The Story of Mohamed Amin

by Brian Tetley

  Our two vehicles trailed a great cloud of dust as they raced across the floor of the Suguta Valley. The dried-up mud flats we had to cross had turned into a giant shimmering saucepan.

  We stayed in the Suguta for four days, braising slowly in our own sweat at noon temperatures of up to 137° Fahrenheit. While there, we climbed a perfect cone of ash called Andrew’s Volcano, named after Lieutenant H. Andrew, a member of the Cavendish expedition to Turkana in 1897. Another climb, more rewarding, was across the Barrier, the coal-black crust of a vast lava flow which prevents just about any form of access to the southern tip of Turkana.

  Our climbs proved what we already knew—that there was no way to drive over the Barrier to the Kerio Valley.

  We decided to move on as directly as possible from the Suguta to Kalokol, halfway along the western shore of Lake Turkana. We estimated that the journey would take us two days. We could not afford to take much longer since our supply of water was already running low.

  Two nights later, in fast-gathering darkness, we pitched camp as the sun sank behind a low hill. We had winched our way over screes and rocks and spent back-breaking hours clearing boulders from our path and, encouraged by our Turkana guides, had continued into a rugged wilderness. And now we were quite lost. What had begun as an adventure had turned into an ordeal of dehydration and energy-sucking heat, fatigue, and bewilderment. The guides we had hired finally admitted that they had no idea where we were.

  Three more days passed before we finally reached Lokori, and then Kalokol near Ferguson’s Gulf, the village where the Turkana Fishermen’s Cooperative has brought the first signs of the industrial era to the region. A large filleting and freezing plant was nearing completion as we camped in the shade of some palms.

  By now, the station wagon needed a thorough repair job. Despite having taken off most of the weight, the rack was causing the roof to move around alarmingly; both front windscreen pillars had broken away and cracks were appearing around all the other pillars.

  With the help of the cooperative’s mechanic, Stewart Sommerlad set to work. After almost three days, the station wagon had a pipe frame that bolted to the floor in four places and also around the windscreen pillars. This kept the tottering superstructure more or less rigid and in place for the rest of the trip.

  Once reassembled, the expedition set off for an exploration of Central Island, an hour away by powerboat from Ferguson’s Gulf. A still active volcano, Central Island has three craters—one large, one small and side-vented, and the third submerged as a sand-fringed lagoon. It sounds attractive, but erosion has left the island looking hardly more scenic than a colliery tip.

  Central Island could erupt at any moment and, amongst other damage, wipe out an important resting place for the migrant birds, which come there attracted by the fruit of bright green salvadora bushes. There was no indication of an impending eruption when we were there, but the birds were clearly soon going to need another place to feed since the salvadora is being destroyed by the fishermen who camp on the island.

  Back on the main track up the western shore of the lake from Ferguson’s Gulf, there was nothing to relieve the monotony. We covered over a hundred miles of flattish, featureless scrub desert with nothing alive in it, or so it seemed.

  It was not until after the Kenya border post at Todenyang that we were diverted by any incident of note.

  The expedition had been cleared to enter Ethiopia by the highest authorities in Addis Ababa [the Ethiopian capital]. And, just to make sure, the day before taking the expedition across, I paid a visit to the Ethiopian border post at Namuruputh. I was greeted warmly and told that the expedition would be welcome. When we arrived, however, we were arrested—the full drama, with rifles at our backs. The letters and visas meant nothing after all.

  We persuaded the border guards to let us use our radio and eventually, we got through to the Ethiopian Embassy in Nairobi, who contacted Addis Ababa on our behalf. The response was an order, in Amharic morse, from the Ethiopian capital, to let us into their country. The performance had taken 48 hours.

  We then drove on a few miles to what I had always considered would be the biggest obstacle in any ‘grand design’ to drive round Lake Turkana—the meandering waters of the River Omo, more than a quarter of a mile wide at the village of Kalaam.

