by Brian Tetley
Mohamed’s plan was different. It was a calculated risk. His team was going in on the victorious side, and if they weren’t shot out of the sky, he felt pretty sure they’d be safe on the ground.
‘We saw Entebbe quite early,’ he remembers. ‘It was very bright, early afternoon, and Dick lost altitude quickly, coming in very low over Lake Victoria and touching down right on the lip of the runway. This runs uphill, so you can’t see the airport buildings—or be seen—until you taxi in.
‘But the first thing we saw—which I filmed as we touched down—was a blazing C-130 Hercules from Libya. It had been shot on takeoff minutes before.
‘When we reached the terminal, we were stunned. It just wasn’t a war situation. There were tribal dancers and a lineup of dignitaries—a real welcoming party—and I thought, “Shit. Now we’re in trouble. They’re expecting somebody important.”
‘I was first out and you could see the shock hit them. There was a big guy—a short, fat guy I knew—Rashidi Kawawa, the former prime minister of Tanzania, then minister of defence, and also the commander of the Tanzanian Army. He was not amused.’
Where were they from?
Kenya, Amin replied.
The welcoming party went into a huddle. In those days, Kenya was not exactly good news in either Tanzania or Uganda. They talked in Swahili, which Amin could follow clearly.
‘It was not a good conversation. They were concerned with how we had got in to Entebbe and what they should do with us. And this was a discussion taking place at the top level.’
Before there was any outcome, however, another plane dipped low over the lake and came in to land. It carried the expected dignitary, Yusuf Lule, flown from Dar es Salaam, to be sworn in as president that day.
‘The trouble was that nobody knew what to do. It was obviously being done at very short notice. They didn’t even have a decent presidential car, just Land Rovers,’ Amin remembers.
‘We were virtually forgotten now and OK—part of the party—so we just followed Lule and his entourage into the VIP lounge, where they discussed this and that and then decided to go to nearby State House to discuss the affair there.
‘We tagged along after we found someone with a car, which we hired. He had no fuel, but we’d taken along petrol. Actually, it was Avgas [aviation gasoline]. Dick didn’t want to carry regular fuel because it was unsafe. Avgas makes your car go like a bomb, but it buggers up the engine.
‘State House was a shambles. Everything had been looted. The Tanzanian troops had been bringing in planes loaded with troops and flying them back to Tanzania loaded with Idi Amin’s goodies—carpets, furniture, you name it.’
It was decided Lule should be sworn in on the steps of Kampala’s Parliament Buildings. ‘They even got together a reasonable crowd and we got some good film.’
Then they toured the ravaged city. Corpses lay in the streets. Mohamed Amin and his colleagues were the first media men to discover the horrific truth of the crazed dictator’s regime. The State Research Bureau, SRB, had been transformed into a 20th-century torture chamber, where none who entered, save the inquisitors, left. Later, some of these inquisitors were to return under different circumstances. As prisoners.
Tanzanian soldiers allowed him freedom to film. More important, at places like the SRB and State House, he found files recording the terrible atrocities that had been committed. Before the day was out, he accumulated two suitcases full of documents—damning and irrefutable indictment of what had gone on in Idi Amin’s Uganda. He also discovered the last film taken of Idi Amin. He saw it through the window of a locked office—twenty or so reels piled on a desk and in cupboards.
‘We’ll have to break in.’
‘I’ll have nothing to do with that,’ said Barron. ‘And neither will Eric. I’ll wait for you in the car.’
Yet once he had the film, Barron wanted to send it to BBC London. Amin carried everything back with him to Nairobi and Angus Shaw, who had been complaining of a lack of ‘statistical evidence’. Now the impatient writer had more than enough for two books.
The end, however, was not the dramatic one the authors envisaged. Idi Amin got away. The besiegers left one escape route from Kampala—a corridor running forty-five miles east to Jinja, Uganda’s main industrial city. Idi Amin seems to have fled from Jinja aboard a helicopter around mid-April, leaving the hungry and desperate remnants of his once powerful, 20,000-man army roaming Jinja. Some lay in the streets dying from open wounds. Only about 400 to 500 hardcore loyalists remained.
