by Brian Tetley
‘I hope that he hasn’t lost that malleable versatility, because along with his pluck and intuitive savvy, it’s what has made him today’s superstar.’
You have to be black, brown, or yellow to know the meanness of racial prejudice. But Amin has never let its shadow darken his sunny nature: either, as in Salisbury, Rhodesia, turning the tables on it or at least finding in it a good yarn. But when ‘Field Marshal’ Idi Amin Dada ‘DC, DSO, MC, CBE’ showed his true colours, there was nothing to laugh about. Calling his troops together at Tororo Barracks, close to the Kenya border, he told them that God had visited him in a dream with the divine instruction to expel the entire Asian population from Uganda.
Hours later, Uganda television cameras swept over delegates at a cooperative conference in the Kampala OAU Conference Centre and Idi Amin’s bulky frame filled the screen. ‘Asians came to Uganda to build the railway. The railway is finished. They must leave now.’
He gave them ninety days.
‘I attended a luncheon which Idi Amin threw for the Asian leaders and various ambassadors and high commissioners,’ Mohamed Amin recollects. ‘The British High Commissioner Richard Slater was there. Apparently, at a meeting with Slater before this, Idi Amin agreed to withdraw the ninety-day deadline.
‘At the luncheon, however, Amin made a statement directly opposite to this understanding, and there was a heated exchange between the high commissioner and Idi Amin, which I filmed. The envoy virtually accused Idi Amin of misleading him.
‘But Idi Amin had obviously made up his mind that he was going to expel the Asians.’
Queues quickly formed outside the British High Commission in Kampala as Idi Amin, wearing the uniform of a paratroop general, gave vent to more vitriolic anti-Asian sentiment at a mass rally of university students.
‘While I was there, we also filmed long queues of Asians at the British High Commission getting their passports sorted out, and a number of stories around Kampala of traders packing up and selling, even giving away, their belongings.’
On August 31, 1972, the first Asians to leave Uganda passed through Nairobi airport’s transit lounge. Once again, the cameraman’s coverage touched hearts. Most of those expelled had been subjected to rigorous and embarrassing searches by customs officials at Uganda’s Entebbe Airport. Money and jewellery had been blatantly stolen under the pretext of ‘confiscation’.
The paranoid psychotic, who was to dominate world headlines, had replaced the imagined genial clown. Idi Amin’s antics had repercussions. In Kenya, the already nervous Asian business community quietly started to build more escape routes by sending its scions to Europe, the Americas, and Australia to establish new roots, to start new businesses.
In Nairobi, the ‘For Sale’ notices went up again and Mohamed Amin filmed the shuttered shops, the clearance sale signs, the Asian women walking past closed businesses and other familiar scenes. And in January 1973, the Kenya Government, too, set a deadline—June 1—for 418 Asian traders to wind up their businesses and quit Kenya.
In February, he filmed the second of his many Idi Amin interviews. The theme was the personal safety of General Idi Amin.
More routine stories followed: the original James Bond, Sean Connery, in action on the fairways of Nairobi’s Muthaiga Golf Club during the Kenya Open Golf Championship; the opening of Hilton’s £1.5-million Salt Lick Lodge complex in a private reserve close to Tsavo National Park; Amin’s friend, game rancher Don Hunt, trapping eland, buffalo, zebra, leopard, and rhino to send by a ‘Flying Ark’ to Nigeria—a gift from President Kenyatta and the people of Kenya to the West African state; and, in Addis Ababa, the installation of General Gowon, the Nigerian Head of State, as Chairman of the Organisation of African Unity at the annual OAU Heads of State summit.
Then it was the 21st East African Safari Rally, marked by the publication of his second book, East African Safari Rally Comes of Age, under the Heinemann imprint, in the same format as his previous book. The rare copies that now come on the market celebrate both 21 years of rally adventure and his flair for telling an action story in a single still picture.
