by Brian Tetley
In Dar es Salaam, the battle for freedom waged by the young teacher Mwalimu Julius Nyerere was more persuasion than force. A League of Nations mandated territory, Tanganyika at first was administered on the League’s behalf by the British. In 1946, after the Second World War, it became a United Nations trusteeship, again administered by the British. Throughout the 1950s, by comparison with Nairobi, Dar es Salaam was indeed what its Swahili name means, a ‘haven of peace’—not at all a bad place for Mo to spend the most formative years of his life.
Sardar Mohamed and his family were the first to move into a new railways estate, on the fringes of bush country still plentifully populated with wildlife. It opened up new worlds for Iqbal, Mo, and their younger brothers and sisters, introducing them to Africa’s wildlife, which would become one of Mo’s consuming passions.
Each morning, he recalls, they would scout through the house, peering out of all the windows to see if a lion or a leopard was in the garden. The youngsters quickly adapted to this new environment, delighting in the thought of waking up to find a giraffe in the garden, or an elephant demolishing the vegetable plot. For their young hearts and imaginations, this was no hardship posting at all. Once, they woke up in time to see a lion kill a zebra. Few 10-year-olds recall such drama outside their bedroom windows.
He went to the Indian Secondary School for Asian children, another mark of the segregation which existed in Britain’s colonial territories in Africa. But the teaching staff was both Asian and European and there was none of the prejudice Mo might be expected to remember. He was brash to the point of bullying, and his instinct for taking command was quickly spotted. Almost at once, he became a form prefect with power and authority. His determination to let nothing—and nobody –stand in his way was evident. His lifelong friend, BBC producer Roy Lipscombe, describes the young Amin as ‘demanding.’ Undoubtedly, he was. He hectored, bullied, and dominated, instinctively knowing how much he could demand and how far he might push.
Indecision played no part in his character or his relationships. Those who knew him were often aggravated by his attitude, but he would bustle along, a twinkle in his eye, to straighten out hurt feelings—never by apology, and always maintaining he was right—displaying early an almost irresistible charm and an adroit ability to persuade, which won over those he needed.
He neither sought popularity nor courted favour, unless for professional or business advantage. Indeed, his independence and self-reliance have remained monumental. Unlike his eye for a picture or nose for news, he sees life altogether in black and white, without room for half measures, ambiguity, or qualification.
From the moment he acquired a second-hand Box Brownie camera for 40 shillings when he was eleven, he was never in doubt about the career he would follow—though those first pictures, keepsake snaps of family and friends, scarcely serve as indication of what was to come.
Yet he had found his vocation, and the art and the chemistry of photography became his passion. Even as a youngster, he was tireless to the point of hyperactivity, both in his enthusiasms and in his attention to detail. But his plea to join the school photographic society was turned down. He was told he was too young and a Box Brownie, after all, was only a toy. Few men in pursuit of a goal are as determined and persistent (sometimes ruthless) as Mohamed Amin. Then, as now, he let nothing deflect him from his single-minded purpose. In hindsight, he regards his subsequent battle to join the society as a major element of his career today.
‘When I tried to join the society, I was in Form One and I was told that I would not be allowed to join until I was in Form Four. The teacher who ran the society was adamant. He said that there was no way I could join.
‘Since my Box Brownie did not impress anybody, I asked a friend whose father had a Rolleicord camera—in those days one of the best—to lend me his dad’s camera. He lived across the road from my house.
‘But the father said it was far too precious to be taken to school. So I persuaded my friend to borrow it for the day without his father’s knowledge—which he did—and I would make sure he got it back.
‘So I took it to the teacher and said, “I have access to a Rolleicord camera. Won’t you reconsider my request to rejoin the Society?”‘
The teacher was so impressed with the Rolleicord that he relented and let Amin join. The camera was returned, unused and undamaged, the same day. But the father found out what had happened and lambasted his son with a hockey stick and locked up the camera.
