by Brian Tetley
‘I wasn’t very interested in taking him on, but Duncan said, “If I get a permit, will it be possible to get a job?”
‘I told him “fine”.’
Months later, in 1977, Willetts walked into Mohamed Amin’s office and said, ‘Now I’ve got a permit. Can I have a job?’ It was at this stage that Amin began to take Duncan Willetts seriously. He hired him to run the Camerapix studio.
Amin’s lack of enthusiasm for studio work is well known. On one rare occasion, he agreed to do some brochure work at the private house of a friend who had a reputation for being a bad payer. When he had finished a hard morning’s work, the friend asked what the bill was. Amin said, ‘Call it a hundred Kenya shillings.’
‘Is that right?’ queried his astonished friend. ‘I thought a thousand was your basic half-day rate.’
‘It is. But I’d rather be owed a hundred than a thousand.’
Willetts soon established himself as the best commercial photographer in Nairobi despite the strong local competition. Amin encouraged him to do more and more outdoor work. Together, they covered the private visit to Kenya of the world’s most touted eligible bachelor, Prince Charles, heir to the British throne. Fleet Street’s tabloid newspapers, convinced there was a love affair between the prince and some unknown girl, were desperate for a picture of the two together.
The script to Amin’s film of the royal heir meeting Kenyatta at Nakuru State House said, ‘Kenya is believed to be particularly popular with the prince for its large wildlife reserves, where he can escape pursuing newsmen.’
In fact, he went into hiding in an Aberdare mountain retreat. Willetts, on assignment for the Fleet Street tabloid The Sun, camped out at the Outspan Hotel in Nyeri with the rest of the pack. The royal heir read tabloid headlines about his ‘blonde bird’ and plotted a royal revenge.
Before leaving Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, the prince handed a shoebox to the Daily Express photographer and said, ‘Don’t open it until I’ve gone.’
As the royal plane took off, the photographer unwrapped the shoebox. There, lying inside, was a stuffed pigeon—with a blond wig stuck on its head. Willetts’ picture, under the headline Charles gives press the bird! made The Sun’s front page.
By then, however, Amin was in Samburu country. Seers had been studying the stars. After fourteen years or more, all was propitious for the tribal circumcision ceremony: perhaps the last that would be held. Few outsiders are allowed to witness the ceremonies. However, Amin knew one of the senior elders, a civil servant in Maralal, capital of Samburuland, who arranged for him to take the first-ever photographs of this almost sacred Samburu ritual on the high Leroghi Plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level.
But when the photographer turned up on the day of the ceremony, Wilfrid Thesiger, the reclusive explorer and author acclaimed for his work among the nomadic Marsh Arabs, who had been cultivating the Samburu for weeks and was actually living with them, was resentful. In his usual fashion, Amin began organising everybody, and Thesiger complained he was interfering with ‘his’ people.
Amin never did discover the reason for the fascination that the Samburu held for this philosopher, but he was astonished to find Thesiger almost begging to be allowed to perform the circumcision of the initiates. ‘In the end,’ he recalls, ‘the Samburu were quietly laughing at this strange mzungu [white man]. They decided to charge him twenty bob for each initiate on whom he operated.’ Since it’s normal for the sponsors to pay the circumciser, Thesiger’s deal must have pleased the thrifty Samburu elders.
But the big story which continued to dominate the headlines remained Idi Amin. Early in 1977, there had been another exodus of Ugandan refugees across the border. The refugees were nearly all members of the Christian Langi and Acholi tribes, whose people had been systematically purged from their jobs, imprisoned, and were now being massacred in their tens of thousands.
Idi Amin never recovered from the humiliation of the Entebbe raid and I suggested to Mo that we should produce a book based on the dictator’s rise and predictable fall written while he was in power and updated regularly so that it could be published within days of his demise. The proposed title was Lust to Kill—The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. Based on drafts of the early chapters, the British paperback publishers Corgi paid a substantial advance.