In the first photographic exhibition of his and Masud Quraishy’s pictures, he demonstrated the same strength. Formally, opened by Kenya’s Minister for Tourism and Wildlife, Juxon Shako, Wildlife Heritage was staged at the Watatu Gallery in the New Stanley Hotel. Ever a believer in the power of the media to which he has devoted his life, Mo hired a friend to film the ceremonies which Visnews syndicated around the world.
The exhibition received critical acclaim. ‘Magnificent photographs with an impact that no words could ever equal’ was typical of press reviews. Film star Paul Newman, on a visit to Kenya, wrote in the visitors’ book: ‘This show should be taken to Hollywood and staged there!’ Other visitors included executives of the World Bank, which was holding its annual conference in Nairobi’s new twenty-nine-storey Kenyatta International Conference Centre.
Many of the photographs were taken in Kenya’s northern deserts, Mohamed Amin’s favourite photographic hunting ground. Lake Turkana exerted an unfailing fascination from his first visit in 1968, pulling him back time and again. He needed no excuse to visit this sere yet stunningly beautiful wilderness; so when it was designated the ideal place for observing the June 30, 1973 eclipse, which subsequently drew scientists from around the world, he arranged to go there about 12 days beforehand to film scientific preparations and local colour.
There was plenty of both. The local people with ages-old superstitions about the bad omens of an eclipse, and a way of life as near to untouched primitive society as any in Africa, were vivid counterpoint to the 80 American scientists, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, who set up workshops and astronomical laboratories on the lake shore at a cost of about US$ 600,000.
Mo agreed to split costs of the essential four-wheel drive vehicle with Ray Wilkinson, John Platter’s UPI replacement. Afzal Awan arranged for them to hire his hunter cousin Mohamed Bashir’s Toyota Land Cruiser.
Mo’s office major-domo, a remarkably hardy character of Nubian stock, was also in the party. Saidi Suleiman is a veteran of bush life who can conjure up five-star dinners in the middle of nowhere—an invaluable asset to Amin, who likes his food.
‘Since the hire was on a daily basis, we didn’t want to take the car the night before, so we agreed to pick it up at four in the morning, when we were ready to leave,’ Amin recalls. ‘But when we arrived at Bashir’s house, the vehicle wouldn’t start. The battery was dead. So we gave it a push-start and then loaded all our stuff, including a tent and supplies and set off.
‘Just down the road, from the top of the Rift Valley escarpment, Ray, sitting next to me, decided to try to get some sleep and leaned against the door, which immediately fell off. There was a sheer drop at the side—and we nearly lost Ray down the escarpment.
‘I stopped and picked up the door. We couldn’t replace it because the hinges had gone. Then, at the bottom of the escarpment, we had two punctures in the space of as many minutes.’
When, after several hours, they arrived at the very last outpost of civilisation, Maralal, at the foot of the Matthews Mountain Range, too late to reach the lake the same day, the Cruiser was in a state of collapse, and the battery so anaemic, it could barely raise enough power to light the indicators.
He went straight to the only garage, which was run by an Asian called Bola, who took one look at it and handed Amin a set of tools. ‘You’ll need these,’ he said.
‘I was surprised,’ remembers Saidi, ‘that the boss did not turn back long before—and even more surprised when we made it to Maralal. It was late in the afternoon, but after stopping for a cup of tea, we drove on.
‘We’d only gone about twenty miles, however, when the fan belt broke. There was no spare and it was impossible to walk back to town because of the wild game and the Samburu.’
All the land, from Maralal to the lake shores, is home to these fierce and proud people, kinsfolk of the Maasai. ‘Not,’ s
ays Saidi, ‘a good place to be left on your own.’
But the party were lucky. A rare car heading for Maralal came by. Mo and Ray thumbed it down, leaving Saidi on his own.
‘After they’d gone, two Samburu warriors came out of the forest,’ recalls Saidi. ‘They had the usual shuka [toga-like dress], ochre over the face, hair, and body, and all the war paint. They were young bucks out for blood, having just been initiated, and their spears were gleaming.
