MY DESERT AND I (PART 1)
–Chief Newton Jibunoh recalls his solo voyages across the Sahara Desert
By Basil Okafor
Saturday March 25, 2006

Dawn! The sun had begun to lift its golden shield from the point where the sky and the earth locked in an indistinguishable embrace, to blast the cold sands into a searing furnace, shortly. The vast emptiness of the approaching desert loomed large, ahead, some 150 miles from Tangiers, Algeria, on the lonely road to Beni-Adis and to the sheer nothingness beyond.

The young adventurer crawled out from where he had spent the night, in his tent. Breakfast time. He was beginning to lapse into some form of lethargy, even congratulating himself for having so far successfully avoided the wild animals that lived at the periphery of the desert.

Without warning, the apparition emerged from literally, nowhere. It wasn’t of any shape or form the adventurer had seen anywhere in all of his life. It took a few stealthy steps forward, then waited. Petrified, the young man stared, as if in a trance, as man and beast regarded each other.

Suddenly, the animal made to charge at its prey and roused the man from his reverie. Drawing a grenade, the man hauled it at the monster, killing it instantly.
“I killed it, cut off its head, dried it on the roof of my car and added it to my growing desert mementoes. I needed to do this not as an ego-boosting act but to find out what kind of animal it was, which I later learned is called ‘Desert Bull’.”

Newton Jibunoh, then 27, had just completed his studies in England and rather than fly home or return by sea into the fanfare that would have greeted his return, chose to drive all the way back to Nigeria by road, across the dreaded Sahara Desert, all alone: “I was just powered by the spirit of adventure…I was going to do something that nobody had tried.”

Over three decades after his memorable solo crossing of the Sahara, Chief Newton Jibunoh, at 63, made another successful and better celebrated crossing. To date, he is the only person known to have attempted this suicidal mission not once, but twice, the stuff of which true legends are made.
A very successful man by any standards, anywhere on earth, having retired as Executive Chairman of Costain West Africa, you wonder what drives a man of that standing, a traditional chief, to abandon all the comforts of his cosy home and his exquisitely beautiful wife and lovely children, to undertake such a dangerous voyage.

Indeed, Chief Jibunoh belongs to a tiny tribe of unstoppable humanity who love challenge. Like his fellow millionaire, the American balloonist, Ben Abruzzo who, with his colleagues, made the first crossing of the Atlantic aboard a hot-air balloon, the ‘Double Eagle II’, Jibunoh believes that society never moves forward unless new frontiers are challenged from time to time.

But how did he acquire this uncommon spirit, very unusual of people of African culture?
The chief believes his unlucky childhood contributed to his personality. Orphaned at the tender age of two, young Newton learned to be his own man at a very tender age and has since not looked back.
Built with the neck and chest of a matador, the rugged and boyishly handsome adventurer, at 68, looks like a man in his early 50s and looks set, if care is not taken, for a third crossing of the dreaded Sahara: “The desert is my life,” he said, “I feel a part of it.”

Committed to care for the environment, the chief believes that “if you take care of the environment, the environment will take care of you’. At the moment, he is heavily involved with his self-funded organisation, Fight Against Desert Encroachment, FADE and believes that this is a fight that must be won. Unrelenting, he believes, like the motto of the British SAS says, that who dares, wins.
In the first part of the encounter with this remarkable man, he talks about his motivation and his first voyage across the world’s largest desert.

Please, read on:
Chief, you are one of a tiny tribe of humanity, of the kind of the likes of Ben Abruzzo, Wolf Vishniac, Jacques Cousteau, and so on, bitten by this inexplicable exploration bug. Why would a rich man like you leave behind such a beautiful wife as Chief Elizabeth Jibunoh, lovely children and home, with all the comfort, to embark on such a dangerous voyage as you did, at your age, knowing what could have happened to you, having crossed the Sahara Desert once before. What drives you, Chief?

Er…comfortable, yes…rich, I don’t know. May be if you had used the word wealth, yes, I have acquired quite a bit of wealth in terms of one’s life and what one has been able to achieve.
Having said that, I have always been in search of who my person is. Who am I? What am I brought to this world for? And what use am I going to be to my fellow human beings.
I mentioned to you earlier on that I never knew my parents, so I have had to face life on my own. By facing life on my own, I have had to adventure and that spirit of adventure which started at a very early age, remained in me. As I speak with you right now, I feel it buring in me. I feel it all over that you cannot really have life until you adventure a bit.

How old are you now, sir and at what age did you make your second trip?
I am now 68 and I undertook my second journey at 63/64. Age apart, adventure is something I don’t think I can ever give up on. I know a lot of people around me, especially members of my family – particularly my wife – who may not want me to say this.
Yesterday, for instance, people landed a spacecraft on another planet. I mean, it is human beings that are actually doing these things, for goodness sake. Have you ever imagined going into space, going on to the moon, regardless of all the crises and all the mishaps? We need to find out a lot more about who we are.
Look at those that started the space race in the 60s, look at what they have used those explorations to do to the world today.

