by Brian Tetley
‘Mo, as usual, was already filming and photographing, close enough to have to wipe the flecks of flying saliva off his lens. Then pandemonium.
‘Kenyatta’s bodyguard immediately surrounded the president. Neither they nor he panicked but they began to let fly, firing outwards from the encircled president and moving him to safety.
‘Mo somehow gained the protective inner circle, next to the president, and I followed. He was filming the carnage until an official, berserk with rage, spotted him and shoved a pistol into Mo’s face, twisted his shirt and shook him. “Open that camera! Give me that film!” he shouted. Unfussed, Mo obliged. He surrendered his film.
‘But he was far too old a hand to have been beaten like that. Seconds after the first shots were fired and the bodies began to fall, he had changed his films, and kept on changing, simultaneously handing me the exposed reels for safekeeping. Naturally, I ducked behind someone during this scene. I didn’t want to be seen as the plumber’s mate just then. But my pockets contained yet another Mo Amin scoop.’
In the midst of all this, Kenyatta reached the microphone, where he began to speak. Odinga and the other guests came out from hiding to take their seats. As the president spoke, medical orderlies were carrying the dead and wounded on stretchers before him into the hospital.
‘Odinga sat opposite Kenyatta, recalls the photographer, ‘and they exchanged words. Kenyatta was very angry. He was mad.’
Remembers Platter, ‘Kenyatta reciprocated the Luo jibes and launched into them in his raunchiest, anthropological best. The mobs were incensed. That only made Kenyatta angrier and even richer with his taunts. Odinga butted in and, I think, tried to grab the microphone.’
The battle resumed.
‘We disentangled ourselves from the mad melee and my only problem was persuading Mo to leave the battlefield. By now, the GSU and the presidential bodyguard were literally shooting a pathway out of the town. Dust and the crowd’s jeers enveloped the scene.
‘We retrieved my car and weaved into about sixth place behind the president, again photographing the shooting and the wild Luo crowds being “taught their lesson”. Even two policemen, trying to hold back the mobs, were shot. One in starched khaki, his head partly severed, reeled over into the curbside to the left of us.
‘Mo was leaning out of the window furiously trying to record the mayhem and wanted me to stop. GSU gunfire crackled from both in front and behind, and we’d have caused awful problems if we’d blocked the “getaway” of the official vehicles behind.
‘“Anyway, it’s my damned car,” I had to say finally, “and it’s not insured for this sort of thing.”
‘We sped away into the night, preparing to break another world story with eyewitness accounts and a batch of exclusive Mo wirephotos. The casualties: 15 killed, more than 80 treated for gunshot wounds. Has any hospital ever had such an opening?
‘How—among all the international photographers based in Kenya—was Mo once again alone on the scene? No Mafia setup. No luck.
‘It was straightforward planning, foresight, and hard work. He’d sniffed out a possibility and, while others were content to dismiss a routine presidential trip and take off for a weekend at the coast, Mo was ready to rise with the sparrows and head the other way.’
At the end of October, Kenyatta named December as the month for the first general elections since independence, proscribed the KPU, Odinga’s opposition party, placed the leaders, including Odinga, under house arrest, and made a sentimental return to the place where he held his last rally before he was arrested in 1952.
In the aftermath of this turbulence, three British newsmen employed by the Kenya newspapers—the Standard, and the Nation— were deported. Mo’s luck held. He was left untouched. Slowly, calm returned to Kenya.
There was a sequel to the elections. Old ministers were ousted and, in the wake of the Mboya tragedy, that shrewd and canny statesman Jomo Kenyatta used the occasion to give his country a new sense of direction.
He announced the new cabinet line-up to a Voice of Kenya (VOK) camera crew sitting in the garden of his Gatundu country home. But he gave his press secretary, Kinyanjui Kariuki, little time to alert the world press, and the VOK team were all alone.
Amin heard the announcement on the midday news bulletins and rang Kinyanjui to ask why he hadn’t been told.