‘I never had access to that camera again,’ says Mo. ‘So whenever the teacher asked where it was I had to say that it had been damaged and sent for repairs. In fact, I never, ever saw it again. But it got me into the society and that gave me access to the equipment there including a camera.
‘I spent as much time as possible covering school events like drama, sports, and festivals. One of the arrangements in the school was that outside photographers were not allowed to cover school functions. We were allowed to sell the pictures to the students. Half the revenue went to the society and the other half to the photographer. By doing this, I was able to raise enough money to buy my own equipment, although it took three years or so.’
Membership of the society was important in two senses. It provided Mohamed Amin with the facility to learn the art and the science of photography and so consummate what would be a lifelong passion. At the same time, it taught him the commercial value of photography. He worked hard, learning how to process film and produce prints, and he joined the Scout movement. It was through these two associations that the first pictures with the byline ‘by Mohamed Amin’ were published.
As a member of the party that went to Government House, Dar es Salaam, during the Scouts’ 1958 Bob-a-Job week to meet the Governor, Sir Richard Turnbull, he used the school’s Rolleiflex to take ‘official pictures’ of the occasion. Back in the society’s darkroom—a broom cupboard beneath the staircase—he carefully processed his film. Selecting the best negatives, he printed three or four pictures. When they had dried, he put them in an envelope and went to the office of the Tanganyika Standard, the country’s leading newspaper. Editor Brendon Grimshaw, now living in retirement in the Seychelles, chose two of the unknown schoolboy’s prints, scaled them for reduction, and sent them off to the process department to be made into half-tone blocks—the images etched with acid as dots on a zinc or copper plate. The pictures appeared on Page One of the next day’s paper.
Mo was elated. ‘I felt on top of the world. My first published pictures were on the front page of the leading newspaper in the country. This was a tremendous boost. In fact, I carried the newspaper around for days and showed it to all my friends and sent copies to my friends overseas. I must have bought about fifty papers on that day.’ Significantly, he adds, ‘I got one guinea [£1.05] for each picture.’
He became a regular visitor to the newspaper offices. ‘As I recall, he used to turn up at the newspaper, still in his school shorts, offering pictures of various events,’ remembers David Martin, a journalist on that paper who now runs a publishing company in Harare, Zimbabwe. ‘As I also recall, they were not particularly great pictures in those davs.’
Still, it’s unlikely that anything since, including awards, honours, and commendations, have equalled Mo’s feelings at that first acknowledgement of his competence with a camera. It added considerably to the prestige he already enjoyed at school.
Two years before this, he had obtained his first official accreditation, to cover the fledgling East African Safari Rally. Few 13-year-old schoolboys have the assurance, or the determination, to pass themselves off as professional press photographers, especially when nothing of their work has been printed. But though gauche, and with his frame still to fill
Twenty out, young Mo did. And at that early age, he already met challenges with a look-’em-straight-in-the-eye response that brooked no opposition.
Another reason for prestige at school was his ownership of a motor scooter. It had become essential to carry
him from one assignment to another, and his enthusiasm and output grew with every new picture in print.
The vehicle, which cost his father 100 shillings a month in hire purchase repayments, was as important to Amin as his camera and typewriter. Ironically, he had acquired the typewriter before the camera, as he realised that without a typewriter on which to present his captions, letters of introduction and invoices for work rendered, submitted or published, all would be wasted.
Before his 16th birthday, he broke into the pages of Drum, the magazine of black consciousness in Africa throughout the late 1950s, the 1960s, and 1970s. It was under the control of ex-Picture Post editor, Sir Tom Hopkinson, who, for the Post in Britain, had recruited some of the greatest photographers and writers in western journalism. They included Bert Hardy and Slim Hewitt whose own careers—from still photographers to BBC-TV cameramen—in many ways anticipated Mo’s own.
When the Post shut down, Hopkinson was invited to Johannesburg by South African dilettante Jim Bailey, a rich and aristocratic farmer, to work on Drum. It was an immediate success and within a very short time Bailey had established separate regional editions in East and West Africa.