  In the 60s, Kalaam had been a ferry point for crossing the Omo, the sluggish freshwater feed for the lake. The problem was that the American missionaries who built and operated the ferry had departed when Ethiopia became a Marxist state after the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie. Ethiopia’s new revolutionary government failed to keep the Omo ferry in working order. Thus, although originally a well-constructed unit consisting of a steel platform on top of 25 oil drums, it had fallen into decay. The drums had corroded into a mesh of holes and the pontoon lay half-submerged on the gentle slopes of the bank.

  Hearts sinking, we drove 14 miles upstream, directed by George Kistachir, the District Officer, to a place called Omo Rati, where a second ferry was located. This turned out to be a series of planks on top of three large fibreglass dinghies. It looked solid enough, and it was floating, although a fourth dinghy was missing. The banks were steep and I worried that they might cause problems when loading and unloading. To overcome this obstacle, we dug tons of earth out of the banks on both sides to make ramps.

  One member of the team scrounged a broken-down outboard motor from George and managed to get it working. The rest of us set about strengthening and improving the ferry—a job that took a day and a night of hard labour, wiring oil drums and timber together. We christened the thing the ‘Rati Queen’ before we inched the station wagon aboard, very nearly losing it in the process. Then the unpredictable outboard seized in midstream.

  The second crossing was less erratic and the pickup was landed without mishap.

  Originally, we had intended to spend at least a week in Ethiopia but we were followed everywhere at gunpoint—’For our own protection,’ I was assured—and repeatedly warned that photography was not allowed. So now that we had crossed the Omo, I did not want to spend longer than necessary in Ethiopia. After an overnight camp on the eastern shores of the Omo, I decided to head for Kenya.

  It was not much later, after travelling for some 30 miles on the east bank, that our two-vehicle convoy drove over a small rise and we sighted a new Ethiopian border post. This was something we had not expected. As we approached it, two soldiers came out levelling their rifles at us as they ran down the hill. They seemed to have had a message about our expected arrival for they waved vigorously, presumably directing us into the border post. However, we picked up speed and ran straight past them, over the line to Kenya and did not stop until we reached the police station at Ileret.

  The expedition returned to Nairobi on February 13, after an absence of 27 days. Amin’s achievement in bringing his team successfully through such hostile territory received an accolade from Britain’s Royal Geographical Society. That august body made him a Fellow of the Society, adding his name to a distinguished list, which includes David Livingstone, Sir John Hunt, and other famous explorers and pioneers.

  Such fame attracts the most improbable characters in search of help. One was a zany character called Mihail Zimeonov, who had conceived the idea of moulding 10 life-size bronzes, using dental alginate for the mould, from a living elephant. It was a perfect television story.

  On March 18, 1980, Mo and Brian Barron drove up to Ol Pejeta ranch, then the private reserve of Saudi billionaire Adnan Kashoggi. It sprawled across more than 16,000 wilderness acres on the Laikipia Plains, north of Mount Kenya. It had its own herd of elephants as well as other wildlife. Peter de Mello, Ol Pejeta’s game warden, had been instructed to find a suitable animal and Dr Ishtiaq Chawdri, from Kenya’s Wildlife Conservation Department, was to drug the beast. Kashoggi’s pilot, a German hunter based in Kenya, took the ranch Cessna aloft and circled the area looking for a pachyderm to plaster. He found one just outside the chain mesh fence that
isolates the homestead from the wilderness. Dr Chawdri fired a dart in the rear flank of the medium-size bull which, it was discovered too late, had a damaged right tusk.

  The dart sent the beast charging madly through the tangled bush, a fleet of four-wheel drive vehicles in pursuit, stumbling crazily in and out of the thorn trees and lurching through the semi-jungle for almost two miles until it succumbed to the drug.

  Amin, camera on shoulder, followed in the lead car as Mihail and his handlers moved in with their US$40,000 worth of plastic-like material, from which dentists normally mould dental impressions—which they slapped over the slumbering beast, white on its right side, before ponderously turning it over for pink on its left.