Many of his henchmen, among them Colonel Nassir Abdalla, governor of Kampala, crossed into Kenya seeking refuge, together with a fleet of twenty Mercedes and forty trucks full of plunder.
Kenyan officials said about eighty percent of the refugees were Nubians, a tribe from northern Uganda, who were among Idi Amin’s loyalist elite. The well-to-do and powerful thus began exile in Peugeots and Alfa Romeos. The poor carted wheelbarrows loaded with mattresses, chairs, and tables. All brought tales of massacres.
In the final days before his flight, the crazed dictator raced about eastern Uganda in a red TR-7 sports car, moving from his Lake Victoria villa to Kampala and from there east to Jinja, sending his bodyguards to collect medicines from the local hospital while berating his troops for cowardice. As Kampala was falling, Ugandans heard his voice on an English-language broadcast from a mobile transmitter. ‘I would like to denounce the announcement that my government has been overthrown. This is not true.’ He called the Tanzanians ‘barbaric murderers’ and claimed he still controlled ninety percent of the country. In those last hours, there was a Richard the Third madness about his frenzied oratory.
More and more gruesome evidence of his reign of terror was uncovered as Mohamed Amin kept up his reports on the crucial and bloody frontline war, which dragged on for several weeks after the fall of Kampala.
Once, remembers Duncan Willetts, they drove to Uganda in a Land Cruiser with Andy Torchia of The Associated Press and John Osman of the BBC. ‘As we left Nairobi for Soroti, I remember Dolly telling me to take care of Amin. Incredible!’
The Ugandan town was in ruins. ‘There used to be a United Nations flying school in the town, but all we could find were smashed up MiGs littering the runway. There were Tanzania soldiers everywhere with AK 47s. Very hairy. They were walking around all over the town and they were very trigger happy, drinking and enjoying the fruits of victory—the grateful Ugandan lasses. We booked in at the Uganda Tourist Corporation’s Soroti Hotel. There wasn’t any brochure, of course. No water either—and very little furniture.
‘I remember John Osman felt he should introduce himself to the major in charge of the liberation, but afterwards, Mo didn’t think he had been all that wise. I mean, John went into the room and did his usual courtesy bit, you know, “Glad to meet you, Major. I’m Osman of the BBC.”
‘This bloke, surrounded by a bevy of good-looking and willing girls, and getting very high on a large and varied selection of miniatures, was totally pissed off by the interruption. If John had said he was from Tass or Radio Moscow, he couldn’t have cared less.’
On one of these frequent missions to cover the war, the team took an Africair charter from Wilson Airport, Nairobi, to Busia, the Kenya-Uganda border town, and crossed into Uganda on foot. Inside the border, they found a Tanzanian soldier in command of a brand-new bus.
‘He’d taken it straight out of the showroom,’ says Mo. ‘I went over to him and in Swahili asked him if he could give us a ride into Jinja.’
‘Sure, but I’ve no petrol.’ There was no petrol on the Uganda side at all. ‘That’s no problem. Why don’t you give me the bus and I’ll cross over into Kenya, fill it up, and bring it back.’
‘Not without me. You might not come back.’
‘So he came with me. The Kenya border officials were quite helpful, but they insisted that he left his gun with them.
‘We drove across, filled up, and returned, and Duncan and the rest—Andy Torchia of The Associ
ated Press, the Voice of America correspondent, and other hacks—got in and on we drove to Jinja with this Tanzanian soldier at the wheel.
‘At Jinja, we filmed the Tanzanian troops taking over the airfield and then went over to look at State House, where Idi Amin had been staying.’ There was a beautiful carving of a large wooden eagle and Mo said to his driver, ‘This is very nice.’
‘Would you like it?’
‘Yes, but how do I take it with me?’
‘Don’t worry. I’ll put it in the bus and hand it over to you at Busia.’
At Busia airstrip, the young European pilot took off and headed for Nairobi. He wanted to go to Kisumu to refuel. But because it was a public holiday, the Kisumu control tower said there would be a service charge of twenty shillings and the pilot chose to go on to Nairobi. But the weather broke and he had to divert to refuel at Nakuru.