Idi Amin was no friend to his neighbours. He made it impossible for the East African Community of Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda to function, and eventually financial and political differences resulted in the Community’s collapse. One of the victims was East African Airways. On the back of a leased Boeing 707, Kenya swiftly launched Kenya Airways, and Tanzania, in a fit of pique, slammed shut its doors on Kenya.
On February 17, after a confrontation with the power-crazy dictator, the world learned of the murder of Ugandan Archbishop Janani Luwum, provoking fears among the All-African Conference of Churches that he was about to unleash a reign of terror against all Christians. Then came news of an assassination bid against the Uganda ogre himself.
Not long afterwards, Idi Amin, bedecked with medals he had awarded himself and sitting on a shooting stick in the corridors of the Libreville Conference Centre, Gabon, during the OAU summit, summoned Mohamed Amin with a movement of his podgy fingers.
‘Where’s Osman?’ the dictator demanded. With Mo as cameraman, John Osman, the BBC correspondent in Nairobi, had interviewed Idi Amin at least twice.
‘Tell him I am the Conqueror of the British Empire and I’ve awarded myself the CBE.’
It was Idi Amin’s facetious response to the reaction he had roused in the British press following his threat to grace the London Commonwealth summit, which he was entitled to attend as head of a Commonwealth member state.
That same day, he told the OAU delegates, ‘On June 30, this year, in order to make it absolutely clear to you, I have been honoured by the highest order of the Conqueror of the British Imperialism in Uganda. The members of the Defence Council [his own] consider the official government of the British, which made Ugandan slaves of a hundred years, have run away, therefore they consider me the Conqueror of the British Empire.
‘I captured some of the people who tried to assassinate me. Let me tell you I have got them but there will be debate on this particular point and that they told me the whole western press knew exactly what was going to happen to me.
‘But they said that their team was well planned, they were responsible. I wanted just to tell you because I’m sorry the president and the leader of Benin [formerly Dahomey] is not here. They told me officially their plan, their mission was to kill, move to Angola, to kill the president of Angola, move to Uganda and then go to Guinea.’
To presidents or pressmen alike, none of this made sense. The megalomania and paranoia were unmistakeable. Just how chilling it was to work in this man’s shadow emerged on September 8, 1977 in an interview the cameraman set up and filmed in his Nairobi office with former Uganda detainee John Sekabira, who first disclosed atrocities to Associated Press reporter John Edlin.
With worldwide conjecture about the fate of Dora Bloch, who had been taken hostage during the Entebbe raid, it was a major scoop at the time. Sekabira claimed he had been conscripted into her burial party. He told of a big military truck, which came to the prison full of bodies.
The Visnews transcript continues:
How many?
Sekabira: There are 200 of them. After the raid at Entebbe International Airport, the Israeli raid, they used to bring in some bodies of airborne officers and some from the marine. Then, one day, it was very early in the morning, when they told us to prepare two graves. We prepared them. Then in the evening at five, they brought in two bodies, one of a policeman who was in the uniform of a policeman and the other one, an old European lady.’
Do you think this was Mrs Dora Bloch?
Sekabira: That is what I think … after … when I told the people that’s what they told me. And the prison officer who was the witness when the policeman was being shot, he t
old us that was the body of the Israeli woman. We asked him why the policeman was shot and the prison officer told us that when the secretary of police came to snatch away the radio from the hospital where she was being given treatment, the policeman doubted that he was a police officer and ordered that he introduce himself to him. So instead they shot him, drag his body to the jeep, they brought them together, they were still breathing.
What kind of wounds did Mrs Bloch suffer?
Sekabira: They shot in her head and the policeman had three shots, gunshots in his body.
Four days later, the Visnews cameraman discovered Idi Amin’s former cook, Moses Aloga. It was another of Mohamed Amin’s world exclusives on Idi. The gruesome thread of this particular story still remains vivid:
You worked for Idi Amin in Kampala for how long?
Aloga: Four years.
You were doing what?