That Hopkinson should unequivocally accept and publish Mohamed Amin’s work says everything. Few people, if any, knew more about Press pictures or the function of the news and feature photographer. Hopkinson’s was the kind of pictorial journalism only equalled by the Post’s contemporaries in America, Life and Look.
‘The Twenties were not to be merely the decade which followed the two previous ones,’ he recalls in Picture Post: 1938-50, published in 1985. ‘They were to mark the beginning of a new era, an era of experiment and self-expression, through which a new attitude to life, surely indeed a new kind of men and women, would emerge from the shadows of the past into a sunlit future. Clearly the new spirit of the age demanded a new form of journalism through which to spread its message.
‘But before this could come into existence there had to be the journalists, and there had to be the instrument. That instrument proved to be a new kind of camera. Only in the mid-1920s, with development of small format cameras, did the photo-journalist begin to acquire the equipment needed for his job—that of telling a story in pictures in much the same way that the reporter tells it with his pen. The Leica, with its small format, 36 pictures on a film, ease of operation and quiet mechanism —to which before long was added a wide range of interchangeable lenses—brought photography out of the studio and into the stream of everyday life.’
Hopkinson then describes the new breed of news cameraman which took advantage of the new cameras. His words describe exactly the spirit 21, which was to characterise the work of Mohamed Amin. ‘The first and most renowned of these was Dr Erich Salomon, a doctor of law and a skilled linguist. Salomon started taking news pictures only in 1928, but within two years, his pictures of political conferences and his stolen pictures of murder trials had won him a European reputation.
‘Until 1932, Salomon operated with an Ermanox before switching to the Leica. For trial scenes, he used such devices as secreting his camera inside a bowler hat or small attaché case, and he would at times gain entry to a discussion among high-ranking diplomats disguised as a waiter or house-painter.
‘But his finest disguise was his own cool assurance, enabling him to attach himself to the train of some eminent personage entering the buildings—he was always immaculately dressed—or to occupy the seat of a missing delegate. Once inside, he would operate his cameras with such confidence and tact that everyone assumed he had full official authority in his pocket.’
This last paragraph, except for the ‘always’ immaculately dressed, might easily have been about Mohamed Amin.
Drum was not alone in recognising the Dar es Salaam teenager. His work was soon on the pages of the most competitive newspaper community in the world—London’s Fleet Street—in papers like The Times, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, and Daily Mirror.
His schoolboy successes did nothing to endear him to full-time photographers in Tanganyika. He threatened their livelihood. It was no surprise, therefore, when he turned up at events to find gatemen and security guards barring his way, on instructions from his seniors. Little did they realise they were providing him with an invaluable apprenticeship in perseverance, initiative, and ingenuity. The lessons he learned at this stage have made the difference between success and failure ever since.
He quickly learned the value of persistence and the need never to take ‘No’ for an answer. The fact that he learned to overcome obstacles to gain his objective was supremely significant. It also confirmed his own belief in his professional competence.
Far from nipping his career in the bud, Dar es Salaam’s community of photographic elders put an edge to the youngster’s determination. He talked, cajoled, persuaded, and sometimes blustered. But, as he recalls, ‘At the end of the day, I seemed to get where I wanted to get.’ As he still does.
But he didn’t get quite far enough when, at 16, he set out on his Grand Adventure—an overland journey to Europe with just 400 shillings, his scooter and a Goan friend, Thambi, riding pillion. ‘I had extra carrying space on the pillion,’ remembers Mo, ‘and I thought, why go alone?’
By the shortest land route, Tanganyika was around 5,000 miles from Britain. The first leg alone involved a journey of something like a thousand miles just to cross the Equator, most of it over dirt roads. In East Africa, tarmac was virtually unheard of outside the main cities. The dirt road from Dar es Salaam north to Nairobi wound through rough bush country and climbed gradually upwards to more than a mile above sea level.
