The Story of Mohamed Amin

by Brian Tetley

  Amin was now the only one left inside the barracks. ‘As I kept filming, I was trying to work out ways of evading the security check outside the gates.’

  Filming yet another helicopter coming into the barracks with more officers, he realised this could be the way out. ‘They were British helicopters and pilots,’ he remembers. ‘And because the barracks were under the control of the British, the Special Branch was not allowed inside.’ As it came to rest, rotors still whirling, he ran across and shouted at the pilot.

  ‘What the hell?’ asked the man at the controls. ‘Who are you?’

  He flashed his ITN card and grimaced at the chaos around him.

  Shouting to make himself heard above the roar of the engine, he said, ‘I’ve got to get this film on a flight to London—and there’s one leaving very soon. Can you give me a lift to the airport?’

  ‘For ITN?’ the pilot smiled. ‘Any time, jump in.’

  Seconds later, the helicopter swirled over the gates. Angry and frustrated, Joe Masraf and his crew gazed up at it, and when Amin hung his head out of the window, the CBS ace shook his fist at him.

  He replied with a V-salute. His car was still inside the barracks but he had his film, and ten minutes later, he was checking it through the freight office of East African Airways for the flight to London.

  Two days later, CBS news executive J. Segal, after viewing the only film showing the Tanganyika Army mutiny, was talking to his London office on a bad telephone connection.

  ‘Who do you say this kid is?’

  ‘Mohamed Amin.’

  ‘Well, make sure he stays on our payroll. I’d hate him to work for the opposition.’

  3. Massacre on the Horn

  CHANGE IN AFRICA DURING THE 1960s was momentous and traumatic. After the euphoria of independence, many countries found themselves ill-prepared for their responsibilities and unable to cope with the political conflicts and disillusion which followed. Those colonies that remained became the targets of freedom movements, many of them based in newly independent countries sympathetic to their goals.

  Under Nyerere, Tanganyika became a major frontline country. The symbolic African idealist wanted no truck with the illegal white minority regime under Ian Smith, which in 1965 seized power in Rhodesia. He was also opposed to the Portuguese occupation of Mozambique and Angola, and a leading campaigner against apartheid in South Africa. This put him at loggerheads with Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda of Malawi, who settled for pragmatic peaceful coexistence with the powerful white neighbours, on whom his country’s economic well-being depended. By contrast, Nyerere paid court to Mao Tse-tung’s China, while the Russians and East Germans consolidated their presence in Zanzibar.

  Across the waters of Lake Tanganyika, the Congo, that vast territory once ruled over by Belgium, still seethed with genocidal strife in a savage struggle for power among rival factions.

  Cuba, Russia, East Germany, China, and others were only too ready to stir this witches’ brew. Never slow to recognise the potential of a situation, Amin began to extend his television news coverage, often on a speculative basis. Most of his work was used, and he won an increasing number of assignments.

  Throughout 1964, he worked regularly for CBS. By now, America had an obsessional interest in Russia’s growing influence in Africa; the French, under de Gaulle, kept a covetous eye on their little possession on the Horn of Africa, French Somalia; and, of course, any good story from the former British colonies was grist to the television mills of Britain’s BBC, and the broadcasters served by UPIN and Visnews.

  Mohamed Amin became a thorn in the flesh to the Dar es Salaam-based stringers—all less energetic. UPIN’s stringer in Tanganyika, Ahmed Sharif, was well into middle age. He ran a successful shop, Minicine, in the centre of Dar es Salaam. The occasional UPIN assignment gave him useful pin money. His great friend was the opposition Visnews stringer, Farouk Reporter, a man his own age. Neither depended on the television news agencies for their livelihood. Their philosophy was simple: ‘Don’t put your life on the line for fifty dollars.’

  But nothing seemed risky about the March 1964 visit of British Commonwealth Secretary Duncan Sandys to Tanganyika and Zanzibar, which they were assigned to cover. For all three, the attraction was the money they could earn.

