by Brian Tetley
As he drove inland for the Land Distribution ceremony, his sixth sense was working overtime. Not far from his destination, he saw a new dirt road leading off into the jungle. It was unmarked and, judging by the debris and uprooted trees, recently built.
‘I turned and drove along it for a few miles,’ he recalls. ‘Suddenly, I found myself around a bend driving through an open and unguarded gateway as if it was the most natural thing in the world.’
Troops, wearing Cuban battle fatigues and East German helmets, were being drilled by European instructors. There were Soviet BRT-40 armed personnel carriers, and black crews undergoing training. On another site, instructors were demonstrating the use of a flare pistol.
‘It was like something out of a James Bond movie. And there I was, in the middle of it. What could I do but get to work?’
He did so with typical care, returning to his car every few minutes to hide the film he had taken and to reload his cameras as a precaution against confiscation. The Soviet instructors were astonishingly cooperative. If he asked for a sequence to be restaged, they complied. Moving through the camp, he took pictures of heavy machine guns and anti-tank guns, personnel undergoing training in grenade handling and antipersonnel mines. All the instruction was given in heavily accented Swahili.
‘I went unchallenged until I filmed close-ups of ammunition boxes with Russian markings on the side. Then I was stopped by a couple of Russians who asked if I was working for the Zanzibar Government.’
He paused, cleaning his lenses, before explaining carefully that he was on the island to photograph the Land Distribution ceremony as a guest of the government. Mr Karume, he explained to his incredulous listeners, was expected any moment and he was there to record his arrival for the East African press and television stations.
When he was told he was in the wrong location, he feigned shock. ‘But then,’ he lamented, ‘I have wasted all my film.’
The Russians watched in disbelief as he produced the invitation and his official pass. ‘This is a dreadful mistake,’ he sighed, continuing his performance as a gullible and not very bright photographer. ‘I am in serious trouble with my bosses.’
Beside themselves with anger, the Soviets told him they would detain him for interrogation. But he played the part of the harried, not too intelligent photographer convincingly. ‘If you let me go, I’ll give you all the film I have taken. You can open it up and throw it away. But please, I beg you, leave me my unused film so that I can do my job and film the ceremony when it takes place.’ Even as he talked, he was rooting in his camera bag, pulling out roll after roll of unused film, shredding the celluloid before their astonished eyes. Then they asked him about the film in his two Bolex cine cameras. ‘Not that,’ he said. ‘I’ve hardly used any, and what I have, I need for the ceremony’.
But the Soviets were adamant, so he suggested he should remove the reel. He borrowed one of the guard’s jackets and covered the camera. Before the Russians could answer, he moved through them and, speaking in Swahili to one of the Zanzibari trainees, asked him to hold his camera. He then took out the spool with the unexposed film, keeping the film that he had exposed on the take-up spool in the camera.
To his delight, the ruse worked. The Russians nodded and moved away. ‘I never knew whether it was just my manner or the name Karume and the official invitation which persuaded the Russians to leave me alone.’
The following day, The Times splashed his still pictures as CBS and Visnews syndicated his dramatic film footage. The Visnews ‘dope’ sheet of November 8, 1965, which went out with Mo’s film, read:
TANZANIA:1) Russians help train Zanzibar Army;
2) Zanzibar gives farms to peasants.
Two stories from Zanzibar: Soviet military advisers helping to train the island’s army, and peasant families being given farms by the Tanzania Government.
Film shows: Zanzibar troops with Soviet military vehicles and advisers training in bush country near Zanzibar town; and first Vice-President Abeid Karume at the land-giving ceremony and helping to measure out the three acres allotted to each family.
As well as advisers, the Soviet Union has also provided vehicles, including armoured cars equipped with antiaircraft guns and trucks.
The Chinese People’s Republic has also given similar aid.
This clear evidence of Russia’s presence in Zanzibar and the Indian Ocean was debated in both the British Parliament and the American Senate. Nothing about the prints made from the edit of his film identified the cameraman. But he forgot one thing. It was routine at Visnews to identify the camera operator on the ‘dope’ sheets which accompanied the film to their subscribers around the world. One of these was Soviet television in Moscow.
There, his name was passed on to Comrade V. A. Kiriev, head of the East African section in the Russian Foreign Ministry. Kiriev, in turn, reported Mohamed Amin’s name in a confidential report to Ibrahim Makungu, Abeid Karume’s head of security on the Clove Island. He had become a marked man.
By the end of 1965, he had already acquired an international reputation. In newsrooms throughout Europe and America, he was recognised as a man willing to go anywhere who could be relied upon to deliver the story and the pictures.
In August the following year, when President Charles de Gaulle visited the pocket colony of French Somalia, CBS assigned him to cover the story.
It was a patch of arid desert patrolled by the French Foreign Legion and a handful of nomads, sandwiched between Somalia and Emperor Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia. Djibouti—its one and only town—was a docks and Foreign Legion centre. It accounted for almost half of French Somalia’s population. There was virtually nothing else but sand and sweltering heat, but de Gaulle was eager that France should hold on to this outpost, one of the most strategic points in the region. His visit was intended to make this clear.
