The Story of Mohamed Amin

by Brian Tetley

  Besides news stories, he produced features, many of them concerned with Tanganyika’s incomparable wilderness areas. His interest and enthusiasm for Africa’s wildlife grew all the time. So did his fascination with Africa’s tribal cultures. He was particularly impressed by the proud independence of the nomadic Maasai, as prominent in Tanganyika as they were across the border in Kenya. To reach Tanganyika’s Maasailand, however, was not easy.

  In such a vast country, roads were few, rough, and often impassable during the rains. Although costly, flying made a lot of sense and as he counted the cost of his trips upcountry, he resolved that one day he would learn to fly—to the horror of those he’d driven in his Beetle.

  He’d already had some near-fatal crashes. One occurred when he was driving home to change to cover an evening function. By good fortune, Dolly was not with him. ‘Normally, she would come home with me and wait while I changed,’ he remembers. ‘This time, thank God, she did not. I was blinded by an oncoming Peugeot 504 with full lights blazing. All I know is that I hit something.’

  The something turned out to be a big lorry without lights parked in the middle of the road. He was thrown out of the car as the Beetle went straight under the truck and had its top sliced off. Anybody with him would have been killed instantly.

  The driver of the Peugeot stopped. He was Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, head of the Mozambique freedom fighting organisation Frente de Liberta9ao de Mozambique—Frelimo—based in Dar es Salaam. He picked up the unconscious body and drove straight to the city’s government hospital.

  ‘By this time, I had come around and had a lot of pain in my chest but did not know if I was badly injured or not. I was put in a wheelchair and wheeled into a cubicle, waiting for my turn to be examined.

  ‘A friend of mine, Mohinder Singh Matharoo, chief photographer for the Ministry of Information who lived close to my house, was driving to the city when he saw the wreckage and was told on the spot, “The driver is dead”.’

  ‘There were a lot of people around the truck. Because I had been thrown out and taken away almost instantly, nobody knew what had happened and just assumed I was inside the mangled wreck.’

  ‘It was his first “fatal” crash,’ recalls Roy Lipscombe, in those days a reporter on the Tanganyika Standard. ‘Everyone in the office who saw his car said no man could have lived.’

  ‘Mohinder finally found me in the hospital while I was still waiting to be examined,’ Mo remembers, ‘and he took me straight away to the private Aga Khan Hospital, where they X-rayed me. There were two broken ribs, which were quite painful.’

  Next day, bruised and battered, he flew to Pemba and Zanzibar, the island that was to give him his first news triumph, to cover the State visit of President Nyerere.

  In the two centuries since the sultans of Oman first extended their domain to absorb the islands offshore from Dar es Salaam, virtually nothing on Zanzibar had changed. The wealth of the ruling Barghash dynasty was founded on 200 years of slave trading. At its height, in the late nineteenth century, as many as 30,000 slaves a year were trekked down from the interior in cruel, inhuman caravans and embarked, at Bagamoyo on the mainland north of the capital, for the slave market in Zanzibar town presided over by notorious slave traders like Tipu Tip.

  In 1866, Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone rested in a house overlooking the market, before setting out for the interior on his crusade to end the evil trade. Yet, a century later, the sultan was still indulging himself in the manner of his ancestors. He claimed a royal rent from the island’s British tenants, which, together with the earnings from clove plantations, placed his family among the wealthiest of all Arab royalty.

  In 1955, for example, a 1,500-ton ocean-going luxury yacht was built in England for the sultan, Seyyid Sir Abdullah Khalifa, at a cost of £350,000. Named the mv Seyyid Khalifa, it joined its predecessor, a no-less luxurious royal yacht, the Salaama, cruising the warm Indian Ocean waters.

  The photographer often accompanied the Sultan’s son, Prince Seyyid Jamshid bin Abdullah, on hunting expeditions—mainly pig-sticking in the dank jungles of the island. The future sultan’s extravagant lifestyle, in decadent contrast to the abject poverty of his subjects, many of whom were descended from slaves, made perfect material for picture features.