‘They talked to me in Samburu, which I don’t understand. And they didn’t know Swahili or English. Eventually, they just took off and disappeared into the forest from which they’d come. I was shit-scared and very glad when Mo and Ray came back so that we could pitch the tent.’
The tent they were carrying was new to them all. As soon as one pole was up, and they started on another, the first one collapsed. It was dark, too, which did not help as they kept bumping into each other. ‘We couldn’t switch on the car lights because of the state of the battery,’ says Amin.
Eventually, however, they managed to get the tent to stay up. Everybody was exhausted and just wanting to sleep when Saidi’s Samburu friends, with what sounded like the rest of the tribe, began chanting war songs in the forest.
‘We couldn’t tell how far away they were, but they sounded as if they were getting closer and closer. Then somebody said the magic words, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
‘We just threw everything into the back of the Cruiser and drove through the night until we reached Baragoi, where there’s a police post, and it seemed reasonably safe to catch a little sleep before sunup.’
The press camp set up next day by Amin and Wilkinson at Loiyangalani in the grounds of the mission run by Father Joseph Polet was about three miles from the lake shore.
As usual, Amin planned a stay of several days, shooting several other stories unconnected with the eclipse, including Father Polet’s work among the impoverished el Molo and other communities along the lake shore. This tribute to the devotion of a saintly man was sent around the world by Visnews. (A few years later, Father Polet was murdered by Turkana outlaws, not many miles away in 150 the wild country around Suguta Valley.)
He shot other stories, as well as the buildup to the eclipse, while trying to organise a new battery for the Cruiser. A swap with the battery used by the tourist lodge proved disastrous to both. Another flown in from Nairobi by his friends at Boskovic was slung in a bucket of water during the bumpy flight. ‘We never got it. There were so many camps around that it went to the wrong one.’
Later, a BBC science correspondent flew in with Amin’s occasional soundman, Saif Awan. Both the BBC and Amin needed to get their film back quickly and he persuaded the Ministry of Defence public relations officer, Daniel Gatangi, to arrange a lift on a Kenya Air Force plane, asking the unsuspecting Saif to drive the Land Cruiser back.
Left on the ground with no other choice of transport, Ray Wilkinson was furious. His temper soon worsened when, going down the side of a steep bank to cross a dried-up river bed, the brakes failed. Saif gunned the vehicle up the opposite side, on which both back doors fell off. All the equipment slid out. Slowly too, the Cruiser slid backwards, crushing everything, including Wilkinson’s personal belongings. Distraught with rage, he grabbed his typewriter, and leaping out of the vehicle, began the long 25-mile hike back to Loiyangalani.
‘That was the last I saw of him on that trip,’ says Saidi.
‘All the traffic was heading to Nairobi,’ says Amin. ‘Nobody was going the other way. Nobody stopped for Ray. They figured that he either knew what he was doing or was mad. He should have died. The heat out there is around 120°F and you quickly die of dehydration. There’s no water. Nothing. I think he thought we were trying to kill him. He didn’t speak to me for one or two years.’
Neither did Mohamed Bashir. ‘When we got back and gave him his vehicle, it was in bits.’
Three years earlier, in 1970, when Enos Nyagah was press attache in Kenya’s Paris Embassy, he met a European filmmaker named Christian Zuber, who had filmed extensively in Marsabit before becoming a World Wildlife Fund publicity officer. Zuber and Nyagah discussed the region’s rich wildlife, in particular the most majestic of all the species that Zuber had filmed—an elephant called Ahmed.
Zuber had caught wind of a story that two American millionaires had laid bets on who would be the first to shoot this, the last of the great tuskers.
The two wildlife lovers decided to launch a campaign to pressure the Kenya Government to protect Ahmed by encouraging people to write directly to President Kenyatta seeking his personal support for the elephant. As a result, Ahmed made headlines as the first wild animal to be protected by a presidential decree. And with the decree came a round-the-clock guard of Kenya’s top game rangers. Now, years after the two began this campaign, Amin decided to safari to Marsabit to film a story about Ahmed. He took Kenya journalist Peter Moll with him as soundman and spent two days on the mountain, filming the patriarch of the forest. Its two magnificent tusks, worth several thousand dollars, were reckoned to weigh more than 200 lbs.