  When Dr Chawdri gave the elephant the antidote to revive it, Amin moved in close to film its awakening, despite warnings that it might get up suddenly and angrily. Being his soundman, I should have stayed with him. But as the elephant trembled and shook itself out of its deep sleep, I remembered his dash to safety with Peter Moll when filming Ahmed, and I unscrewed the lead between the camera and recorder and took refuge on the lorry. He shot the end of the story without sound.

  Though nothing was ever again heard of Mihail and his bronze elephants, that pink and white elephant put the finishing touch to one of the zaniest stories Amin ever filmed.

  It was a year of high comedy and high drama for the Visnews ace. A few weeks after the Mihail sequence, Pope John Paul II paid his first visit to Kenya, arriving on May 6. He was a charismatic figure and Amin was deluged with assignments including photography for Newsweek and Time.

  ‘I heard that the Pope was a keep-fit enthusiast, who went out jogging and also had a morning swim. I thought it would make great pictures,’ Amin says.

  ‘All we had to do was get him first thing in the morning. So with Duncan, I went to the papal nuncio’s house in Lavington, Nairobi, where the Pope was staying. It was just after six 0’ clock. The place was guarded by Kenya’s paramilitary force, the GSU, who were reasonably friendly and let us in through the gates.

  ‘We knocked on the door but there was no answer. I tried the door and it was open. We went from room to room looking for the Pope. But there was nobody around.

  ‘About the seventh or eighth door, we ran into this big, tall man who looked like an American. In fact, I had seen him around the Pope before. He was Paul Marcinkus.’

  It was clear that the two, who were carrying most of their gear, were news photographers. Marcinkus, all dressed up in a priest’s clothes with the cassock and collar, was furious.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Father, this is a holy house. Don’t be so angry.’

  ‘How did you get in?’

  ‘Father, we came through the door.’

  Mo said they wanted some pictures of the Pope jogging and swimming.

  ‘He must have thought we were a bit around the bend but also pretty harmless. He told us that we had to leave and I said, “Look, we really need to get some pictures. If we can’t film him swimming, can we take some pictures of him at breakfast?”—which he was probably having out on the patio. There was a firm negative.

  ‘Although we had to leave the house, we were allowed to stay in the grounds to take some pictures of him as he left on his drive to the mass rally at Uhuru Park, which was the highlight of his visit.

  ‘While we hang around in the gardens, I figured out that if we took pictures of him leaving the house, we’d never make it to Uhuru Park in time, so I organised the convoy of cars outside. Since we were working from inside the grounds it was very easy for us to put our Land Cruiser in front of the Papal car, which in fact later produced some excellent material. We were the only ones directly in front photographing His Holiness and the thousands lining the route.

  ‘If we had asked for this privilege, I think it would have been refused, but the fact that we were working from inside the residence meant there were no problems.

  ‘By this time, a number of families of people who worked in the papal nunciate had gathered to be presented to His Holiness when he came out with the papal nuncio.

  ‘He picked up little children and talked to the mothers, which gave me many first-class, human interest pictures, and the papal nuncio, whom I knew quite well, brought the Pope over to us and introduced Duncan and me, explaining that I had done a lot of work in Africa and also a book on the pilgrimage to Mecca.

  ‘His Holiness gave us each a gold and ruby rosary. I treasure this.’

  From the divine to the evil: mystery still surrounded Idi Amin’s escape from Uganda. And, after all his years reporting the dictator’s rule, Mohamed Amin was intrigued about the man’s hideout. Nothing had been seen or heard of the fugitive dictator since mid-April 1979. Initially, he had gone to ground in Libya in a big house just outside Tripoli, where he had been told by Gaddafi to remain incognito. Idi Amin did not like this new kind of existence. Then the photographer heard that he had moved from Africa.