On the morning of August 26, 1966, a large press contingent followed the French leader on a tour of the port installations, breaking for lunch at the main hotel in the city’s Lagarde Square, where de Gaulle was scheduled to make a major address in the afternoon. All the bunting, chairs, and platforms were in position.
Leaving their camera equipment in the cars, his colleagues hurried into the dining room for lunch. ‘I didn’t bother with lunch. I went up to my room, which had a balcony overlooking the square where de Gaulle was going to make his speech,’ recalls Amin.
‘After taking some shots of the large crowd that had already gathered, my Bolex camera was on its tripod and I was actually sitting there cleaning my cameras. Suddenly, around midday, somebody fired a shot. It seemed to come from the crowd.
‘At this point, the French Foreign Legion opened up with their machine guns, shooting randomly into the crowd.
‘I did some quick takes from the balcony and then rushed down the stairs to film the massacre. People were lying dead at the side of the road. Others were dying, their legs and arms ripped off by machine gun bullets. Then a Legion ambulance, pretty large, drove up and the locals loaded the wounded, with blood pouring out of them and limbs missing, into the ambulance.
‘A big Foreign Legionnaire came along shouting at me in French. I think he was telling me to get the hell out of there but since I don’t understand a word of French, I ignored him and in the confusion, he didn’t actually do anything.
‘Then he ordered the Legionnaires to throw all the wounded out of the ambulance—about a dozen were critically injured, some dying—and they just threw them out like sacks of potatoes. Everybody was told that the ambulance was for the Legion and not for the locals.
‘Despite the large contingent of photographers and cameramen who were in the restaurant, I had this story pretty much to myself. Their cameras were locked in their hired cars and their drivers had all fled for fear of being killed by the Foreign Legion.’
His film went to CBS with secondary footage to Visnews, whose script of August 27, reported:
General de Gaulle arrived on Thursday to an airport welcom
e, which gave no indication of the trouble to come. The banners were predominantly welcoming, although a few demanded, and demonstrations, which started in a minor way, grew fiercer. Soon, the main square, in which the president was scheduled to make a public address, was thronged with demonstrators—and there were clashes with police troops. Barricades of barbed wire and road blocks were quickly set up, and the African quarters of the capital were sealed by troops with submachine guns. The president cancelled his public address and instead spoke to the Djibouti Assembly. He told them the banners and agitation were not sufficient to express the democratic will of the nation.
After the demonstrations, the wounded were left in the square as squads of troops and police moved in to clear the debris of clubs, bottles, clothing, and stones.
Amin had the only pictures. Once again, ‘Mo’s Luck’ had put him where the action was and given him a major exclusive.
He followed in de Gaulle’s wake when the French leader flew at once to Addis Ababa for a state visit to Ethiopia. At the capital’s Bole Airport, he was approached by a Time-Life correspondent.
Did he have pictures of the Djibouti massacre?
Yes, he’d shot some rolls of colour but he wasn’t sure what was on them.
The Time-Life representative said they’d buy them. How much did Amin want?
‘A thousand dollars.’
Without demur, the American newsman agreed. The pictures made a gruesome spread in a subsequent issue of Life.
Then he flew to Pakistan to visit his parents at their new home in Faisalabad, before flying back to Dar es Salaam on September 8, to find his post box filled with congratulatory messages from CBS and Visnews, lauding his coverage of the Djibouti rioting.
Fifteen days later, on September 24, 1966, with three other media men, he flew in a chartered four-seater Cessna from Dar es Salaam airport to Zanzibar to cover the state visit of Egyptian president Gamel Nasser.
Amin had just passed his 23rd birthday, but his long mop of black, wavy hair, and goatee beard made him look a good deal older. It was about his 2oth visit to Zanzibar in as many months and the immigration officer looked down, checked his name against the press list, and stamped the formal one-day visa into his passport.
Minutes later, as he waited to film the Egyptian president’s arrival, he was approached by a burly African, sweating freely in a three-piece European suit. Asked to accompany the man, Mohamed Amin walked behind him, unworried. He thought he was going to be shown the press vehicles arranged for cameramen to film the Egyptian leader’s visit. Unknown to him, he was followed by a colleague who saw four men bundle him into a car and drive away. The Soviets had marked him. Now the Zanzibaris had him.
4. ‘Solitary’, Slings, and Death Row
THE NIGHTMARE GREW FROM THE moment the heavy doors leading to the sweltering, mouldering dungeons of Zanzibar’s infamous Kilimamigu prison swung shut behind him. Before him, across a bare concrete vestibule, stood a second door—a latticework of steel. When this too was locked behind him, he was pushed along a passageway lined with maximum security cells, four on each side.
As he was being locked in, he pleaded to write at least one letter. He addressed it to Mohamed Fazal, the Tanzanian Government Press Officer accompanying the official party with President Nasser.
Dear Fazal,
Please, you must help me urgently. I am being held for no reason in Kilimamigu prison. I was arrested this morning and I am being locked at the rear of the prison in the maximum security political section. If you have no luck with the Zanzibar authorities, please advise the British High Commission in Dar es Salaam and my clients, CBS, in New York, and Associated Press and Visnews in London. Also tell Dolly what has happened. Tell everyone to do what they can. I am desperate.
