by Brian Tetley
Contents
Foreword by Bob Geldof
Preface
Introduction: We Are the World
1. Kid with a Box Brownie
2. Isle of Blood
3. Massacre on the Horn
4. ‘Solitary’, Slings, and Death Row
5. Black Jack and the Congo
6. Assassination of Tom Mboya
7. Idi Amin’s Coup
8. Bloodbath in Bangladesh
9. Uganda’s Asian Exodus
10. Idi Amin’s OAU Circus
11. Lust to Kill: The Fall of Idi Amin
12. Expedition to Turkana: Where Man Began
13. Uprising in Kenya, Bombs in Beirut
14. There Are People Dying
15. All the World Wants to Give
16. Together We Can Build a Better World
Postscript
Photo Section
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
About the Author
About the Publisher
Your May issue, with the ‘Moving Pictures’ essay, was very good. However, it should be noted that the Visnews crew that shot the film for the British Broadcasting Corporation was led by a veteran still photographer and cinematographer named Mohamed Amin. Amin has not received the attention he deserves. Burnham Wore, Owenton, Kentucky
—A letter in the June 1985 issue of the American Photographer
For so fearlessly forcing the world to face the truth about African famine that governments had to take action and…for currently continuing courageous camera coverage of the homeless and hungry all over the world.
—Citation for the Valiant for Truth Award, 1986, awarded to Mohamed Amin by the Order of Christian Unity.
Any danger spot is tenable if men—brave men—will make it so.
—John F. Kennedy 1961
Author’s Note
IN THIS BOOK, ALL THE organisations are referred to by their professional acronyms: in America, the major ones are National Broadcasting Company (NBC), American Broadcasting Company (ABC), and Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS); in Canada, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC); in Britain, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Independent Television News (ITN), owned by the network of Britain’s commercial television companies. Australia has many independent stations as well as Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). In Europe and elsewhere, there are both state broadcasting and independent broadcasting networks. All are members of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU).
Communications technology has an elaborate lexicon of phrases such as ‘sat feeds’—satellite television transmissions; ENG—electronic news gathering; and, by comparison, old-fashioned terminology like ‘dope sheets’ which refer to the factual information provided by a cameraman when he ships his film or tapes. Other language derives directly from the cinema—take, expose, cut, shoot, and so on. And some, like ‘hacks’ for reporters, are journalese.
The same applies to the printing industry: ‘proofs’ are the finished pages of yet-to-be-printed books; ‘separations’ are the colour pictures divided into four or more colours before printing; ‘dummies’ are mock-ups of projected books without the final text or pictures, designed to show publishers what the finished publication will look and feel like.
In all cases, I have tried to ensure that context clarifies meaning.
Foreword
SOMETIME IN THE LAST DAYS of October 1984, I turned on the television and saw something that was to change my life.
I was confronted by something so horrendous, I was wrenched violently from the complacency of another rather dispiriting day and pinioned, unable to turn away from the misery of another world inhabited by people only recognisable as humans by their magnificent dignity.
I do not know why Mo Amin’s pictures did this to me. God knows, if you watch an average night’s news, you are confronted with enough scenes of horror to seriously question man’s sanity. But the tube also has the ability to reduce, to shrink events and make them bearable in the context of your living room. Ultimately, one becomes immune, if not anaesthetised.
But the pitiless, unrelenting gaze of this camera was different. Somehow, this was not objective journalism but confrontation. There was a dare here: ‘I dare you to turn away, I dare you to do nothing’. Mo Amin had succeeded above all else in showing you his own disgust and shame and anger and making it yours also.
It is certainly true that were it not for that now historic broadcast, millions would be dead. There would have been no Band, Live, or Sport Aid, no mass outpouring of humanity’s compassion. No questioning of statutes, laws, and values both inside and outside Africa. No reappraisal of development, of the nature of international aid, no debate on the mire that Africa had become.
In that brief, shocking but glorious moment, Amin had transcended the role of journalist-cameraman and perhaps unwittingly become the visual interpreter of man’s stinking conscience.
He had always been amongst that breed considered extraordinary. He continues to upset us with his unrelenting and passionate lens. He is without question an extraordinary man.
I thank God that I was home that autumn evening. I thank God I was watching that channel, and I thank God that Mo Amin sickened and shamed me. Long may he do so.
Bob Geldof
Preface
THIS YEAR, CAMERAPIX, THE COMPANY my father founded, celebrates its 50th anniversary. It has been a journey synonymous with the history of post-independent Africa, where we have been a part of all the triumphs and tragedies, the success and the failures. My father’s story is the story of Africa—rising up against the odds and taking its rightful position amongst the best in the world. We could think of no better way to commemorate our anniversary than with the republishing of Mohamed Amin’s biographies as e-books to symbolise the change in technology that continues to uplift our continent.
A good story is timeless, no matter what media platform it is told on. Mo Amin’s story will live through the ages and these e-books will hopefully give many millions more the opportunity to experience his life and hopefully be inspired by it.
