by Brian Tetley
Feeling pleased with himself, the Mirror stringer wrote a 500-word story, selected the best negatives, and sent them in an air-freight package to the newspaper. Along with the now wilting daffodil stems, he put the girl’s letter in another package addressed to Prince Charles, and went to the airport crew area, where a BOAC VC10 captain agreed to deliver the package of flowers to Buckingham Palace.
The stringer assured the Mirror news and picture desks that it was an exclusive story but he did give it to the Nation, which ran it on page three the same day the Mirror collected the negatives and story from Heathrow.
It didn’t cross his mind that you never serve notice of an exclusive in the making to Mohamed Amin. At that time in particular, Mo had an almost pathological compulsion not only to be first with the television stories but any news story. Nobody, but nobody, was allowed to beat him on his own patch.
Because of space problems, London told the stringer that they hadn’t been able to use a picture, but the story was on page one. Then they rang again to ask what the hell was the Daily Mail doing with the same story and a virtually identical picture.
After reading the story in the Nation, Amin simply went along to the Nation and bought a print, which he radioed to the Mail. He paid £1 for that print—and sold it for £30.
Lesson Number One!
At that time, however, most of the stories out of Africa were dramas or tragedies. One was the continuing agitation to rid the region of its Asian minority—many of them second and third generation East Africans—which culminated in the mass expulsion of Asians from Uganda in 1972.
In Kenya, new trade licensing laws—effectively prohibiting merchants who had run their shops for as long as half a century or more from continuing in business—were announced. The first victims, around fifty families totalling some 500 people, booked passage for India aboard the SS Kampala, departing from Kilindini docks, Mombasa, on January 10, 1969.
‘There’s racism in every society,’ says Amin, ‘but it’s nothing to do with colour. There are various backgrounds, clans, castes, and communities, and all that, which all boils down to some kind of racialism.
‘If you look for it, there’s plenty of it around. In many instances, people get treated badly—I’ve seen it happen—because they suck up to others. You know, they get themselves into a position where they get treated roughly.’
His film sequence of the first Asian exodus closed with a long slow ‘pan’ of the sad and haunted faces taking their last look at East Africa from the top deck. It reminded him of his own decision, made four years earlier in 1965, to remain. The one-way ticket to Karachi had never been used. No matter what happened, he never intended that it should. He was where he wanted to be, where it was all happening.
Always unhappy without action, he was delighted to cover a professional parachute jumping contest in Nairobi early in the new year of 1969, but found the student riots at the end of January more challenging. Over a thousand University of Nairobi students were evicted from their halls of residence following a boycott. Kenya’s tough old founder-leader, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, closed down the university and ordered in the riot police. Several students were beaten up in a melee, which Mo filmed.
In February, he shot a remarkable story about Richard Amiani, a 32-year-old humanitarian who had spent six years travelling almost 10,000 miles a year through remote areas of Kenya, performing literally thousands of eye operations. He followed that with another story about the blind—the ascent of Africa’s highest mountain, the 19,340-foot high Kilimanjaro well inside Tanzania, by a group of blind students from the Outward Bound Mountain School, Loitokitok, on the Kenya side of the mountain. Despite his prohibited immigrant status in Tanzania, he followed the climbers to the peak. That news film was seen around the world while still pictures were published in major magazines in Europe and America, including Ebony, America’s largest selling Afro-American magazine.
He was now regularly making half-page spreads in The Times of London, too. One, of cheetahs all over a tourist’s car in Nairobi National Park, illustrates Gerald Clarke’s point that ‘only someone with a special eye can catch those odd and revealing juxtapositions that give meaning to the obvious and the jejune.’ In February, it was an ostrich courtship ritual, which commanded half a page.
But when that appeared, Amin was in Dhaka—then Dacca, East Pakistan—with the BBC’s India correspondent. They were reporting the aftermath of Ayub Khan’s resignation as president and the imposition of martial law—more pictures which made The Times and other major newspapers around the world.
Back in Kenya, he filmed the five-day, 3,500-mile East African Safari Rally. To find the most dramatic pictures and the best early morning or late afternoon light, he often set off at midnight, not returning until 10 or 11 the next evening. Yet to him, these exhausting days were times of recreation compared to his usual routine.