‘I had very little time, Bwana, to organise anything. You know how it is.’
‘Can we get the Old Man to do it again?’
‘No chance at all.’
But the photographer refused to be beaten.
‘Come on, Kinyanjui. This is important news. The rest of the world should know.’ He was filming many stories a month for Visnews and thought this would be simple.
Finally, Kinyanjui suggested he should drive over to Gatundu to discuss the situation. When he arrived, however, Kinyanjui was quite adamant that Mzee Kenyatta would not repeat the announcement for the Visnews camera.
Mzee’s close friend and aide, Mbiyu Koinange, who was in the garden, spoke to Amin demanding to know what he wanted.
He explained.
‘Why weren’t you here this morning?’
‘I wasn’t told.’
Koinange reprimanded Kinyanjui and then asked the cameraman whom he represented.
‘He was pretty impressed. He said, “You should be here all the time” with a pointed look at Kinyanjui.’
The presidential confidante said Kenyatta was asleep but he would wake him and tell him of the Visnews man’s request.
‘He came back looking pretty sheepish. Then Kenyatta came out. He’d obviously been woken up and was in a real temper. He went for Kinyanjui, who explained that he hadn’t had time to gather the international press.’
Then Mzee noticed a cabinet minister hanging around in the drive some distance away. Told the minister’s name—he was short-sighted—he waved him over with his fly-whisk and demanded to know what the minister wanted. When the minister had finished his explanation, Mzee dismissed him—with a blow across the face from his fly whisk.
Now the doyen of African statesmen turned to Amin, who was trying hard to vanish.
‘How do you want me to do this?’
The soundman was also trying to shrink into invisibility—inside a clump of rose bushes.
‘I was beginning to wish I hadn’t bothered,’ remembers Mo, whose camera was set up facing the table at which the Old Man was now seated.
‘I told him, “Do it as you like, sir.”‘
Kenyatta became even more angry.
‘How do you want it?’
‘Just as you did it this morning, sir.’
‘Do you want it in Swahili or English?’
‘In English.’
‘Very good.’
The president visibly relaxed. ‘He was a tremendous professional,’ says Amin. ‘He went straight into it like a veteran broadcaster and started with a real introduction. ‘All good things come to an end and my first government has ended. Now it’s time to announce a new cabinet.’
Kenyatta finished the preface and then named the cabinet.
‘I’d only gone with one reel. Just enough to get the cabinet. But Mzee gave the names of the assistant ministers and then the permanent secretaries. My reel had long finished but I wasn’t going to say stop. Not after what I’d seen. I kept my eye behind the viewfinder and the motor on.’
Just before Mzee began speaking, Amin had noticed a VOK crew setting up their camera. When the Old Man finished and went to resume his interrupted sleep, he asked Kinyanjui what the crew were doing.
‘I thought they were here this morning.’
They had lost their film. Changing magazines after the morning announcement, the cameraman had placed the exposed reel on the roof of the Presidential Press Unit car but was called back to take some more film. Thinking the film was in the car, the driver drove off, back to Broadcasting House in Nairobi. Halfway between Gatundu and Nairobi, negotiating a roundabout, the film can slid of
f the roof and rolled into the gutter, the lid breaking loose -and the precious film spilling out like a long snake.
The camera crew certainly could never have explained that to Mzee.
This was the year Amin met Christopher Rawlings, when the BBC producer was preparing to shoot the Search for the Nile series—at that time one of the longest and most costly in television history. With six one-hour episodes, it would take long months to complete.
Rawlings planned to shoot the film in Uganda but President Milton Obote and his ministers rejected the scripts. When Obote met Rawlings, he told the producer that there had never been any slavery in Uganda nor any Kabaka—the traditional monarch of the Buganda. Therefore, the BBC would not be allowed to film.
