The expedition
George Rodger, the Life war photographer who had walked out of Burma and photographed Belsen before co-founding Magnum Photos in 1947, had already crossed the Sahara twice and had nearly died of thirst on the second crossing. For the third he and his wife Jinx, an American who had joined Magnum's staff, prepared for months: a four-page packing list went into a newly bought Land Rover — a 1957 Series I 107-inch station wagon, an early example of Rover's first full-size estate model, registered VAC 433 — which they named Mzuri. They fitted it with oversized tyres, extra fuel tanks, a short-wave radio, a tropical roof, air-conditioning, a fold-down bed, a stove and a kettle. Magnum's archive has George's photographs of Jinx loading the car in Kent. National Geographic commissioned the journey.
They reached Paris in January 1957 and fought three weeks for visas and permits while the Algerian war intensified; vehicles leaving Algiers for the south were being attacked, so they chose to enter by Morocco and arrived at Tangier in the first week of February. For the last leg to the desert they were escorted by a military convoy of eight armoured cars and fifty French soldiers. Once on the edge of the Sahara they left the road and zig-zagged between the two great southbound tracks, the Tanezrouft and the Hoggar pistes, so as to experience, in Jinx's words, 'just about every bump, washboard, corrugation and drift of sand in the Algerian Sahara' — and its dangers: soft sand, rocks, and fesh-fesh, 'a dust fine as talcum powder and treacherous as a bottomless swamp'. They could go a fortnight without meeting another vehicle, passed motorists who had been broken down for days and a lone walker seventy-five miles from the nearest oasis who declined a lift, and moved from oasis to oasis — Adrar's brilliant red-orange houses, In Salah's burnt ochre, El Goléa's sand colour, Timimoun's deep red and white marabout tombs, the only place Jinx thought really worth the visit. Beyond Adrar, in the Touat, a three-day sandstorm pinned them down. George's diary for 9 May 1957 records fourteen hours from El Goléa to Timimoun 'on the worst road in all the Sahara' after floods and sandstorms, a night in the Oasis Rouge hotel in the room the Grand Duchess of Luxembourg had used, and on 11 May Mzuri hopelessly stuck in soft sand while they dug for desert roses. On the road to Tamanrasset they crossed the Ahaggar, whose peaks rise 9,000 feet from the sand, and went from camp to camp among the veiled Tuareg, whose matriarch George photographed at Tamanrasset.
The danger came at the end. Driving back towards Morocco with the military convoy that had brought them in, one of the escorting vehicles was blown up by a land-mine near Colomb-Béchar; the track into Morocco had never been busy and, since the first mines were laid, all traffic had stopped. 'For the first time I knew the silence and fear of the desert,' Jinx wrote; they chose to go on, threading the hills 'seething with watching rebels' to Tangier and home to England after some 4,000 miles in ninety days. Jinx's story 'Sand in My Eyes' and George's photographs appeared in National Geographic in 1958, and the magazine has since published the unseen frames. Mzuri was back in Africa in 1958, shipped on the SS Tripolitania from Djibouti to Mombasa for Amboseli, Uganda's Queen Elizabeth National Park and the Sudan border, the only visible change between the two expeditions being its number plates.
The car was sold and dropped out of sight for nearly thirty years until a Saturday-night telephone call to David and Janelle D'Arcy of Land Rover Heaven in Goulburn, New South Wales: a man at Mount Beauty in Victoria had an old station wagon that might once have been in a desert film. They found it behind a tonne of timber with chickens nesting in it, bought it, and were handed the number plate — VAC 433. A search that night showed enthusiasts had been looking for the car for decades. The D'Arcys traced the Rodger family, and on a visit to England took Jinx, then in her nineties, a framed photograph of Mzuri in the Australian bush and had her sign the passenger seat flap; Land Rover Owner International photographed the car in 2016 and Magnum and National Geographic told the story in 2018. A book on Mzuri was announced by Cool & Vintage.