  On the flight to Zanzibar, Sharif and Reporter admired Amin’s brand-new Bolex camera, which he had bought with the money he had made covering the revolution and the Dar es Salaam mutiny. On both occasions, Sharif and Reporter had been noticeably absent.

  ‘I was paid by the story, not by the day, and I thought I may as well get another story and earn another pound. No point wasting time in Zanzibar for half a day. So I decided I was going to cover one of the prisons—which was an obvious story to do—and I persuaded these other guys to come along with me and do it.’

  They saw no harm in his suggestion. The detainee camps still held thousands of Arab prisoners. Even when they were refused permission at the first camp, they still went along with his suggestion that they should try the Aga Khan’s house which, Mo had heard, was being used for a similar purpose.

  At the gates, he used his favourite ploy of chatting up the young guards and suggesting he should film them. The trick rarely failed. The guards were in an amiable mood and the three were given the run of the grounds and the mansion. Just as they were about to leave, however, the telephone rang.

  The guard who replaced the receiver was a changed man. ‘Suddenly,’ Amin recalls, ‘we had guns in our backs. We were made to stand out in the sun for hours and we were all near to collapse. The temperature was around 34°C (93°F) with eighty-five percent humidity. These were not two young people like myself and even I was close to exhaustion.

  ‘A cabinet minister arrived. He accused us of being imperialist spies, spat on us, kicked and slapped us. We were then locked up in a room, our cameras, bags and films confiscated.’

  By morning, Farouk had run out of the medication he carried for the pernicious haemorrhoids from which he suffered, while Ahmed, deprived of pan—a mild narcotic to which he was partial—became neurotic. ‘Their plight was dreadful,’ Mo remembers. ‘They really hated me.’

  It was 48 hours before the Zanzibari authorities relented and let them go, endorsing Mo’s passport with a ‘Prohibited Immigrant’ stamp—the first of three he would collect within a span of thirty months from the hyper-sensitive governments of East Africa.

  He never used his new Bolex again. Together with Farouk’s and Ahmed’s equipment the new Zanzibar Government requisitioned it to form the island’s first film unit. Not that the two elder stringers ever needed their cine cameras again. Safely back in Dar es Salaam, they quit television news. ‘They said they would never do a story again. But I was back scrounging for cameras from my friends again because I’d just lost my new camera.’

  If Amin had wanted a strategy which would make Tanganyika, and much of East Africa, his exclusive beat, he could have thought of none better. He now had a virtual monopoly in the area, and it was only a matter of time before he was able to replace the confiscated Bolex.

  Despite the Prohibited Immigrant stamp in his passport, he was allowed to enter Zanzibar on April 25 to cover the story of the Union—between Tanganyika and Zanzibar—which gave birth to today’s Tanzania.

  Like a cat—no matter which way fate tossed him—he always managed to land on his feet. The gauche young man, now approaching his 21st birthday, had filled out and become burly. The goatee beard he had cultivated and which he still has today gave him a maturity which belied his years. Cameras over his shoulders, he was at the seat of great events. He was already becoming something of a legend. He worked with exceptional energy. Rumour said he had designed a crossbar, which he strapped over his shoulders, on which he could mount three 16mm cameras and focus and operate them simultaneously with a single sighting sensor and trigger. He denies it. He could fit only two cameras to his crossbar.

  These events, including the often painful births of nations, pr
oximity to new men in power, meetings in his stills studio with a rapidly widening range of acquaintances, were giving his life a very clear outline.

  By now, his father and mother were ready to leave East Africa for good. It never seriously occurred to them that he would not travel back ‘home’ with them, like the rest of their children. But he was never in any doubt for one moment.

  With frequent assignments from the press—even the wildlife pictures he took ‘for fun’ during the weekends had begun to make half-page spreads on the back pages of papers like The Times of London—and now television, he had no wish to leave Africa.

  Early in 1965, his parents, sisters, and brothers boarded a P&O liner, the SS Karanja, in Dar es Salaam harbour, bound for Karachi. At 55, Sardar Mohamed was returning to his ancestral land on a pension of 500 shillings a month. As part of his terminal benefits, all his dependants were given one-way tickets on the Indian Ocean steamer. As Amin took his, he told his father, ‘I’ll come across later.’ But, waving farewell as the steamer moved away from the quay, he knew it would never be used.