Aloga: I was working as a servant. For his, well, office or residence. The Old Command Post, the New Command Post.
And this put you in charge of the room where he kept his drinks in a refrigerator?
Aloga: Yes, yes. I was in charge of that.
He kept something else in the fridge?
Aloga: Yes, he started it because he have got, you see, very big size fridge where he keeps human organs.
What kind of human organs?
Aloga: Just you’ll find some head for the people who’ve been killed because if you’re killed there, if he wants you, he can get it. That I need your head for him. Then they bring the head, he put it in the fridge and keep it for time.
Moses, when Sarah [Idi Amin’s wife] opened the fridge, she saw something very horrifying. What was her reaction to this?
Aloga: She pressed me to open that fridge. When I opened, in it she see the head of her [previous] husband, I know, which was very bad to her. She fell down. I tried to push her out, when I fell ….
How many heads did you see over the years you worked?
Aloga: No, I can’t say because sometimes he kept five there, sometimes six. And stay there for any time he wants, you know. Because unfortunately, his girlfriend found the head that was there. The girl was going with other men.
This same year, Idi Amin’s contemporary despot, President Bokassa, of the impoverished Central African Republic, announced his intention to crown himself Emperor of his arid, Sahara-edge bushland.
The event became Africa’s greatest spectacle of the year. It was allocated a budget of £20 million, and written, produced, and directed by former French army sergeant Jean-Bedel Bokassa. He was President-for-Life, President of the Government, Keeper of the Seals, Minister of Defence, the Civil Service, Social Security, the Interior, Telecommunications, Agriculture, Information, Health and Population, Grand Master of the Order of Operation Bokassa, Commander of the Order of Merit for Agriculture, Industry and the Postal Service, Holder of the Gold Medal for Work, and Knight of the International Society of Philatelists.
The opulence included:
Thirteen costumes worn at Napoleon’s coronation (on which Bokassa based his), done up by the 200-year-old French firm of Guiselin; the emperor’s 32-pound robe, with its 785,000 pearls, and more than a million crystal beads at the bargain price of £75,000; the Empress Catherine’s gown from the House of Lanvin, dazzling with almost one million sequins and gold pieces, cost about £32,000; the crown, topped with a diamond, sceptre, and the empress’s diadem: cost £2.5 million; two hundred and 40 tons of air-freighted champagne, wines, caviar, flowers, doves, and a seven-tier cake, 60 brand-new Mercedes limousines, and 30 Peugeot 504s, together with 150 800cc BMW motor cycles, flown in at a total cost of more than £1 million.
Like the other newsmen covering the coronation of Bokassa as emperor of one of the world’s 25 poorest countries, Mohamed Amin needed a morning suit.
‘When I heard about the coronation,’ Amin recollects, ‘I was determined to cover this story. I offered it to Visnews, who said there was no way anyone was going to be allowed to cover the story because French television had bought the exclusive rights. They also told me that a French picture agency had bought exclusive stills rights—all being sold and marketed by a Frenchman who was the mastermind behind the organisation of the coronation.
‘I still wanted to go. Missing one of the biggest stories of the decade in Africa was just not on. The Associated Press assigned me to cover the event. Then I was told that you had to follow the protocol laid down by Bokassa himself. You had to be properly dressed—topper and tails, a morning suit.
‘If you were not properly dressed, we were told, you would have an ear cut off. For fear of losing an ear [(In 1972, Bokassa personally supervised the public amputation of the ears of 13 convicted thieves)], I decided I had to be properly dressed. I was going to take no chances. I thought there would be no problem getting a morning suit since so many Englishmen wear one on wedding days.
‘But when I called round friends who had recently got married, they all laughed. It was out of fashion, they told me. Eventually, I went to the Donovan Maule theatre in Nairobi and hired a morning suit. Newsweek’s Nairobi bureau chief, James Pringle, who was on the flight with me, was so short he had to have his suit specially cut by the Donovan Maule to fit him.
