-word diary-like account his 22-day experience as a worker on a salt caravan with more than 100 camels in the Sahara’s most dread desert, the Ténéré. Helpful definition here: The “tagilmust” (in the final sentence) is a very long length of fabric the Tuareg use to create their headband and face veil. That sentence epitomizes a brand of humor typical, apparently, of male friends throughout the world.

.... The time has come to part from my friends, and I suddenly feel greater anguish returning to the other world than I experienced entering the Ténéré. Changed by my experience with the Tuareg, I feel I’m a different person than I was a month ago. Yet, with "civilization" at hand, my month-long journey no longer seems real. Was it all a dream, a beautiful dream that I will remember with growing nostalgia as I age? Or did I really live for a while in a parallel world? I cannot say. All I know for sure is that I now feel extremely sad to be leaving my friends.

     With Agadés only a two-hour march away, the four Kanuri are now leaving, and I will follow them there. My friends will later bring my luggage to the house of one of the Kanuri's friends.

     Through the slit of his veil, Saidu's eyes are warm with friendship as he takes my hands in his. A knot in my throat stops me from saying much, but we understand each other. "Bellafia," he says. "Farewell." I walk away in Tuareg fashion without looking back, but a shrill cry forces me to turn around.

     "You're good with camels," yells Saidu, "but your tagilmust is too short."   

 

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Author’s note: On that fourth trip to Africa I traveled with the caravan, up to 16 hours a day, often without water to the limit of survival, and with very little food, my duties were close to that of a slave. But I count those days as the most extraordinary, most wonderful, most happy days I ever lived. There is something indescribable about the desert and its people.  No wonder three of the world’s greatest religions were born in the desert.

   To this day, the Tuareg, whom I have visited again and again over the years, three times for National Geographic alone, remain my favorite people. But besides owing them my career, I never had more wonderful friends anywhere. And never did a people initiate me to a more extraordinary world than their own.

      When I showed up again at National Geographic in June 1965, a few weeks after having sent them my slides, I learned that my story would appear on the cover of that year’s November issue. The room was filled with people waiting to shake my hand.

     “Never mind the limit of our contribution for expenses,” someone said. “Give us all the bills. And we will pay you our top rate instead of what your contract stated. Now, tell us what else you can do for us. Tell us where else you’d like to go.”

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Reminder to Publisher: Again, this manuscript fulfills the promise of the proposed title: How I Became a National Geographic® Photographer. Sequel books could feature Victor’s eight more journeys for National Geographic, as well as stories for The Smithsonian, International Wildlife, Natural History, Paris Match, The London Sunday Times, Archaeology, the German and French GEOs, and many more magazines.

Salt Caravan notes: Victor made one more camel salt caravan in Ethiopia and a llama salt caravan in Bolivia.

Victor also hopes to publish an anthology of his South American stories, of which he has many, most already drafted.

AFRICA

AMAZON

SOUTH AMERICA

SOUTH AMERICA

AFRICA

SAHARA TUAREG

AFGHANISTAN

INDONESIA

UPON RETURN TO BELGIUM

Victor in Tuareg garb