Mo, who has subsequently planned all his travels down to the last detail, paid scant attention to roads or weather. With one suitcase, he and Thambi set off, blissfully ignorant of the countryside they had to cross or the difficulties they would face. ‘We felt,’ he says, ‘we could work at various places on the way to raise enough money to finish the journey.’
When they arrived at Morogoro the youngsters found the hotel too expensive. Son of a railwayman, Mo mounted up and the scooter bucked over the potholes of the little town to the railway station on the old German-built Central line from Dar es Salaam to Kigoma on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was typically teutonic—cold and austere—but the stationmaster was sympathetic. Thambi slept on the floor, Mo on the stationmaster’s desk.
Early in the morning, it began to rain and the downpour beat a tattoo on the corrugated iron roof. The noise woke them up. At first light, the two teenagers emerged to find the landscape sodden: the baked dirt road leading out of Morogoro to Korogwe at the foot of the Usambara Mountains had become a sea of mud. Outside the town, they asked an African what the road ahead was like. He told them it was rough for a few miles and then ‘like a piece of concrete’.
In the event, the 100-mile journey took them the best part of four days. Almost every yard of the way, lorries and vehicles and cars lay abandoned, axle-deep in the mud. Every few hundred yards, the scooter broadsided and flipped, throwing the two youngsters off. They slept where they stopped—one night under a tree, soaked to the skin, another in a well-covered glade in a wayside thicket. This was wild country, roamed by elephant, lion, leopard, rhino, and myriad plains game.
He recalls that he was woken by something tickling his face. He thought it was Thambi’s hair and he gave his friend’s sleeping bag a good thump. The response startled him. There was an aggrieved snort, warm rancid breath on his face and the hasty departure of a heavy body. In the morning, the two found the pug marks of a lion at the spot.
Battered almost beyond recognition, the scooter eventually chugged into Korogwe, its two riders smeared with mud, their baggage soiled and dirty; but after a wash and a rest, they quickly recovered and rode on through Moshi, where Mo’s friends lived, and Arusha to Namanga, the border crossing into Kenya. From there, they rode into Nairobi. Altogether, this first leg took about a week.
Many of his relatives lived in Nairob
i, including his uncle, Niaz Mohamed, who had a house in Pangani. It was to there they headed. Mo was half-expected. His parents, frantic with worry, had already circulated the news of his ‘absconscion’. Mohamed Shaffi, his cousin, who now works for him as a cameraman, was about eight when the two teenagers arrived. ‘It was raining very hard. And they were very scruffy and very tired,’ he recollects.
Shaffi’s father was understanding; he admired their spirit. ‘He was very good,’ Mo recalls. ‘He gave us somewhere to rest and when we wanted to get on our way, he gave us some money.’
The two made it northwest from Nairobi, through Kampala, and up to the Sudan border, where their way was barred. Neither had even a rudimentary travel document, let alone a passport. Their money was running out, too.
In three or four weeks on an underpowered scooter, they had covered around 1,500 miles on the kind of killer roads that earned the East African Safari Rally, which ran through all three East African countries in those years, its reputation as the ultimate test of man and machine.
‘So we turned round and rode all the way back to my uncle’s house in Nairobi and on down to Dar es Salaam, where I was given a thoroughly good thrashing by my father,’ Mohamed Amin remembers. ‘He didn’t think very much of the adventure at all.’
It had lasted two months and he had learned a great deal. The scooter was a write-off, but he sold it for 100 shillings and began casting his eye over an assortment of second-hand VWs. To his mind, these vehicles had all the virtues of the people he liked. They were reliable and hard-working, able to rough it, and they were economically priced.
To earn the money to pay for the VW, he redoubled his photographic work. The annual magazine of the Aga Khan Girls High School in Dar es Salaam carried the following: ‘The Editors acknowledge most gratefully permission to use the photographs taken by Mohamed Amin.’ He had begun to understand the importance of copyright and the value of repeat usage of pictures. It must have pleased his vanity to grant ‘permission’ for the use of his pictures.