‘I looked out,’ recalls Amin, ‘and there was the terminal building and he still hadn’t touched down. I thought, “Christ. This thing’s not going to stop because he’s not going to be able to pull up in time.” At the end of the runway was the main Mombasa-Kampala road with huge trucks passing along it all the time.
‘He then decided to take off again, which was worse because there was no way he was going to clear the power lines at the end of the runway. I thought, “This is it.”’
The plane powered into a stone dyke, spun around and collapsed.
‘I opened the door and threw myself out and everybody followed,’ Mohamed Amin recalls. The pilot was the last out and he just ripped off his epaullettes and threw them on the ground.
‘I’m going to lose my job.’
‘Damn right. I’m going to make sure you lose your job.’
Two weeks before, the same pilot had landed at Maasai Mara with the plane’s undercarriage up.
Idi Amin’s fall was acclaimed by the whole world. The many filmed interviews and newspaper and magazine still pictures, broadcast and published everywhere, had portrayed him as the increasingly horrifying, deeply disturbing, if at times grotesquely comic, tyrant he really was. A significant amount of that exposure was from Mohamed Amin, either filmed and photographed by himself or made possible by his efforts and his contacts.
Yet the British, thinking Idi Amin was a simple ex-colonial soldier, had been the first to recognise his government.
12. Expedition to Turkana: Where Man Began
LIKE MOST REAL CAMERA ACES, Mohamed Amin is a ‘people person’ and uses photography to express what he knows and feels about people. He tells thorough, intricate stories that touch people. They respond automatically. He is unpretentious and straightforward, and isn’t afraid to move in close with his camera, somehow managing to penetrate almost to the soul of his subject.
It was the people who live around Lake Turkana who were the principal inspiration for his long-delayed expedition, which he began organising in earnest midway through 1979 to take place early in 1980.
As Kenya’s fourth general elections, in November 1979, saw the first white Kenyan MP elected by an African majority, Mo was huddled over large-scale ordnance survey of reference maps, planning the month-long journey round that rugged wilderness in Kenya’s far north.
The concept of the book People of the Lake had changed. It had been planned as a book about the el-Molo, a small group living on Lake Turkana’s south-eastern shores, illustrated with black and white pictures. The el-Molo, among the smallest communities in the world—fewer than 300 of them at that time—were not enough for the kind of book he now had in mind.
‘The trip was for a purpose,’ he says. ‘For me, it wasn’t an adventure, although it was for some of the guys. There was a specific purpose to the trip. I didn’t set it up just to have fun.
‘I had been working on a book on the area for some time and I thought the best way to wrap it up was to go right round the lake, rather than working in sections. It also gives the feel of the whole place. It also added up to a bit more of an adventure in terms of a chapter in the book.’
He wanted the book to focus on all the communities around Turkana, the Merille, Rendille, Samburu, Turkana, and Gabbra, as well as the el-Molo, and so be more colourful as well as more challenging.
Aware of the tensions that can arise in a close-knit group isolated from society in hostile terrain, he chose his team carefully. He included an Australian broadcaster, Stewart Sommerlad, Andrew Johnson, Peter Moll, Saidi Suleiman, and I.
Amin’s planning for any event is impressively thorough. Sean Hawkins, who calls it ‘a genius for logistics’, says that, ‘Behind his dramatic and beautiful photographs and films lie the realistic planning, the strategies and tactics, the precision timing—not to mention the courage—of a professional military commando. Without this, Mo the artist would never have captured what he did in so many situations.’
It explains partly why seasoned professionals are quite content to let Amin look after arrangements that will affect their safety—and sometimes their survival.
With everything organised to his satisfaction, only days before the expedition set off, he flew to Pakistan in the Ismaili leader’s personal jet to cover the Aga Khan architectural awards in Lahore. It was his first visit since his arrest in 1971 and he was determined to ensure that his persona grata status in that country was restored under the new military regime of President Zia ul Haq. Knowing the new leader was a devout Muslim, he carried two large photomural prints of the holy places—Mecca and Medinah—to present to the Head of State.