  On December 9, 1963, Prince Philip renounced Britain’s guardianship of the sultanate. Mo Amin was there, for press and television. Then, on the morning of December 11, he took an East African Airways flight from Zanzibar to Nairobi, trailing Prince Philip, who at midnight that same day stood at attention with Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenya Prime Minister, as the British flag was lowered for the last time and the new Kenya flag raised.

  Photographers and cameramen were assigned places in foxhole-style dugouts close by the flagpoles which lined the site of the ceremonies at Uhuru Gardens near Nairobi’s Wilson Airport. As the British flag was lowered, the lights went out. The plan was for the floodlamps to burst into light as the Kenya flag unfurled at the top of the staff. But the rope snagged and there was a slight delay.

  Prince Philip leaned over and whispered something to the African statesman which brought a wide grin in response. It was learnt later that the Prince had told Kenyatta, ‘You’ve still got time to change your mind if you wish.’ Seconds later, thunderous cheers greeted Kenya’s entry into the ranks of the world’s free and sovereign states.

  Exactly one month later, on Saturday January 11, 1964, the young photographer received a telephone call from an old contact, 40-year-old Marxist revolutionary Abdulrahman Mohamed Babu, organiser of Zanzibar’s extreme left-wing Umma—’Masses’—Party.

  After spending six years behind a Post Office Savings Bank counter in Acton, West London, and dabbling in journalism, Babu, of mixed Arab-Comorian descent, had returned from England in the 1950s. He had fled Zanzibar in a dugout canoe the day before, after laying the groundwork for an uprising planned for Sunday January 12.

  ‘If you want a big story, you should be in Zanzibar tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘There’s a big story. Take your cameras. You’ll get an exclusive.’

  ‘What kind of story?’

  Babu would say no more. When Amin learned from his own sources that the Sultan had given the opposition Afro-Shirazi Party permission to hold a fete, he dismissed the story as non-newsworthy and thought no more about it, until 4.30am on Sunday January 12, when he was woken by the telephone and a voice saying, ‘There’s shooting all over Zanzibar.’ He was at Dar es Salaam airport in time to board the 7am flight to Zanzibar. But when it reached the island, the pilot was refused landing permission.

  Back at Dar es Salaam airport, he rang Associated Press correspondent Dennis Neeld, and five minutes later, Neeld and a newly arrived colleague, Bob Ryder, jumped into Amin’s car and raced out of town along the coast road to Bagamoyo, 45 miles away. The old slaving centre was a thriving dhow port—and boat was now the only way to reach Zanzibar.

  As he and Neeld bargained with dhow captains who had no wish to go there at any price, the streets of the island, thirty miles across the sea, ran crimson with blood. In those first hours of what was to be a week of terror, thousands died.

  At three that morning, 600 revolutionaries, under the command of John Okello, a semi-literate Acholi tribesman from Uganda’s Lango District, had struck the island’s Mtoni police barracks. Within days, Okello himself was disowned, but not before he had indulged in blood-letting on a horrifying scale. At week’s end, the death toll was officially estimated at between 12,000 and 13,000.

  Still bargaining at Bagamoyo, Amin finally persuaded a bearded dhow veteran to carry his party across. Outside Zanzibar harbour, they were challenged by one of Okello’s motor patrol boats. A man on board recognised Mo and gave the dhow a tow into the harbour.

  By the following morning, resistance to the coup had virtually ended. With no military on the island, the British troops having left after independence, the only armed force on Zanzibar con
sisted of a European police commissioner, James Sullivan, a European assistant, six European ‘special reservists’, and 80 Zanzibaris. Between them, they had five rifles, one revolver, and a handful of ammunition.

  When Mo’s party landed in Zanzibar, Sullivan and the others had already left with the sultan aboard the potentate’s yacht, the Salaama. Later, the royal party transferred to the bigger yacht and—turned away from Mombasa—berthed back at Dar es Salaam, where this prince out of a live ‘Arabian Nights’ fantasy boarded a BOAC jet, chartered by the British Government, which took him and his 42-man entourage to that limbo of many forgotten exiles—England. It landed at Ringway Airport, Manchester.

  Amin arranged with the captain that the dhow should ferry his film back to the mainland each day. To his astonishment, telephone links with the mainland were fully operational, so he was able to ring Dolly in Dar es Salaam and tell her when to drive out to Bagamoyo to meet the dhow.