  Jaunty, self-confident, he moved into bachelor quarters in the house of Salim, a neighbour on the Railways estate. He had total confidence in his abilities, could talk anyone into anything, never minded taking a risk, and seemed to have a charmed existence whatever he did. All he needed were more hands and equipment to meet the demands of his clients. He chose some novel ways of fulfilling them.

  David Martin remembers him at work during the 1965 visit to Tanzania of Chinese Premier Chou En-Iai. ‘He had assignments from five television organisations and eight stills organisations. Obviously, he couldn’t do everything himself, so he hired a group of young Asians and taught them the most rudimentary photography.

  ‘Throughout the Chou En-Iai visit, there was this crocodile procession of photographers led by Mohamed. He would move up to take a given shot and shoot for X seconds, then he would move on and the next in line would move into his place and do the same. He must have made a fortune out of that visit.’

  Then, as now, he could summon up hypnotic charm when he wanted something. ‘No, I don’t want to talk to Mohamed,’ Nairobi marketing executive Jerry Shah once told me with some vehemence. ‘Every time I do, it costs me money.’

  Roy Lipscombe remembers their first meeting—the start of a lifelong friendship—hundreds of miles upcountry in Tanzania, where they were covering a presidential visit. Lipscombe had flown by charter plane for the Tanganyika Standard. Amin, working for Lipscombe’s opposition, drove all the way in his Beetle.

  ‘When the ceremony was over,’ remembers Roy, ‘Mo strode up and asked, almost demanded, that I should take his film, which was for a rival newspaper, back to Dar es Salaam with me in time for publication. I can’t imagine now why I agreed. But I did.’

  Persistence and perseverance are a newsman’s greatest assets. Amin sees his job as taking pictures—and is obsessive about it. Nothing stands in his way.

  ‘Once you agree to do a story, it’s important that you’re first with it. You can’t always win but generally speaking, you should never lose. I can’t actually remember a time when I’ve been on a story and been beaten into the ground, so to speak.’

  For the 1965 state visit of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip to Ethiopia and Sudan, Amin, assigned to cover the tour by Pathe News, whose newsreels ran in cinemas around the world, was one of a hundred or more cameramen and photographers.

  It was during this visit that Emperor Haile Selassie presented the queen with a thoroughbred from his royal stables. These were behind the Chion Hotel, which was once a part of the palace and connected by a private path.

  ‘All the press—and there were about 200 of us counting the reporters—were staying at the Chion,’ recalls Amin. ‘Obviously, with the queen’s interest in horses, it was going to make a great picture. But although the stables were at the back of the hotel, the emperor’s officials insisted that we had to report at the palace and board the official buses. Since we couldn’t use the private path, this involved a long drive around half of the city to the official entrance.

  ‘And when we got there, it was the usual snafu and there was a delay. While we were waiting, the royal couple and the Emperor walked down the path and into the stables, and by the time we got there, the presentation was over. So we weren’t allowed to enter.

  ‘We wrote a note and sent it, in asking them if they would please make the presentation again. It was given to one of the royal family’s aides and the answer came back—no.

  ‘That was when we decided we were going to boycott the rest of the visit. The queen was still being shown around the emperor’s stud and we were standing outside the entrance where the royals would leave.

  ‘So, lining up our cameras on the ground, like a guard of honour without the cameramen, we all stood a yard or two behind. It was very clear that we were protesting and it was very obvious from their reaction when they came out that neither the queen nor the emperor knew what had happened. He asked his aide what the problem was.

  ‘When he heard, he talked to the queen and then, just like two real professionals, they invited us in while the emperor re-presented the horse to Her Majesty.’

  During this tour, his determination always to be first earned him the dubious distinction of receiving two royal rebukes within the space of a week: something even that not many of the British palace staff can boast about. He has a great gift, even in the middle of the mob, of standing out from the others.

