by Brian Tetley
Long before he recounted his experiences to CBS executive Bill Small in Washington, the news chief had read a secret State Department report. He already knew that Amin had been made to strip naked in the noonday sun almost daily and forced to take pills.
In a confidential memo to Gordon Manning in CBS’s New York office, with a copy to Patricia Bernie, Small joked, ‘I assume this treatment to be the Zanzibar equivalent of physical therapy.’ More seriously, he added, ‘During the last four weeks, I have been in daily touch with the State Department, berating officials high and low for not getting Mo out of prison. State Department people here were somewhat shocked by the ferocity of my attacks on them, for apparent temerity in the face of a delicate diplomatic situation on Zanzibar.
‘I assume that Pat Bernie will be in touch with Mo and I am curious as to whether pressures on State were helpful or whether he was released apart from that, because of his own efforts or those of the Canadians, representing the British.’
In fact, his release did come about because of the tremendous pressure CBS exerted on the American Government and Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere. CBS lobbied the State Department in Washington daily for action, and the Commonwealth office in London almost as regularly.
Amin remembers that several friends in Dar es Salaam complained about the Canadian High Commission, which seemed to be more interested in keeping the peace with the Tanzanian Government than carrying out its duty to a British citizen.
But his ordeal was not yet over. In Dar es Salaam, an immigration officer handed him a deportation order and escorted him to a Fokker Friendship bound for Nairobi, where he was met by a member of the British High Commission and sympathetic reporters from the East African Standard and the Daily Nation.
He did not want to talk. Before leaving the airport, he rang Dolly in Dar es Salaam and told her to put together some clothes, collect his cameras, and fly to Nairobi. Relatives wanted him to stay with them but he checked in at the New Stanley Hotel. He was still recovering from shock and needed time to think. ‘I just wanted to be alone.’
That night in his hotel room, he received a call from President Nyerere’s press secretary, Hesham Mbita, to say the immigration officer at Dar es Salaam airport had made a mistake. ‘I should have been allowed forty-eight hours. He asked me if I would like to come back for 48 hours.
‘I told him, “not at the moment—I’m not well.” But my main fear was that perhaps he meant they had made a mistake in releasing me.’ Next morning, he met Dolly at Nairobi’s Embakasi Airport, still uncertain, knowing only that a major but unplanned change in his life had taken place.
Checking with his Tanzanian contacts, he found that the 48-hour offer was genuine and he returned to the capital to wrap up his affairs. Waiting for him was a cable from New York:
Mo welcome back stop We salute your courage in enduring long confinement stop Happy you are well and relieved to know CBS news is back to normal strength in Africa.
Manning
Amin assigned the running of his business to Bahadur Khaki, Dolly’s brother, and two days later, on October 26, returned to Nairobi on a five-day visitor’s pass. Under East African Community rules, a deportee from any one of the three countries—Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania—was automatically prohibited from the other two countries. Each day, he visited the Kenya Immigration Office in Jogoo House, Harambee Avenue, Nairobi, to plead his case with Kenyan officials. They gave him no firm answer.
But then it was back to covering news. The trouble-ridden Organisation of African Unity (OAU) was holding its third Heads of State summit in Addis Ababa, and he flew there for CBS News. The atmosphere in the Ethiopian capital was tense. A group of Tanzanian students on their way home from China marched down the broad wide streets of Haile Selassie’s imperial capital in Red Guard uniforms and Mao Tse-tung badges, shouting communist slogans. When he moved into the middle with his cameras, he immediately became the target of the mob. By his side was his great friend, Associated Press photographer Dennis Royal. They first met when Amin was a cub in Dar es Salaam. The mob set about them, calling Amin an ‘enemy’ of their country.
Within hours, two CBS executives in New York sent him another cable:
Many thanks your great efforts on our behalf but please take care of yourself stop You more important to us than story.