The area of communications as we know it today, for instance, all came out of that. So, why must we just sit back, relax and say, ah! I have three square meals a day, I have got a roof over my head, I have got luxurious cars to drive? So what? If you could do more, why don’t you try?
Also, people fear death and this is something I just can’t understand. Death is there for everyone of us. It’s waiting for us. No matter what you do, no matter what you achieve, it has got to come to you someday. As the Quran says, if it comes, you must be ready. But if you have this adventurous spirit and you don’t want to go on an expedition because you may die, then you don’t have it. So, calculate your risks sufficiently enough, then put your life on the line.

You can only achieve great success if you put your life on the line – that is, if you say to yourself, I am going on this expedition and I may not come back. That is the only way you can handle death if you see it because if you’re not ready and it comes to you, you will just panic and die. But if you’re ready for it and then you accept it when it comes, my goodness, it may even find you not ready for it.

I ask for your age because, at 68, this whole thing you espouse and represent is no longer a flash in the pan, it borders on religiously, a way of life. What is your culture, what is your religion?
I have also been searching for that because I believe in some kind of a religion, but I don’t know which. I was born a Christian and even sang in the choir, having been born in a Christian home. Yesterday, I saw a gentleman, Femi Bucknor, that I sang in the choir here, in Lagos with, in the ‘60s – it was such a wonderful re-union. I was indeed a choir boy and this is just to show you how much I believed in and related with Christianity – I was an Anglican.
However, over the years, mainly because of my spiritual faith in searching for God and not being able to find a number of missing links that I discovered while studying the Bible, I went into studying other religious beliefs. I read the Holy Qu’ran, I have gone into Judaism and even travelled to Israel and the Palestine. Right now, I am studying Santology because I am on a mission of discovery and may be, in the process, satisfy myself.

But while this whole thing was going on. I went back into the African religion – the way we were able to put our religion and our faith into use before the advent of Christianity and I also found that to be very rich. In fact, I think we can relate a little bit more, if only we can begin to research now. Be it the Yoruba culture, or whatever other African culture, you will find that we have a very rich religious routine in our system.

Unfortunately, those that brought Christianity to the country feared our African religion so much that they used it to poison our minds and instill fear in our people. As a result of this, overright, we abandoned our golden heritage and history.

So, if you ask me, further, I would say that what I do is to just leave myself open, to be able to appreciate and respect whatever faith or religion anybody chooses to worship God. That is the position I find myself in right now. I remain a free mind.

Now, everybody knows you as an art patron, in fact, an owner of a museum. You are also a naturalist, a conservationist, an environmentalist. Do all of these interests and activities dovetail into the total essence of your being, your religiousity – Nature?

Precisely. In fact, you just took the words right out of my mouth. You see, there is a huge relationship between your acts and the way you relate to your arts. The unwritten history. The things that hold back the generations of your ancestor’s beliefs and the environment you are in.
I mean, why is it that you have so many religious organisations, all over? It is because people sometimes try to adapt to a religion that is relevant to the cultural being of the people. Which is why I keep going back to the African religion, because there is a wonderful link between the environment we live in and the African religion.

I don’t know which one came first, whether it was whilst I was in search of what makes the Christian faith into what it is, I stumbled into the arts, or whilst I was studying and trying to understand our arts, that I now got into environmental issues. Everything happened so quickly, so fast, as I was growing up. But I have found that I have a life. In fact, if you take away those things from me – the arts and the environment – there will be no life, you would kill me. My life is all about the arts and the environment.

The first time you crossed the Sahara, you did it as a young college graduate. You didn’t have as much resources and experience as you do now, I mean, you just took off no sponsorship, nothing. How did you do it?

Yeah, I wasn’t sponsored by anybody, not even a dime from anybody. In fact, we are talking about the middle sixties. Sponsorship was not common those days. Even my Volkswagen car that I used was converted at my own expense. People advised me to contact Volkswagen in Germany and let them know what I was doing. Of course, I did and they asked me to bring the car over to their factory so that they could modify it in order for it to be able to stand up to the exceptionally rough terrain I was likely to encounter on my journey through the desert.

Initially, whilst I made the call (I suspect, may be, because I had acquired quite a bit of the English accent) they couldn’t quite place me. But finally, when I appeared in their factory, their attitude towards me changed. They did all they promised they were going to do, but they changed me for it. That shocked me because everybody had given me the impression that it was going to be done free of charge.

Do you think the change of attitude had to do with your colour?
I suspected so, yes, that was where my mind went to. In fact, when I told my friends that I had discussed it with back in London, that was also where their minds went to, straight away. That was part of the prejudice, especially in the 60s. Though they gave me a reasonable discount, I still paid for the services.
Having said that, I was only in my 20s then and I can tell you right now, that I didn’t know what I was doing then. I was just powered by the spirit of adventure.

The spirit of the fact that I was going to do something that nobody had tried. I was going to be part of that 60s era. I didn’t even think about death.
In fact, Johnny Egbonu, one of my closest friends that was in Berlin at that time, studying medicine, felt and hoped that someone was going to turn me back somewhere down the road. I truly did not know what I was doing and it was not until I got to Lagos that I was able to say to myself, yes, you are a born adventurer. It was only then, that I started relating to my diary, about the things I had encountered in the desert and the near-death situations I had survived.

To be continued next week