  The first rebuke came during a garden party in Addis Ababa. ‘I was filming Prince Philip talking to some schoolgirls, but eventually I became more interested in what he was talking about than actually filming.

  ‘So I got closer and closer, pretending that I was filming. Unfortunately, you can hear the drive on a 35mm cine camera and mine was not switched on. I was just interested in listening to one of the royals talking. I got very close. But Philip, of course, twigged what has happening. He turned around and in a very quiet voice said, “Why don’t you fuck off?”’

  A few days later, Mo found himself in the Sudan, driving through the desert near Khartoum line abreast in two ten-ton trucks, ahead of the queen’s car. All was well until the road narrowed to a single lane, when the lorry in which he was standing took the lead place. All he could see in his viewfinder were professional rivals happily clicking away in the other truck.

  Outraged, he shouted at the driver of his lorry to stop so that he could climb down and go back to photograph the queen’s car as it approached. ‘The convoy was going slow enough for me not to get left behind, and anyway, Khartoum was not that far away.’

  But he had not reckoned with the courtesy of the Sudanese. The driver who had stopped to let him off would not go on without him. The royal motorcade ground to a halt.

  Taking what he felt would almost certainly be exclusive royal portraits, he ignored the furore he had created until the queen herself leaned over the side of her open-top vehicle, extended her arm, and shouted at him in the manner of one used to being obeyed, ‘Get yourself out of the way—and take that truck with you!’

  Soon after this, he had learned that Frelimo was running a guerilla training camp at Bagamoyo, the dhow harbour he’d used for entering Zanzibar.

  They had taken over a building put up more than half a century earlier by the Germans, when the Kaiser claimed Tanganyika for himself and had converted it into barracks. He made his first visit directly to the door but he was met by a gun. Despite his pitch that he was working for news agencies sympathetic to Black Africa and freedom from colonialism, three more similar attempts failed.

  Foiled in this conventional approach, he chartered a light plane at Dar es Salaam airport, removed the door, strapped himself in next to the pilot, and zoomed above the palms, almost clipping the topmost branches. But Frelimo held its secrets close beneath the rustling branches. He returned empty-handed.

  Next, he hired a small dhow and drifted in on the night breeze t
o the beach which led up to the camp. Arranging to be picked up just before sunup, he dropped into the shallows and waded ashore with his cameras. But this commando-style operation resulted in failure, too.

  Finally, he forged a letter from the Frelimo chief himself, Eduardo Mondlane, the man who only months earlier had taken his unconscious body to the hospital. Somehow, he had obtained a copy of his signature.

  Now he typed a letter giving himself authority to enter the camp for filming, and carefully forged Mondlane’s signature at the bottom. As a result, he was given the run of the camp for one whole day—shooting news footage and taking colour and black-and-white still pictures. They showed more than 300 freedom fighters being trained by Africans who had been instructed in ideology and hand-to-hand fighting in camps in the Soviet Union, Cairo, Peking, Cuba, and Algiers.

  Subsequently, the pictures appeared in North America, Europe, Africa, and the Pacific zone including Australia, New Zealand, and the Far East together, with a page spread in the London Observer and The Times. They aroused shock and anger in equal proportions. His television film was widely used and the issue was debated in the Tanzania Parliament.

  In November, no longer a Prohibited Immigrant after the island’s union with Tanganyika, yet still needing a visa, he went to Zanzibar to cover Land Distribution Day—a heady occasion summing up what the revolution was all about. Sheikh Abeid Karume, president of the island and vice-president of Tanzania, was handing out plots to landless Zanzibaris.

  The media were already tagging Karume’s bastion island a Soviet submarine base and accusing him of destabilising the Indian Ocean, which was a peace zone. A massive military buildup was said to be taking place on the island, with shipments of arms unloaded nightly from Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, East German, and even Romanian ships. Washington was especially worried. Its paranoia about Cuba resulted in an obsessive fear that Zanzibar might become Cuba’s equivalent in Africa. He realised CBS would jump at evidence of such a military buildup on the island.