  For four days, through CBS, Visnews, and ITN, his film from the bloody island of spice led world television bulletins. He also hit the front pages of the world’s press. Interest was all the greater because Zanzibar was a strategic area and one of the bases for the United States satellite tracking stations for ‘Project Mercury’.

  Soon after landing on the island, he was pressed into service to take the first official pictures of the revolution’s leaders. One of them—Babu, his confidante—had become the new regime’s Minister for External Affairs. Meeting Babu in a crowd of excited revolutionaries in Zanzibar’s seething streets, he told him he needed permission to charter a plane to ship his film. Time was critical and the airport was still closed.

  ‘Give me a piece of paper,’ said Babu.

  ‘I don’t have any.’

  Looking around him, Babu saw a discarded detergent carton, picked it up, tore off the flap, and scribbled a crude but official note clearing a plane to land at Zanzibar.

  One of his first newsfilm reports that week was the evacuation of 61 Americans, 12 Britons, and five West Germans—together with nine Arabs the American consulate described as ‘Lithuanians’ from the island by the American ship USS Manley.

  Then, just after he completed a grisly film about mass graves and dhow ‘funeral’ ships used to dispose of corpses at sea, always followed by a sinister wake of dorsal fins, the British ship, HMS Owen, arrived to evacuate about 150 British citizens.

  They included seven newsmen deported as ‘prohibited immigrants’, including Clyde Sangar of The Guardian in Britain, Priya Ramrakha of Kenya working for Life magazine, William Smith of Time, Jack Nugent Newsweek, Robert Conley New York Times, Peter Rand New York Herald Tribune, and Robert Miller of Toronto’s Globe and Mail.

  American Consul Fred Picard, who tried to intervene on their behalf, and his assistant were arrested at gunpoint at the Zanzibar Hotel, where the newsmen had been detained.

  Before boarding the ship, the newsmen had been lined up against a wall. At first they thought they were going to be shot—but the Zanzibaris just wanted to take their pictures to make sure they never came back.

  The story left Amin in no doubt about the merciless attitude the revolutionaries had to Arabs and Asians. As he stood on the wharf, filming the last of the British boarding the launch which was to carry them out to the anchored warship, he felt a hand on his shoulder. Two revolutionaries in tattered clothes and armed with machine guns took hold of his arms and tried to snatch his cameras. He resisted and held on to his precious equipment. As the launch was pushed off, he jumped on board. The startled Zanzibaris raised their weapons, trigger fingers tightening. British marines on the boat challenged Mo, but as the gap between vessel and steps widened, he reached into his camera bag and pulled out the black passport with the gold crest of the British coat of arms—No. 336186—issued by the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam. The marines nodded. The Zanzibaris watched the boat drift away.

  Through it all, he never stopped filming.

  When he arrived in Mombasa, he shipped his film to London via Nairobi, then took a charter flight back to Dar es Salaam.

  Not yet 21, his performance earned the admiration of the hardened professionals in the CBS, UPIN, and Visnews newsrooms. He had been in a frontline situation all week and shown not only the courage to film it but the initiative and resource to get his film out for the world to see. A great reputation was in the making. Within the week, he had added to it substantially.

  The revolution created unease throughout East Africa, and there were immediate repercussions. Two hours after midnight on Monday January 20, the First Battalion of the Tanganyika Rifles—two-thirds of the country’s army—stationed at Colito Barracks on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam mutinied.

  Before dawn, they swooped on the homes of British officers seconded to the Tanganyika Armed Forces, bundled them into lorries and took them to the city’s airport. There, they put them aboard an East African Airways plane and ordered the pilot to fly them to Nairobi.

  Later in the day, after sweeping through the capital at daybreak in an orgy of looting that left at least six people dead and many wounded, they collected their wives and children and put them on another plane to Nairobi.

  The whereabouts of President Julius Nyerere was a mystery. After promising a delegation of mutineers to consider their demands, he vanished. It later transpired that he was smuggled out of State House by the Army’s British commanding officer, Brigadier Patrick Douglas, and went into hiding for two days.