Salim Amin
CEO, Camerapix
10th December 2013
Introduction: We Are the World
‘There comes a time when we heed a certain call
When the world must come together as one
There are people dying
And it’s time to lend a hand to life
The greatest gift of all …’
—We Are the World
IT’S OCTOBER 9, 1984. The place is Korem in northern Ethiopia. People lie dying, not from war or disease but simply of hunger. They lie by the thousands in the open: in freezing rain, in searing sun. If they had the strength to look for shelter they would find none. If they had the strength to look for food they would find none.
It’s like the Holocaust, but these are not the victims of hatred—only of indifference. In Europe, millions of tons of grain lie rotting in stores—too much for people already glutted with the realisation of plenty. Here in Korem, they shrivel before your eyes, wasted with the pain of starving and yet in their bearing, there is dignity to match the hopelessness in their eyes.
It’s like something out of the Bible. Gently, caringly, a television cameraman moves among the dying and the dead with his cameras. He limps as he walks. What passes between him and the victims and thus through his lens is so elemental, and so profound, that four days from today, it will change the world.
It’s January 28, 1985. Early morning in Los Angeles, California, USA, and 45 pop stars are belting out a revivalist-style hymn of hope that’s destined to become one of the hit singles of the decade—the world’s own anthem of love.
They’ve been here since ten o’clock last night and they won’t be leaving until eight o’clock this morning. They’re here because of Ken Kragen, and Harry Belafonte, and an Irishman called Bob Geldof, who’s flown over from Britain for this moment. And, of course, because of Mohamed Amin—the television cameraman who filmed the horror of Ethiopia 1984.
This day is one they’ll all remember. One the world will remember, too. On radio stations everywhere, in practically every language on earth, people will send in requests for We Are the World.
This is their requiem for the hungry and the homeless. Producer Quincy Jones is making it memorable: a heart cry from the famous for starving millions.
‘Hopefully,’ says Lionel Richie, ‘what we’re trying to do here is something that’s going to be everlasting, or at least a link in making people aware of the true value of life. It’s a party for life.’
Kim Carnes says, ‘If we can bottle the spirit we have in this room and send it round the world, we will have no problems.’
Ray Charles says, ‘For me, it’s a great opportunity to contribute to a beautiful cause, a wonderful cause. I’m honoured to be a part of it.’
Kenny Rogers says, ‘I see that these people really do care, they’re just like everybody else.’
Stevie Wonder says, ‘It’s out of a dream, all this energy together, energy that can really change the world. We’ve all got to use modern technology properly to bring people closer together. That helps them see how everyone is alike.’
As early as 1980, UN agencies and relief organisations began to warn of famine in Africa, and in Ethiopia in particular. Appeals for aid and food fell on deaf ears as the hungry continued to die. By the spring of 1984, the famine had reached a magnitude difficult to comprehend.
In the penultimate decade of the twentieth century, it was not really possible for a human mind to envisage half the population of London wasting away for want of food. Jobless people in Europe and America didn’t really understand, any more than those in safe and secure jobs with comfortable homes that five million people could die of hunger. Not in societies where surplus food made mountains.
In October 1984, Mohamed Amin could not believe what he saw. Nothing, he was to say later, that he had experienced in 25 years of covering wars, disasters, riots, and other famines could have prepared him for this.
This son of a railway worker is one of a courageous few who put their lives on the line daily: an elite that included such friends as the late cameramen Ernie Pyle, Time’s Priya Ramrakha, and Time-Life’s Bob Capa—all killed in action taking news pictures. They are legends.
In 1985, Mohamed Amin would mourn the death of another friend and colleague, Neil Davis, killed in action for America’s NBC television 14 network, covering an abortive coup in Thailand.
The last half century has seen a revolution in global communications. Today, it is literally possible to sit by a warm fire and witness, as Mohamed Amin demonstrated, the truth of C. P. Snow’s 1969 prediction that ‘many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes…we will see them doing so on our television sets.’
Television images shape our lives with powerful force, none more so than the news films made by cameramen in the front line of dramatic events. These images are broadcast by the world’s television networks.
In Europe, the EBU operates the Eurovision News Exchange. EBU subscribers take a choice of news film from a range of material offered by members and by the television news agencies.
The largest of these agencies, Visnews, based in London, syndicates its services daily to more than 420 television stations in nearly 100 countries around the world.
Mohamed Amin is the African bureau chief for Visnews, based in Nairobi.
1. Kid with a Box Brownie
IN AUGUSST 1943, PREJUDICE AND bigotry wore many faces. One was colonialism, which was nearing its end, though few if any could have predicted how soon. The British, fighting to preserve the Empire, had enlisted those subjects regarded as second- and third-class citizens, sometimes not even as citizens at all, to fight on their side. Many Africans fought against the Italians in Ethiopia and Somalia. Others went across the Indian Ocean to battle in the jungles of India, Burma, and Malaya.
Nairobi, the Kenya capital, an offspring of the Grand Empire, was itself born at the zenith of Imperial might and splendour as a shantytown railhead on May 30, 1899.