  Using his network of contacts, following up one rumour after another, he discovered that his namesake had gone into hiding, together with his large family, somewhere in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. The hideout was secret, but he was confident that, once in the city, he could track the tyrant down.

  It was going to be expensive, however, and there was no guarantee that he would succeed. In April, he discussed it with Brendan Farrow at Visnews in guarded terms. The newsroom executive was enthusiastic, but the company’s top management opposed it. Mohamed turned to BBC’s Brian Barron, who thought Idi Amin was probably still in Libya. Barron was very keen to do the story and insistent that he and Mo go together. At no stage did the cameraman reveal Amin’s whereabouts to Barron.

  Slowly, however, the commercial possibilities of the story became apparent to the Visnews management and they agreed to underwrite the expedition. They were also strongly against any BBC involvement, fearing that BBC Enterprises, the corporation’s powerful commercial wing, would gain the financial advantage at Visnews’ expense.

  Two lengthy messages to Brendan Farrow on May 24 and 25 tell the story. Referring to the BBC London approaches to Visnews London, Amin telexed:

  In case there are any misunderstandings, the circumstances surrounding this are:

  I have been following this story for past two to three months, when I was first tipped off by my contact about the change of the whereabouts of our elusive friend.

  I maintained close contact but did not want to talk to anybody until I was reasonably sure the information was accurate and that I would have a reasonable chance to see the subject.

  Barron and I discussed this story in very general terms about four weeks ago, but he had no real information of the person’s whereabouts.

  As Uganda situation deteriorated further, BB and I again discussed the possibilities as Uganda was now a hot item.

  The fact that I discussed this with BB was in no way intended to mean that I was handing him the story. Over the past year, I have suffered [a] great deal of frustration on several top stories due [to] your economy drive and there is no way I intend to hand over this story.

  The joint operation idea was only discussed after Visnews said no to my proposition. At that point, I had made it very clear to BB that the story was mine, the contact is mine, and if I agreed to do a deal with BBC (as VIS could not be persuaded to spend the money) it had to be in such a way that the BBC would pay all the costs, absolutely everything, which would have amounted to perhaps ten thousand sterling if the story worked—if it failed, a lot less—and BBC would only have UK (repeat UK) rights and I would own the world rights.

  That’s the summary. As far as I am concerned, the story is still mine and my loyalty is to Visnews. In other words, since you now agree with me and are prepared to risk your money, it’s now yours too. You make a decision about the BBC. Personally, I see no objection to BBC participation but doubt if Barron’s presence is needed on the initial trip and if he insists on coming, don’t see why VIS should share his cos
t. Feel confident BB on his own would not even get near the hotel, as the authorities are none too happy about Limey accents at the moment.

  Farrow phoned Amin to discuss the BBC joining the trip. Visnews realised that even he could not be sleuth, cameraman, soundman, lightman, grip, and interviewer all at once, so they finally agreed to allow the BBC to join in. But explicit terms were agreed to protect Visnews sales rights.

  In a letter of May 28, 1980 to Alan Protheroe, then editor, BBC TV news, Visnews editor in chief Robert Kearsley referred to ‘the various discussions between BBC and Visnews people in Nairobi and London’ and sought agreement for the Idi Amin Project. These included 50-50 shared costs for the three-man crew, Barron, Thirer and Mohamed Amin, exclusive UK broadcasting rights for BBC TV news and exclusive international distribution rights outside the UK for Visnews. Another clause specified that ‘Visnews and BBC Television News’ would agree on the date and time of the first broadcast of the material.

  The final clause read that ‘the original negative would remain in Visnews hands’ but that ‘copies for BBC use would be made free of any charge’—acknowledgement of Visnews copyright ownership. The letter, countersigned by Protheroe, was stamped with the BBC Television News seal. But Visnews staff remained unhappy.

  On Thursday May 28, the three flew from Nairobi to Jeddah. They entered the country professionally incognito for, unless cleared well beforehand by the highest authority, film crews were not allowed into Saudi Arabia.