After the rally, he joined a Flying Doctors’ mercy flight from Nairobi to Moyale, on the Ethiopian border. A seven-year-old boy had been snatched from his bed by a hyena.
His film of the rescue made two minutes on CBS news. It was his last story for the American network, which had fostered his career for more than seven years. American interest in Africa was waning, only to revive in any depth 15 years later when his Ethiopian famine coverage, shown on the rival NBC network, once again turned eyes and hearts towards the so-called Dark Continent.
Indeed, the story he shot for Visnews only three days after the Moyale story could have been a preview of his 1984 film in Ethiopia. Drought and famine had afflicted Kenya’s Maasailand and the seasonal rains, due in March, had failed. He flew out to one of the worst-hit locations, Selengai, with Flying Doctor pilot Dr Anne Spoerry. He also filmed President Kenyatta laying the foundation stone for Kenya’s satellite communications headquarters in Nairobi, another pointer to his own future although, at that time, he had no idea of it. In between all these stories, he was also busy filming the Swahili language movie, Mrembo.
This role came to an abrupt halt at midday on Saturday July 5, 1969, with another astonishing instance of ‘Mo’s Luck’. ‘I was at home in my flat in Mfang’ano Street, a few hundred yards from the Nairobi city centre, when a friend rang to tell me Tom Mboya had been in an accident.’ Minister for Economic Planning and Development, Tom Mboya was the rising star of Kenya politics, considered by many a likely successor to President Mzee Jomo Kenyatta.
Grabbing his equipment, Amin ran downstairs, leapt into his car, and drove to the scene of the assassination. Minutes after the assassin had gunned Mboya down, Amin was photographing the body, which was sprawled in a pool of blood in the doorway of a pharmacy. He didn’t even have time to load his Bolex.
When an ambulance pulled up, he followed inside. Asked by the driver where to go, he shouted, ‘Nairobi Hospital.’ As the ambulance turned the corner, he was trying to load a reel of cine film into his Bolex. But the door swung open and he had to throw his take-up spool on the floor to hold on and avoid being thrown out.
‘One side of the spool bent and I thought, “What the hell do I do now?” I hadn’t got anything else. I broke off the damaged side and placed it in the camera, hoping the camera lid would hold it in place and started filming as the ambulance sped to the hospital. Luckily, it worked. I certainly couldn’t have reloaded because half the spool was missing.’
Inside the ambulance, Amin filmed and photographed as medics and Dr Rafique Chaudry fought to save the victim. At Nairobi Hospital, Mboya was wheeled into the intensive care unit. But too late. As Mboya’s weeping younger brother, Alphonse Okuku, and another cabinet minister, James Osogo, entered the room, a European doctor pronounced the pioneer trade unionist and freedom fighter dead.
This exclusive film—shot with a makeshift spool—led television newscasts in many stations around the world. His stills were used in newspapers everywhere. In the Sunday Nation, his picture filled the front page under the heading:
KENYA WEEPS
Reuters rep
orted:
Mohamed Amin, a photographer who arrived at the scene shortly after the shooting, accompanied the body to hospital in the ambulance. Amin said, ‘The Asian doctor, who had tried to revive Mboya, was also in the ambulance and oxygen was administered all the way to the hospital, two miles away. The ambulance driver was going as fast as possible but I saw him literally trying to push the ambulance along faster. He was very distressed,’ said Amin. ‘When the ambulance arrived, there was panic. Only a nurse was on duty and she did not realise at first it was Mboya. She immediately rushed around summoning doctors.’ Amin said Mboya was taken into casualty and few minutes later, a European doctor arrived. ‘This doctor examined Mboya with a stethoscope and then walked away. We knew then Mboya was dead.’
‘Some have confused Mo’s hard work and intuition with luck,’ says John Platter, former UPI bureau chief in Kenya.
‘As he repeatedly triumphed at what is surely the most difficult of all aspects of a cut-throat business—being first and best—people would marvel at “Mo’s Luck”. Sometimes, they suspected more than luck.