Segal/Vanbergen
He had a strong case to be allowed to stay in Kenya. His birth in Nairobi in August 1943 automatically entitled him to live in Kenya under Section 18 of the Immigration Act, which also exempted him from the need to obtain a work permit. As usual, he won. On January 11, 1967, his passport was endorsed with the Kenya Residents Certificate: ‘Valid for the life of holder of this certificate.’
Now he settled in to a new life based in Nairobi, where veteran cameraman Ray Robinson worked for Visnews and Mohinder Dhillon for CBS and other strings. Within days, he was drawn into this cameraman’s ambience and had a desk in Dhillon’s office. It was agreed he would not encroach on either Robinson’s or Dhillon’s territorial rights. Kenya was their preserve. But elsewhere, he felt free to operate as both stringer and competitor, which he did with such a degree of success that it provoked enmity similar to that which had arisen in Dar es Salaam.
Typically, he also ensured that his lucrative strings in Dar es Salaam were still serviced. Dolly’s brother Bahadur shot the film and took the stills while she did the paperwork and accounts.
On January 24, he was in Bullo Howa on the Somalia side of the Kenya border, filming Kenyan refugees seeking sanctuary from maltreatment by Kenyan and Ethiopian soldiers. They claimed their troubles stemmed from the running battle the two countries were having with a group of ruthless brigands who operated from a base in Mandera—deep inside Kenya’s desert territory—where they ran the Northern Province People’s Progressive Party, which sought alliance with Somalia. Known as the Shifta, these were ruthless killers and robbers. Troops were said to have carried out reprisals on the civilians who fled across the border.
His film made the CBS prime time bulletin and his stills were splashed across half a page of The Times of January 30 under the heading, ‘Troubles in the Horn of Africa.’ Days later, at the Namanga border, he filmed the beginning of what seemed likely to be a major confrontation between Kenya and Tanzania after Kenya tightened up travel regulations following Nyerere’s nationalisation of banks. These stories were far too close to the border for the comfort of the official Kenya stringers.
He was rapidly becoming as familiar around Kenya with his battery of cameras as he had been in Tanzania. His energy and range were phenomenal. He spent his spare time documenting nature in the wild. Often, with monumental and uncharacteristic patience, he would study an animal for a whole day, rewarded by a growing understanding of its movements and behaviour. One picture sequence of a lioness and her cheeky cub, taken in Nairobi National Park in February 1967, was of such beauty that The Times of London used three photographs across more than half a page.
The day these appeared, however, he was far from his new home—in the front line of the violence and guerilla activity that was turning Aden into a charnel house. A general strike had provoked riots and unrest. Sixteen people were killed and 69, including British soldiers, injured.
All through the action, at the shoulders of the British troops, he was shooting colour and black and white, stills and cinefilm, simultaneously and at the same time dodging grenades, bullets, booby traps, and tear gas.
In Aden and Djibouti, with Dennis Royal, he was again trying to draw the line between the ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ risk. They often nearly failed, becoming an ironic illustration of what frontline photographer Mathew Naythons—who has worn body armour to undertake his assignments on more than one occasion—meant when he said, ‘When I get hit, I hope it’s because I’m unlucky, not stupid. I’m never worried about the bullet with my name on it. I’m worried about the one that says, “To Whom It May Concern”.’
Between Feb
ruary and April, Amin was virtually resident in Aden and neighbouring territories. From Aden, he braved a 120-mile journey along the heavily-mined route to Taiz, across the border in Yemen, to interview the leader of the freedom movement, Abdulla al Asnag.
Another world scoop, in Aden, was his UPIN film of two men being beaten to death. UPIN’s weekly log for March 5, 1967 reported, ‘Mohamed Amin has produced some first-class coverage out of Aden this week, including coverage of a hysterical crowd beating two men to death during a funeral ceremony.’
In mid-March, he pulled out of Aden for a week to team up again with Royal in Djibouti, covering the referendum to decide whether French Somalia should retain its link with Paris. The French had declared that only 39,000 out of 125,000 people were qualified to vote. When the result of the referendum—in favour of retaining French ties—was announced, rioting broke out. On March 18 and 19, French troops sealed off the African sector with barbed wire after 11 Somalis were killed and 20 more were injured in a 20-minute battle.