Forty-four years later, this improbable town, a mile above sea level, had begun to blossom with spaciousness and dignity—but not equality. By some unstated rule, the races were as severely segregated as if by royal ordinance—though no laws to this effect had passed through the statute books of the Crown Colony. Through self-sustaining levels of economic and class privilege, the races themselves fell into their respective ghettos.
Those Africans in the British forces abroad, some of whom would never return, had been recruited from such locations as Eastlands and Shauri Moyo, low-class, overcrowded, residential estates. The Europeans lived in tree-clad, pleasantly gardened suburbs called Parklands and Muthaiga.
In between, in such places as Eastleigh, lived the buffer community: the Asians, many of whom had arrived with the railway and stayed on to develop this wild and wonderful land astride the Equator.
It was in Eastleigh on August 29, 1943 that Mohamed Amin was born. At that time, Nairobi was still a small and unpretentious town, a settlement of 250,000 people. By 1988, swollen to more than one million citizens, its suburban periphery extended on every side—over rolling plain and up forested escarpment. Eastleigh itself had become a forlorn part of the inner city core. But it has changed little in physical appearance. It has that depressing atmosphere of raw utility found in British council housing estates—some rather dilapidated maisonettes and flats and bleak shopping centres.
Mohamed’s father, Sardar Mohamed, born on April 30, 1910 in Jullundur, Punjab, migrated from India when he was 17 after he heard of the opportunities in East Africa. He paid three and a half rupees for a passport and travelled to Bombay, where he boarded the British India Navigation Company’s steamship Kampala for the seven-day voyage to Mombasa. There, he took the train to Nairobi and spent his first three nights in the capital in a cheap lodging house on River Road, a busy downtown concourse.
His first job was as a mason in the Public Works Department in Eldoret, on the high plateau of Uasin Gishu, northwest of Nairobi. Six months later, he moved to Kakamega, in western Kenya, with the same department. After 18 months, in 1929, he travelled to Nakuru in the Rift Valley to join the Kenya-Uganda Railways Corporation as a mason. It was the Uganda Railway, the ‘Lunatic Line’, which, in 1899, had made railhead at the swamp known in the Maa language of the Maasai as Nairobi, meaning the ‘place of cold waters’ or ‘the beginning of all beauty’.
For two years, Sardar Mohamed was based in different towns such as Nakuru, Kisumu—the Lake Victoria port—and Eldoret, in charge of the buildings and bridges in those areas. Finally he was sent to Nairobi, where he was when war broke out in 1939 and he went home to marry Azmat Bibi.
The wedding took place in Jullundur in May 1940. In June, the couple travelled to Bombay to board the SS Katlina. At the last moment, Sardar Mohamed changed his mind and cancelled his double berth. It was an augury perhaps of the uncanny intuition which his son would inherit. SS Katlina was torpedoed and sank with the loss of all passengers and crew, but for a sole survivor.
Returning to Kenya soon after, Sardar was posted to Namasagali, a remote paddle steamer base on the shores of Lake Kioga in Uganda, and then began a period of transfers from Kisumu to Jinja and then Kampala in Uganda, where he settled for 18 months before returning—for three month
s in 1941—to Jinja, where his first son, Iqbal, was born. Two years later, during a posting to Nairobi, Mohamed Amin was born. Very early in his career, friends and colleagues shortened his first name to ‘Mo’.
In charge of station construction and maintenance along an extensive network of track, his father was at home in most of East Africa. He travelled great distances in his own camping coach, often taking Iqbal and Mo with him. They thus acquired a taste for travel and adventure very early.
Deeply devout, pious, and outwardly austere, Sardar was also a warm and loving father. Early on, he implanted in his sons those virtues of independence, initiative, and straight-talking which he cherished. He was far removed from his contemporaries in the supervisory section, who fawned on their European superiors, presenting them with gifts in anticipation of patronage and privilege to come. Sardar Mohamed sought no man’s favour. He trod his own forthright, independent path, placing value on hard work, integrity, pride, and honesty.
His disdain for subservience and preference for straight-talking brought a rebuke—a ‘hardship’ posting in 1952 to far-off Dar es Salaam, seven hundred miles south of Nairobi, at the far corner of what, by then, had become the East African Railways and Harbours Corporation. Dar es Salaam, sultry and humid, was in more ways than one the end of the line. But for Mohamed Amin the transfer could not have happened at a better time. The carefree, sunny childhood days which he had enjoyed in Eastleigh were at an end for everyone.
In 1952, Kenya was on the brink of civil war and revolution. The Mau Mau movement had become a fully-fledged freedom army and had taken the battle against colonialism to the armed forces of Kenya’s colonial government in forests and countryside. In October, after declaring a State of Emergency, the British seized Kenyan African leader Jomo Kenyatta and others at night and hustled them away to spend almost a decade incarcerated in Kenya’s remote north. Parts of Eastleigh became barbed-wired open-air concentration camps for thousands of Africans rounded up on suspicion of supporting, harbouring, and sympathising with members of the Mau Mau freedom fighters and their cause.