‘When, on that Saturday, cameras at the ready, he was in the Government Road [now Moi Avenue] drugstore a few minutes after Tom Mboya was shot, my London UPI picture department was incredulous.
‘“Mo must be in with the culprits,” they gasped. “He’s got a Mafia network setting things up.”
‘As usual, his radiophotos were flawless—and first. I could only gasp myself, and admit his omnipresence was quite uncanny.’
The film had such immediacy and impact, it earned him the 1969 award of British Television Cameraman of the Year in the hard news silent category and brought him his first Visnews contract. ‘Once he was appointed a permanent staffer,’ says Ronald Robson, ‘his international stature grew even faster.’
Mboya’s death sparked the most critical period in Kenya since independence, a crisis made more serious because Kenyatta was still recovering from a near-fatal stroke suffered the previous September during one of his increasingly frequent rest and recuperation visits (known euphemistically as ‘busy working holidays’) at the coast.
George Githii, editor in chief of the Nation, a former private secretary to Kenyatta, had courageously published his own story about Mzee’s ‘mild indisposition’. It resulted in Githii being tossed into exile at Oxford University to work on a doctorate thesis and in the Nation offices being raided by Kenyatta’s European-run Special Branch.
Now Mboya, a member of the Luo tribe, rival to Kenyatta’s Kikuyu, was dead and Kenya was smouldering. For months, Mohamed Amin’s cameras recorded the aftermath.
The day after the assassination, the script to his next report began, ‘Sadness and tension mark procession of mourners as body of Tom Mboya lies in state.’ It went on, ‘Violence broke out when a young Kikuyu boy tried to enter the grounds of Mr Mboya’s house. The Luos quickly began to beat the boy and then ejected him from the grounds. On Saturday night, there were disturbances in Nairobi and other Kenyan towns as Luos and Kikuyu tribesmen clashed.’
The Kenya Government declared five days of mourning. Flags came down to half mast as people queued outside the National Assembly in Nairobi to sign the book of condolence.
While President Kenyatta held an emergency cabinet meeting at his private home in Gatundu, 30 miles outside Nairobi, Amin filmed a clash between steel-helmeted riot police and Luo mourners in Nairobi city centre. Then, talking his way through the heavily guarded gates at Gatundu, he filmed the unique emergency ‘Privy Council’ meeting held under a mango tree in Kenyatta’s garden to discuss plans for Mboya’s State funeral.
Next day, at Nairobi’s Catholic Holy Family Cathedral, the courtyard and the church were ringed by riot police and heavily armed troops wearing gas masks. Fighting broke out with the arrival of the hearse when the crowd milled around Mboya’s widow, Pamela. Shortly after, President Kenyatta arrived and the crowd became more violent, throwing shoes at his Mercedes saloon during the last few yards of its approach.
Reprisal was swift. Tear gas was fired into the crowd and inside the cathedral. Kenyatta’s dignity was immense. While most coughed wretchedly and tried to clear their eyes, he could be seen sitting impassively, head held high, unblinking. Amin filmed it all.
From Nairobi, he travelled for five days with the funeral cortege to Lake Victoria through crowds of hostile and impatient Luos, estimated at around a hundred thousand. The cortege stopped at Kenya’s third largest town, Kisumu. When he reached there, his Land Rover had holes as big as a man’s fist from the rocks thrown at it by the mobs lining the route.
Three days later, Tom Mboya was laid to rest on Rusinga Island near Homa Bay on the mainland. Six hundred crack troops of the paramilitary General Service Unit, Kenya’s own Special Service commando group, were deployed on the island as Mboya’s long-time political opponent in Luoland, Oginga Odinga, arrived in full tribal costume to exploit the occasion.
Before the month was out, another Luo, Joseph Odero-Jowi, 39, was sworn in to succeed Mboya, and two other Luos were promoted to important positions—37-year-old Robert John Ouko moving from the civil service to become finance minister to the East African Community, and John Okwanyo, 41, becoming an assistant minister for foreign affairs. But the die was cast.