‘We went via Douala in Cameroon, the best way to get to Bangui. At Douala, we were still worried that if we took a wrong step at the very least, we might lose an ear. So we went to the British Embassy for advice.
‘We saw the Number Two who spent the next half hour telling us that we shouldn’t go there and that the British Government would have absolutely nothing to do with us if we got into any trouble.
‘He was a typical British diplomat who was telling us in effect, “Look, you’re a nuisance, so why don’t you just go home and keep out of trouble instead of creating work for us.”
‘Next morning on the flight to Bangui, I decided that there was no point in taking any chances, so I dressed up in my morning suit on the plane to arrive properly attired. The other three hacks on the flight decided to do the same.
‘But when we stepped out of the plane, it must have been around 100° Fahrenheit. As we came down the steps in our morning suits, cameras dangling round our necks, we looked absolute fools.
‘The immigration officers were falling about laughing, so we had no problem getting into the country. Then we went to the Ministry of Information for accreditation, but we were told it was impossible as the French had all the rights.
‘Anyway, we decided we would cover it as best as we could. But all the hotels were full. Finally, we spent the night inside a church. Next morning, when we arrived at the Coronation Palace, which had been built specially for the occasion, we walked in without any problems.
‘We were so well dressed that the security guards just assumed we were diplomats or state guests. My other colleagues went and sat down, but since I was photographing, I hung around the place where the emperor was going to be crowned.
‘The French television and stills guys came up and asked me who I was. I said I was just a guest from Kenya taking a few pictures. They left me alone until one of the French news guys recognised me and realised that I was not just taking pictures for fun, that I was a professional in fact.
‘They tried to throw me out as the bugles heralding Bokassa’s grand entrance sounded. In the scuffle, my leg hit the tripod of the French television camera and it came tumbling down.
‘Desperate to get the camera back on its stand to film Bokassa, they stopped hustling me, but this particular camera missed his entrance.
‘After that, everybody was too busy trying to get their own pictures to worry about throwing me out. I was only about six feet from the emperor and it would have been noticed. That certainly would have caused problems.
‘After the coronation, Bokassa drove in his horse-drawn carriage to the church, and the entire road from the palace to the church—about a mile or more—was covered with red carpet. Nobody realised that hundreds of cars would follow. At the
end of the day, the carpet was in shreds.
‘We were kept some distance from the emperor in the church. But near the end of the service, I decided to make a dash to get some close-ups where Bokassa was sitting—and also his departure from the church.
‘The security guys got very uptight. There was absolute silence in the church when they pounced on me. But when the emperor spoke to them they left me alone. I had the best position for photography in church and for his departure. There were hundreds of security guys around, but I walked backwards right in front of the emperor, working on a twenty-millimetre wide-angle lens. He loved being photographed and I got the best pictures of the day.
‘That evening, we attended the banquet at the palace. Much later, when Bokassa was in sanctuary in France, it was alleged that human flesh had been served there. I don’t know what I ate.
‘That same night, I left on the Paris flight and on to London to get my pictures out. I was determined to beat the French. My pictures were extensively used, not only by AP but by many magazines. But I remember it as the most bizarre story I’ve ever covered.’
The real news focus, though, remained on Idi Amin. When the BBC’s David Lomax interviewed him in Kampala early in January 1978, he received such a grilling that Mo began to worry for their safety.
Despite Idi Amin’s denials, Lomax kept insisting that Dora Bloch had been murdered by his men. The dictator grew angrier and angrier. The cameraman, who had studied him better than most for the last seven years, thought, ‘He’ll kill us all.’ The confrontation only came to a halt when the reel ended and he had to change films.
‘You could hear the silence. It was pin sharp. Then, as I was busy in the black bag, loading a new magazine, Idi Amin chuckled and wagged his finger at Lomax, ‘‘‘You know I’m only giving you this interview because of my friend Mohamed Amin.“’
He arranged television interviews with Idi Amin on behalf of many world broadcasters. They came to him because of his reputation. No one else had his contacts.