A Hollywood producer at the same meeting was looking for some pretty shots of the Nile for his feature film. When he, too, was told that he could not film in Uganda, he exploded, ‘Well, screw you. We’ll build our own Nile in Hollywood—bigger and better than yours.’
Rawlings’s alternative location was Kenya, where Amin confirmed that almost every locale in Uganda could be matched. Rawlings was impressed. He hired Amin as production manager. The move from news and documentaries to an ambitious film-style feature series was a major step which Mo took in his stride.
‘In the BBC series, the actor playing the English explorer Samuel Baker, who was the first European to discover Lake Albert, found the lake 500 miles east of the real location—from the top of Central Island in Lake Turkana [Rudolf].’ Amin remembers. ‘In fact, we shot a lot of the series around Turkana, including the slave caravans. We used areas along the Kenya shores of Lake Victoria, too, of course.
‘There were two BBC film crews shooting major specials—Rawlings and Tony Isaacs’ team, which was producing The British Empire. They were deadly rivals.
‘For our series, Chris created a huge thatched palace of the Kabaka, on the shores of the lake. The idea was to present it to the locals after shooting had finished.
‘Isaacs heard about this magnificent set. It was just a facade. But he thought it would be very useful for his series, too. So he chatted up the locals to get them to agree to him using it. When Chris heard of this, he was furious. So instead of handing it over to the locals, he had the palace burnt down.’
One event hard to rig, however, was Speke’s discovery of the Nile. To film this vital sequence in Uganda, Mohamed Amin agreed to drive in together with the actor playing Speke and one makeup girl.
The actual falls where the Nile tumbled out of the lake are no longer visible. The Owen Falls Dam, built in the 1950s, caused the waters of Victoria to obliterate them. Nonetheless, a little way downstream, there’s a similar series of cataracts, where they filmed the sequence.
The crew booked in early in the morning at Jinja’s Crested Crane Hotel and the makeup girl set about creating Speke, the bearded giant, from the clean-shaven young actor. Receptionists and guests were astonished to see Mohamed Amin and the girl leave the hotel with an entirely different companion.
When Speke first set foot at the source of the Nile, he carried a rifle. But the wooden gun provided by the BBC’s props department had been confiscated at the Malaba border, so in the finished series, this element of authenticity is noticeably absent. Instead, Speke carries a stick.
7. Idi Amin’s Coup
TODAY’S YOUNG CAMERAMEN, BROUGHT UP to film with electronic news gathering equipment—ENG—where footage costs no more, be it ten or 100 feet, could learn a lot from Amin’s generation of cameramen. Their instinct for composition has always been allied to an admirable sense of economy.
‘In the late 1960s, when I was manning the newsdesk at Visnews and directing the assignments of cameramen,’ Peter Marshall notes, ‘we were still making the transition from the 35millimetre cameras inherited from the cinema newsreel crews to the new, lightweight 16millimetre equipment. And it was still a black-and-white world.
‘The introduction of colour was the next big step, and it was the cameramen in the field who had to make the major adjustment. By the early 1970s, it was becoming possible to visualise the possibilities for TV news that were going to emerge with the growth of communications satellites.
‘We could only begin to imagine the concept of a portable satellite uplink, transmitting those pictures direct to London for redistribution to the rest of the world.
‘Together with satellite transmission came the electronic news camera, ENG, removing the need to process film before the pictures could be edited and supplied to the broadcasters. Again, as with the arrival of colour, it was the cameraman who had to learn new skills.
‘The effect of these technological developments,’ adds Peter Marshall, ‘is to shorten the time between the coverage of a news story and its appearance on the screen of the viewer at home, whether in West or East, South or North. Distances are no longer the governing factor.
‘In consequence, the cameraman’s responsibilities become even greater, year by year. Once, there were always hours, if not a day or two, before the world saw the pictures of a momentous or controversial story, and this provided time for assessment and consideration; perhaps for subsequent editing in the light of new developments, or even political reactions.
‘Now, there may be no time to search through the footage for the second “take”. No time for uncertainties about identifying personalities and locations.