In the next few weeks, Kenyatta appeared at a series of mass rallies intended to condemn tribalism and unify the nation—one in the heart of Kambaland, another at Mombasa, one in Nairobi, and another at Kiambu, not far from where Kenyatta had been arrested by the British in 1952.
By August, an unknown 32-year-old Kikuyu, Nahashon Isaac Njenga Njoroge, had been held for the slaying. When his trial opened on September 1, he whispered ‘not guilty’ to the European judge, Mr Justice Simpson. But he was convicted and hanged. Among those who assembled the case against Njoroge were the head of the Kenya CIO, John Bell, State Prosecutor John Hobbs, and government pathologist Martin Rogoff—all Europeans. The killer’s motive remained a mystery.
Kenya was in a ferment. On the back of the murder of his political rival, Oginga Odinga was building discord and Mohamed Amin’s sensitive news antennae were twitching with all sorts of vibrations. He foresaw a showdown between the Luo leader and President Kenyatta.
‘Which played a bigger role in Mo’s success?’ asks Platter. ‘Intuition or hard work? One incident in particular tends to favour the work angle. He listened, always listened, researched, mulled, waited—then pounced.
‘It was in September or October 1969, just after his return from Addis Ababa, that he picked up a confidential tip. He was passing by my office in Nation House and put his nose around the corner. He whispered the information. What did I think?
‘Kenyatta would change his schedule during a visit to Kakamega and make a surprise swing down into Kisumu, in Luoland, volatile then in the long Mboya assassination aftermath and the perennial Odinga pot-stirring. It would be the grand old man’s first real visit to the sugarcane country and mosquito-laden lakeside since independence.
‘Mo said he would keep tabs on his informant. Until then the presidential trip was billed as just another “Hurrah Harambee” [Pull together—Kenya’s national motto] outing to peaceful Abaluhyaland, which we could all leave to the Kenya News Agency and the Voice of Kenya.
‘However, a hospital built with Russian money garnered by “Double 0,” Oginga Odinga, was due to be opened, probably by Mzee himself. This was pure Kenyatta-style—to tweak Odinga’s nose in his own backyard and show both the Luo and Moscow who was the boss. The last minute diversion had possibilities, Mo thought.
‘Without alerting “hackdom,” we sped off from Nairobi a few days later well before dawn and breakfasted at the Tea Hotel in Kericho, then still a thriving colonial relic.
‘We caught the Mzee and his entourage at Kakamega. Lots of harmless jollities in the little showground there. Mo and I felt rather sheepish pretending to cover the innocuous festivities. He took a picture of me laughing beside a witch doctor dressed in colobus monke
y skins and clanking warthog tusks. The bourgeois, uncomprehending white intruder beside impenetrable Mother Africa.
‘At the last moment, the tour to Kisumu was announced and, sure enough, the convoy of Mercedes and Land Rovers swung round and headed down the escarpment to the provincial lakeside capital.
‘The afternoon clouds had built up over the lake by now. An offshore wind awaited us and so did thousands of Luo people gathered outside the hospital. Odinga was waiting, too, in his beaded, coloured cap and knee-length gown with the Mao collar. His guest was the Russian ambassador, but not to worry. In Kenyatta’s Kenya, the communists couldn’t be too choosy.
‘Kenyatta and Odinga smilingly exchanged pleasantries through clenched teeth as they took their seats on the dais.
‘Loudspeakers were set up along a perimeter fence about a hundred yards away, so the swarming crowds could hear Kenyatta from the hospital’s front entrance.
‘But several hundred locals seemed to have barged in and clustered around, mingling with VIPs. The paramilitary GSU guarded the exit where the mobs had set up an ominous chanting in Luo. Not quite the usual welcome for the travelling president.’
Mohamed Amin remembers that they were shouting ‘Dume, Dume’ the slogan of Odinga’s Kenya People’s Union opposition party, the KPU. As the chanting continued, Kenyatta inspected a guard of honour lined up outside the hospital and then walked towards the red-carpeted entrance, where microphones for the public address system had been set up.
‘At this point,’ says Amin, ‘all hell broke loose.’
John Platter remembers, ‘Within a few feet of the president, people began smashing each other with broken chairs. Odinga and the Russian ambassador fled into the hospital.