It was during this battle that he ran, literally, into the man who was to play a large role in his life during the 1970s—bearded Paul Toulmin-Rothe. ‘I was running through the street towards the riot and he was running away. We both came around the same corner and crashed into each other. He told me, “Go the other way. Turn back. Follow me. It’s dangerous back there.”’
Amin ignored him. Royal was not far behind. During the battle, the two photographers were so intent on capturing the action that they did not notice the hand grenade that rolled near them. In the blast, shrapnel caught Amin in the knee and Dennis in the groin.
‘Dennis went down with total fear in his eyes,’ he remembers. ‘He thought he had lost everything which made life worthwhile. Then he realised it wasn’t perhaps as bad as he thought at first and got slowly to his feet and warily unfastened his belt, unzipped his fly, and dropped his trousers to examine the damage. ‘I took a picture of him at that point but his relief at finding that the wound was only a minor one stopped him losing his cool. In fact, later, when I gave him a souvenir print of that picture, he roared with laughter.’
It was the last time they worked together. Royal met his death early in the 1970s, during a peacetime NATO exercise, in a helicopter that crashed.
It was in Djibouti that BBC veteran Ronald Robson also first met Mohamed Amin. ‘For the television news correspondent, life was a lottery,’ says Robson, who joined the BBC in 1954 as foreign correspondent and war reporter for both radio and television news, and who filed reports from India, Southeast Asia, the Far East, Middle East, the USA, and Africa.
‘If the Fates decreed that the correspondent should be blessed with the most dramatic story of the day in his territory, it all meant little if the camera team failed to capture the best scenes or produce sound on an exclusive interview, or refused to move because it was time for a cooked meal, or turned out to be incapable of grasping the significance of events as they happened, or were slow or “bloody-minded”.
‘The joy of working with Mo was that he was always good—and amenable, dependable, fast-moving, cheerful, and courageous; with news sense, picture sense, personal contacts of considerable value, and a burning determination to make the most of any task.
‘I’d heard nothing very reassuring about Mo when I was told that he’d be working on the referendum to be held in Djibouti on whether that territory should remain linked with France, and that I should be ready to script any of his film for use by the BBC.
‘Amongst other things I was told that Mo was a “bit of a cowboy,” a slick operator who was out to make money and thought nothing of working for two agencies at the same time, as he was entirely a freelancer, and felt limited only by whatever he could physically accomplish.’
He’d also heard that Amin mounted two cameras on a bar with a central sighting device to shoot film simultaneously for two separate customers while using a still camera—on the same bar—to shoot pictures for newspapers.
‘He sounded,’ adds Robson, ‘a real man of action.
‘Events in Djibouti were to confirm this. Mo was always in the thick of it. Drums of petrol were set ablaze to impede the soldiers in one riot. Mo was there being singed. Some rioters are content to simply throw stones, which is bad enough. In Djibouti, the Somalis went one better and used slings of the kind used by David against Goliath, and there was a plentiful supply of ammunition in the form of large, smooth beach pebbles the size of bread rolls. A stills photographer of my acquaintance had a nasty facial injury from only a glancing blow from one of these missiles, his spectacles smashed, and was lucky to escape concussion or worse.
‘Mo decided to capitalise on his brown skin. There was no percentage in remaining on the receiving end of the barrage of stones thrown with such vicious velocity from slings.
‘He crossed the lines and filmed from the viewpoint of the slingers, whose targets were white faces. This was a bright idea—until the French forces decided it was time to open fire.
‘A French rifleman tried to draw a bead on a slinger out to Mo’s right. The slinger ran across stage, as it were, passing Mo. The rifle’s muzzle swung with him.
‘When the trigger was pressed, the target had just passed beyond Mo’s left shoulder.
‘He never stopped filming. He didn’t even duck, although a fraction of a second’s difference right then in the timing of the shot could have ended a promising career. The French troops were professionals. Mo had taken a calculated risk.’