‘It is in the challenging and exciting environment of television news development that you recognise the true talent of cameramen such as Mo.’
Yet Amin has no doubt which medium he thinks most challenging. Not television.
‘If I had the choice, I would still prefer stills because there is more to it than just taking pictures. You come back from an assignment, you process the film, you do the selection, the cropping, and the prints, and if it’s for news use, you wire the pictures.
‘Most of my filming is for news but I would say that about 90 percent of the time, I don’t see the results because I am out in the field doing the shooting and I have to get the film out as quickly as I can.
‘With satellite, we sometimes have time to edit ourselves which is a lot of fun. But often, there is no time or the editing equipment is not available locally. So we just transmit it raw and then the editing is left to people in London or New York. And we have to trust them. Generally, they do a very good job, although there are times when they don’t quite do what one wants them to do.
‘But that’s because when you are on the scene yourself, you have conceived the story in your own mind while often the person sitting in New York or London doesn’t quite grasp the story because he is just doing a mechanical job. He is cutting one story after another and he just follows your guidelines.
‘So generally, I like doing stills very much but it doesn’t really worry me which assignment I get. And when I shoot film, I always take stills. I have never travelled on any assignment without a stills camera.’
‘In the very early days of photojournalism,’ Gerald Clarke observed in Time, ‘picture takers often trailed behind writers like baggage carriers in the African bush’—hardly a simile for Amin’s latter-day role in Africa.
‘I always felt a great deal more comfortable,’ Platter recalls, ‘when Mo was on a story with us. If he was there, things were always likelier to happen and yield copy; if he wasn’t, things had a habit of happening elsewhere, and you could be scooped. Usually by Mo.
‘In any contretemps, we courageous scribes would push him to the front to argue it out with fuming political worthies, fiery soldiers, grieving relatives, and rioting mobs. He was usually up front anyway. And he would usually win them over, with a mixture of humour and pretended innocence.
‘His relentless desire to complete any assignment well, and of course therefore lucratively, meant he needed little prompting. And what he may have lacked in formal academic grounding was more than compensated by his innate political savvy, as indispensable to a successful international cameraman as to an intern
ational autocrat.
‘Yet it was always useless to try to engage Mo in any heavy political discussions. These were meaningless—and unprofitable—trifles. He abhorred violence and injustice, but talking wasn’t going to help.’
Says Amin, ‘I used to go in cold and just do the job and come out cold. You have emotions and all that, but so far as the work and my own personality were concerned, it did not matter. It had nothing to do with me; it was an incident that happened and I just recorded what happened. I could do nothing for it; the fact that it happened had nothing to do with me.
‘I just never interfered, never tried to stop anything, because it was not for me to do that. If I had actually tried to stop some of the things that I actually saw I could have been killed because I was dealing with people you couldn’t negotiate with; because when they’re killing people, there’s no logic any more. There’s no sense. Interfere with that and you yourself go. Covering wars and things like that, I was just doing a job. It’s not my world.’
Adds Platter, ‘He wasn’t a participant, he was an observer. He has that particular cast of mind, even “distinction of mind”—to use an Elspeth Huxley phrase from her book, Out in the Midday Sun—peculiar to so many East African personalities.
‘Mo is an adventurer. It must be in the highlands air. In common with the earlier British pioneers, affected by that heady atmosphere, or something else indefinable about East Africa, Mo was, and remains, oblivious to danger and discomfort. He has a job to do and if possible, it should be done with élan—and it has to be lucrative.’
Harold Evans, former editor of The Times, comments, ‘When I hear snooty remarks about photojournalists, I think of one of their greatest achievements—objective presentation of war and its consequences. Their pictures have told many truths, and they have been prepared to risk everything to capture an image and hold it fast forever.’
By the 1970s, Amin had done that many times, and on a scale and frequency which have led friends and critics alike to believe his life has a kind of inevitability.