During the awards ceremony in Shalimar Gardens, Lahore, he asked Siddiq Salik, one of the president’s military aides, if it would be possible to present the pictures to Zia. He was told he could do it before the president left the ceremonies. ‘But I hadn’t got anything prepared. The pictures were still not framed, so I said “No” and thought I’d blown it. But next day, I got a call to go to the governor’s house.’
The aide warned him that he had only one minute. In the event, the quietly-spoken president wanted to talk to him at length. ‘He offered me tea and we had a long and interesting discussion. Then President Zia asked me, “Mr Amin, will you do something for my country? I would like you to produce a book about Pakistan.”
‘I told him that I would need time to think about the kind of book it should be, and I would get in touch with him. Frankly, I thought he would forget all about it. He must meet hundreds of people like me every day.’
President Zia ul Haq, however, proved far from forgetful. But when he returned home early in January, Amin was swept up in the last-minute preparations for the expedition.
Amin left confident that nothing would go wrong. Nothing did. Until the eve of departure, after we assembled in the morning for a press ‘photocall’ in Total T-shirts and hats, atop the strengthened Land Cruiser with its piles of jerricans and volatile fuel. Departure was set for midnight from his house.
But at the last minute, his two writers (Peter Moll and I) were unable to make the start, and the expedition was delayed for about 22 hours. I had been beaten up a few hours before departure and taken to hospital. When Amin finally tracked me down, I handed him my false teeth, which had been broken into several pieces, and promised to discharge myself from the hospital that night. But would he please get my teeth fixed?
Amin was driving the Land Cruiser and Stewart the Toyota Hilux. Both were heavily laden with water, fuel, food, and tents, even a trail bike. It was a complete survival kit for the four-week expedition. In addition, there was half-a-ton of camera equipment.
Heading off towards Rumuruti on a rather rugged murram road, Amin, who had not slept for two nights worrying about the delay, dozed off and the Land Cruiser hit a bank and rolled.
‘Peter Moll was in the front with me and you and Saidi were in the back,’ Amin recalls. ‘You were all asleep but woke up very quickly. We all crawled out and fortunately nobody was hurt.’
He reminded me that I had just been released from hospital. ‘You lost your painkillers, which you
were holding in your hand but you were still clutching your bottle of beer.
‘Soon after, out of the blue, a police patrol car drove up. They were eager to prosecute somebody for dangerous driving. They talked to you while you sat there on the side of the road, drinking your beer, but you assured them that there was nothing dangerous about my driving. You had been advised to rest and avoid exertion.’
Shaking their heads, the police just drove away.
‘We got the vehicle back on its wheels using the winch and the Hilux. All the windows were shattered and the top was totally bent. We drove back to Nyahururu and spent all day putting the vehicle back into some sort of shape so that we could drive on.
‘We were unable to put any windows back as it was impossible to straighten anything.’
While this was going on, I went to see the local doctor because some glass had gone into my eye, causing intense pain, but he could only give me some eye drops, so I cadged a lift in a Land Rover and went to hospital in Nairobi.
Mo remembers it best because I was back in the same bed in the same ward and no doctor or nurse believed me when I told them I had left. They all thought I had serious brain damage.
The actual story of the expedition and its drama, including the arrest of the entire team by Cuban-trained Marxists at a remote Ethiopian border post, is told by Mohamed Amin in the final chapter of Cradle of Mankind.
For more than half a century, largely during colonial times, the whole Turkana region was a closed zone, isolated from the rest of the country and patrolled by British troops. Whatever the motives for this policy, it had the effect of insulating the peoples of the lake, and their traditions, from the changes going on around them. In the book, Amin writes:
We took stock for 24 hours at Nyahururu, repaired what we could, and hammered the worst protuberances back into the body work. More equipment, including a tent, beds, and the refrigerator, had to be jettisoned.
But there were minor compensations. The lack of windscreen and windows, for instance, provided welcome ventilation when we eventually reached the Suguta Valley. A precipitous track, handmade by an Italian missionary, leads down from Parkati for a few miles before petering out. And it was along these boulder-strewn slopes, 48 hours later, that the much lighter station wagon crept into the valley, surely one of the hottest places on earth. From now on, we became trailblazers in the truest sense of the word.