That performance won him the Visnews Film of the Month award. ‘Assigned to the difficult Djibouti story, he maintained a flow of excellent material on the buildup to these important elections, polling day scenes, and the riots which followed the result. He was injured in the process of covering the demonstrations—though fortunately not seriously.
‘Most of his stories were accompanied by wild sound tracks and his efforts were a model one-man operation.
‘He took pains not only with the camera but in writing his “dope” sheets, and he overcame a problematic shipping situation with the help of some detailed preplanning in London.’
One incentive for him remaining so long in the war zone was the £50-a-day darkroom allowance he drew from United Press International (UPI). With characteristic prudence, he invested most of the first day’s allowance on the acquisition of a set of plastic chemical baths, an enlarger, chemicals, and a red bulb. Each day, for an hour or so, remembering his experience at the Nation newspaper in Dar es Salaam, he transformed the toilet in his hotel room into a makeshift darkroom.
He remembers best the time he covered ‘Mad Mitch’ retaking Aden’s strategic Crater area when the major, bagpipes swirling, marched into the enemy outpost at night with little more to protect him than pure guts. Amin marched by his side filming this act of bravery.
Aden represented the nadir of intransigent British policies in the 1960s. On June 20, 1967, 400 freedom fighters took control of the Crater area of the protectorate, which contained the commercial and residential capital of the country.
But Lieutenant Colonel Colin Mitchell of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders was determined to recapture it with minimum loss of life. His bravery and that of his men on that day, July 3, 1967, captured the hearts of the British public and earned the admiration of fighting men everywhere, winning the officer the name, ‘Mad Mitch’.
He was media-conscious and before the attack, briefed the British Press corps, including Stanley Bonnett of The Associated Press and the Daily Telegraph, Stephen Harper and Terry Fincher of the Daily Express, Anthony Carthew of the Daily Mail, Barry Stanley of the Daily Mirror, John Dodd of the Sun, and Mohamed Amin, who, apart from taking stills for UPI, was shooting film for CBS. ‘Mad Mitch’ told them, ‘We’re going into the Crater.’
He was piped into battle. ‘It is the most thrilling sound in the world,’ he wrote in his autobiography, Having Been a Soldier. ‘In an Internal Security operation against a lot of third-rate, fly-blown terrorists and mutineers
in Crater on July 3, 1967, it seemed utterly appropriate.’
It also required steely nerve on the part of the correspondents. Moments after ‘Mad Mitch’ ordered the advance, the enemy opened machine-gun fire. ‘Everyone bit the dust,’ he recalls, ‘—with a few notable exceptions.’ Mohamed Amin was one.
Walking unprotected alongside his Land Rover, ‘Mad Mitch’ continued to lead his ‘B’ Company into the heart of the Crater. The correspondents, he reported, were ‘utterly cooperative and friendly and shared the experience in every sense.’
It was Amin’s film that the world’s viewers saw. ‘World reaction,’ noted Mitchell, ‘had been immediate and intense.’ But the BBC and ITN crew only flew in from London the morning after the attack.
It was also Amin’s UPI stills that occupied many of the front pages of the British and world press.
To many people, photographing and filming wars and riots must seem a desperate way to earn a living. But Amin has a buccaneer’s love of action and movement. During the next three months, he took himself time and again to the limits of endurance and danger, almost like a game of Russian roulette. He was a member of a unique group of adventurers, reckless yet caring people, whom Time magazine would honour years later in a tribute headlined:
‘Freezing moments in history—Photojournalists aided by television have come into their own again.’
Walter Gerald Clarke, quoting former Associated Press, now Time, photographer Eddie Adams—’a powerful picture reaches into your heart and just rips it out’—wrote that despite the wonders of television, the still news photograph retained its special magic. Clarke also quoted Harold Evans, then editor of The Times:
‘It is still sometimes thought that the arrival of the moving picture made the still image obsolete. I believe, quite to the contrary, that the still image has never been more powerful. It is a moment frozen in time: it preserves, forever, a finite fraction of the infinite time of the universe.’