Amin
‘I also asked to be allowed to contact the Canadian High Commission in Dar es Salaam,’ he recalls. ‘It was looking after the interests of British citizens following Tanzania’s break in diplomatic relations with Britain the December before over Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
‘The African guards refused, and I was hustled into a dark cell at revolver point. There, I found an African who told me he had fled from the Portuguese colony of Mozambique seeking asylum in Zanzibar. He’d reported to the Zanzibar police on arrival and they’d immediately slapped him in jail.’
One guard gave him some cushions to rest on but before long, a rough, bearded inquisitor—his name was Yusuf—hurried into the cell, ripped the cushions away and threw him a tattered and dirty sheet with the sneer, ‘That’s all you’ll get in this place.’ Later, he returned and hustled Amin out of the cell, with his camera equipment, into an interrogation room.
‘I thought this was the end and that they were going to shoot me,’ he remembers. Told to write down a list of all the things he had with him, he was then marched into another room and stripped naked. Eventually, his captors gave him back his trousers. When he returned to the cell, the Mozambican had been moved. He was alone—locked up in a tiny cubicle no more than six feet square with one small hole for ventilation and a wooden door with a peep hole. He was to spend sixteen days in ‘solitary’.
‘There was no bed and I slept on a grimy concrete floor with that disgusting sheet, full of holes, as my only protection from hordes of mosquitoes. I can’t ever remember crying before but I did in that terrible place and I beat my fists on the wall because my situation seemed so hopeless.’
Each morning, before sunup, he was given five minutes to use the primitive toilets but not allowed to bathe. Food was a plate of maize porridge in the morning and unwashed beans at night. For thirteen days, he ate nothing. Drinking water came from the lavatory cistern.
When he refused to sweep his cell, he was stripped, beaten with a broomstick, and made to crawl naked along the floor of the compound in the midday heat.
On the sixteenth day of this nightmare, his cell door swung open and a body was pushed in. In the darkness, Amin squinted, trying to make out who the man sprawled on the floor was.
Then he recognised his new companion. It was the Zanzibar Minister of Finance. But the man was too shocked to answer questions or even speak. ‘If they can do this to their cabinet ministers,’ he thought, ‘what chance have I?’
The minister, Abdul Aziz Twala, was later killed on Abeid Karume’s orders.
However, Amin was not given long to meditate. Later that day, he was moved to a cell with two Arabs and two Africans. One Arab had been locked up almost a year. He had said he had no sympathy with the new government. The other was a former Radio Zanzibar disc jockey who had been inside for eight months—from the day security police had searched his home and found a toy gun. The two Africans had been there six months. They had no idea why they were being held. Talking to them, despite the heat, he felt a sudden chill.
Looking back, there has been nothing in Mohamed Amin’s character or personality that evokes self-pity. Resolute and determined, too often in his life, he has been in potentially dangerous situations with only his own resourcefulness, quick wit, ready tongue, and extempore ingenuity to rely on for escape.
More often than most in his perilous profession, certainly much more often than any ordinary person, he has been eyeball to eyeball with death and outfaced it. He was ever an opportunist and a calculated risk-taker. There’s no doubt, however, that it never entered his head he would be arrested for the film he had taken earlier in Zanzibar.
East German interrogators accused him of spying for Britain and America and threatened to kill him unless he confessed. When he refused to take a tablet prescribed by an orderly in a tattered shabby white uniform, he was beaten.
Yet, though he despaired, he did not give up. ‘I think being in prison, particularly in those circumstances, is about as depressing as you can get. We’re all different in many ways. Some people get depressed over petty things because that’s the way they are—you know, sensitive. Others need to take a lot more before they get depressed. But
somewhere along the line, I think all of us do get depressed. And feeling frustrated and threatened is a form of depression.’
To counter it, he plotted to escape—’run or be killed’—with another detainee who had been there some time. The date set for this do-or-die attempt was October 22.
‘None of us ever thought we were going to leave that place alive. We all thought we were going to be killed, including one of the trusties—a guy who used to clean up the cells and the compound. He’d been there two years.’
The plan was to overpower the night guards, steal the revolver in the guard room, and flee over the wall. There was a car outside belonging to one of the new inmates.
‘We planned to jump in that and drive like hell to one of the beaches on the island, where the trusty knew someone with a dhow which could take us to Tanga, the nearest point on the mainland,’ recalls Amin.
But with that inevitable implication of forewritten destiny, it was not to be. On October 19, he was ordered to wash his clothes—unchanged since his imprisonment. The trusty told him it meant one of two things. ‘I was going to be either shot or released.’
In the event, he was asked to sign a statement in Swahili denying that he had been ill-treated and on October 21, he was taken to the airport and put on a plane for Dar es Salaam. In 27 days, he had lost 28 pounds in weight.
How seriously the Americans took the affair—and the Soviet presence in the Indian Ocean—can be gauged from the fact that they contrived to have a CIA agent board the same plane. The quiet-spoken American managed to seat himself next to the still-shocked photographer and spent the short 25-minute flight gently quizzing him about his ordeal.