  As police moved in to take control, arresting looters, the photographer was at the heart of the action. Then a senior police officer arrested him and marched him off to Dar es Salaam Central Police station. The cells were already full so he was put inside one of the small offices behind the counter.

  ‘Basically, the whole scene was chaos and pandemonium,’ he recalls. ‘The police took my cameras and just shoved me in an office. I looked through the keyhole and it was like a rugby scrum outside. Nobody seemed to be in charge. I could see my cameras on a desk, unguarded, and there was a lot of confusion and shouting.’

  To his surprise, when he tried the handle of the door it swung open. He sauntered out through the arguing police, public, and soldiers, picked up his cameras and, without quickening his pace, walked out to freedom. At home, for the first and only time in his life, he shaved off his beard, then changed his clothes and went straight back to film the action.

  On Tuesday evening, Nyerere made a speech to the nation over Radio Tanganyika, calling the previous day ‘a day of shame’. When Nyerere visited the barracks to address the mutineers, he told the soldiers that they would have to lay down their arms before he would consider their grievances, but the troops refused. Nyerere, accompanied by expatriate press officer George Rockey and aides, left to inspect the damage in the city centre.

  By now, Dar es Salaam teemed with television cameramen from Europe and America, covering the Zanzibar Revolution. They had grip boys to carry their baggage, and the latest cameras and sound equipment—not to mention sound recordists, producers and, of course, the ace, front-of-camera reporters, who put words to the pictures.

  Among them was the man known as ‘the CBS marine’—tough, trouble-shooting Joe Masraf—a cameraman who had filmed virtually every major war of the last 25 years, from Spain to Vietnam.

  Pitted against all these resources, 21-year-old Amin had one ancient borrowed Bolex camera. He remembers thinking it was a bit like trying to compete in an air race in a glider. But in the end, it was not the camera but the man behind it who won the day.

  ‘Touring the town late in the evening, I saw British officers coming ashore at the presidential jetty off a British ship anchored offshore. I decided I must be ready for action early next day. Around sunup, I heard the thump of heavy gunfire and small-arms fire from the direction of the Colito Barracks, eight miles out of town. I headed that way. A mile short, I was stopped at a road block manned by British marines.’

  His ITN card established an immediate rapport with the
marines. They told him it was ‘bloody dangerous up there’. He just grinned and asked if he could film them. He was allowed through.

  ‘A British helicopter was circling the barracks with a loud-hailer. The man on the hailer was Captain M. S. H. Sarakikya, a Tanganyikan hero who had climbed Kilimanjaro’s ice-capped 19,340-foot-high peak on Independence Day to hoist the new republic’s flag on Africa’s highest mountain. Sarakikya was calling on the mutineers to lay down their arms. Between his appeals, the helicopter, armed with a light gun, was loosing off blank shells.

  ‘They made a lot of noise but they were doing no damage. Some of the mutineers, but not many, were moving towards the football field, where they had been told to surrender. And some men in the guard room were firing back at the helicopter.’ In response, the gunship put a live shell through the guard house. The rebels began to capitulate.

  Up to this time, filming from outside the gates, he had had the story all to himself but now NBC, BBC, CBS, and other crews began to arrive. They got dramatic coverage of rebels fleeing the barracks and being flushed out of the bush by the low-flying helicopters. Heart sinking, he realised he could not compete.

  ‘They had everything. All the technology you need to make a good story. And they had the action, too. Anyway, I filmed what I could with what I had.’

  Then the barrack gates were opened and the film crews were allowed inside to record the arrests and the mopping up. At midday, he saw the first television crew leave. They were stopped outside the gates by members of the Tanganyika Special Branch, who confiscated their films. ‘That was one crew which had nothing to show for their efforts,’ he recalls. Then the same thing happened to another crew. Masraf and his CBS team also saw what was happening.

  He watched as big Joe slit open the back seat of the crew’s rented car and stuffed his cans of film inside. Then, slowly, he and his team drove clear of the barracks till they too were pulled up and ordered out of the car. Smiling innocently, they denied possession of any exposed film and showed the guards rolls of unused stock, gesturing and chatting in a friendly, persuasive manner. But one of the Special Branch guards found the rip in the seat cover and pulled out the used films.