Finally, the old and, as it turned out, ailing animal had had enough. Irritated by their constant presence, and already sick, Ahmed charged the two and they took to their heels. Amin darted to one side of a giant podo tree, Moll the other. Between them stretched the cable fastened between the Auricon recorder that Moll carried around his neck and the camera that Mo carried.
Amin kept running but Moll found himself stopped abruptly by the cord. ‘I was certainly not going to retreat,’ says Mo. Moll came round the tree like a whiplash only inches from the lunging tusks.
The film was sent to London by air freight and processed and edited the day that Ahmed died. Shown by Visnews-subscribing stations around the world it served as an obituary to this mammoth of the Marsabit forest. The impulse which led Mo to film Ahmed just before its death is typical of countless instances which have persuaded people that he has some kind of sixth sense.
Perhaps another was the assignment in November 1973, when Visnews sent him on a week-long journey through Ethiopia, an all too tragic rehearsal for the story that he would film in 1984.
An estimated 100,000 people had already died when the world’s attention was drawn to the drought, which had begun years earlier. For two years, said David Nicholson’s script to Amin’s report, the people dug into their grain reserves, then began slaughtering their cattle.
‘This year, as the drought continued to suck the land dry, they began selling their farms and homes for food. Finally, they began the long and pathetic march to the relief centres.
‘But although the disaster was growing to massive proportions, there was apparently no plea for international aid from the Ethiopian Government. The Ethiopian Government has now denied it deliberately kept the famine a secret for political reasons and has claimed its pleas to the world were ignored.’
As the commentary went on, it became distressingly like that which would follow in the 1980s.
‘Since then, relief workers have reported horror stories of whole villages dying of malnutrition and disease. In one village, 212 children out of 250 are reported to be orphans while in another, at least a third of the current survivors will still die despite medical aid.
‘Poor communications are a major hindrance and only a small proportion of the starving population are receiving the vital protein and vitamin supplements…and pessimistic officials now estimate that another £11 million is needed over the next six months if a major human tragedy is to be averted and the majority of victims survive.’
The words could have been laid over the horrifying report that he was to film 11 years later.
Al Wells remembers, ‘He shot 400 feet on his first report and this story was wanted for the Eurovision exchange out of London. Everyone in Visnews HQ was very excited, but time was against us, what with customs clearance at Heathrow and developing the film.
‘The processed film was given to me at 15.55. Eurovi
sion started at 16.00 and everyone was in a panic. The pressure was on. It was my job to make sure that this story got on air. But not 400 feet—that was much too long for EVN.
‘I just cut the first 200 feet from the 400 feet roll—I didn’t even look at this last 200 feet—and put that into Eurovision.
‘Everyone said the coverage was first class although it was unedited. This is what I mean. How can one thank a man like Mohamed Amin for a job more than well done?’
World reaction to this 1973-74 tragedy set the stage for the crisis which brought down the Royal House of Ethiopia, whose Emperor Haile Selassie claimed a lineage going back three thousand years to the House of Solomon and a bloodline traced to Sheba.
But Selassie remained in power long enough to visit Kenya and share the spotlight with his old friend Kenyatta on December 12, 1973, when the country marked Ten Great Years of Uhuru (Independence)—the day Amin launched his photobiography of the Kenya leader, published by the East African Publishing House.
Selassie’s days were numbered, however, and in March 1974, Amin was in Addis with John Bierman, the BBC reporter, to cover events which precipitated the emperor’s overthrow.
Years before, Bierman had launched the Nation newspaper for the Aga Khan and had frequently used Mo’s picture material, particularly that of the Safari Rally. Now, they worked together reporting a student boycott of the new government which Selassie had appointed to forestall his downfall.
Amin was known to His Majesty. ‘One of my earlier documentaries, To Build A Nation, was made for the Ethiopian Government. It was commissioned by the prime minister and the cabinet as a present for the emperor on his eightieth birthday.