The Story of Mohamed Amin

by Brian Tetley

  ‘We’ve been, but nobody’s there.’

  ‘The staff quarters are just next door.’

  ‘Really?’ The photographer, the pilot, and the rebels marched up to the Aero Club and Amin persuaded the manager and kitchen staff to make the rebels hamburgers and chips with sodas and tea. ‘Actually,’ Amin remembers, ‘they didn’t need much persuasion. Not with my escort.

  ‘After this, Karim Bhaloo, the pilot, and I were left at the Aero Club. I then phoned a number of my friends hoping that somebody would give me a lift. I first got through to my doctor, who I thought was my friend and sked him. But he said, “That’s not possible. There’s shooting all over the place.”

  ‘So that was the end of that. Other friends said much the same thing. I finally got through to Duncan Willetts, who gave me much the same story and told me he had been turned back twice when he had tried to go out. It was a dodgy situation, but I suggested that he should drive along a back road, via the mortuary, to Wilson Airport, and after about half an hour, he arrived at the Aero Club.

  ‘I felt the first thing we should do was drop the pilot at his father’s house, which was close to mine. We then drove to the office to get our cameras. At this point, I realised it was the air force that had rebelled and the army that was trying to put the place back into shape.

  ‘At the roundabout on Uhuru Highway and Haile Selassie Avenue [in central Nairobi], we were taken out of our car at gunpoint. Luckily, I recognised the colonel in charge and persuaded him to give us an armed escort of three soldiers.

  ‘Two sat inside the Land Cruiser, one on the roof. We had this escort for the rest of the day, while we covered the battle between rebels and army.

  ‘Looting was taking place on such a scale that I think if they had been given another day, they would have dismantled the entire 29 storey KICC and taken the bricks home. In the few hours that the civilians and the rebels had the freedom to loot, they pretty well cleaned out the entire shopping centres of the city.’

  Amin and Willetts went on filming into the third day, when flights resumed and Amin was able to ship his film to Visnews in London. The script noted:

  The Kenyan capital Nairobi was slowly getting back to normal after the August 1 coup against President Daniel arap Moi failed. Almost the entire Kenyan Air Force, which was at the centre of the revolt, are in custody, said military sources on August 4.

  A thousand civilians, also under arrest, have been described as looters by the authorities. Some are believed to be students, who came out openly in favour of the rebellion. The city centre has been under strict military surveillance since the coup.

  Troops positioned at major junctions have been searching cars and passersby, and police have mounted door-to-door operations to recover the contents of looted shops. Despite repeated government appeals for a return to work, many office workers have been staying at home. But shopkeepers have started clearing away glass and other debris from their damaged premises.

  On August 2, President Moi publicly thanked the armed forces for their support and appealed for calm throughout the nation. At least 150 rebels and 100 civilians died, according to official estimates. No casualty toll has been given for government forces.

  The rapes and the beatings inflicted on them during the first hours of the abortive coup were notice enough to many of Kenya’s Asians that it was time to quit. Most, like Amin, however, shrugged it off.

  In the end, for him, the would-be coup was just a brief diversion from the rapid development of his publishing interests. Almost on the back of the two Journey through books the first copies of Run Rhino Run arrived. Eloquently written, elegantly reproduced, it was to receive critical acclaim around the world, though its sales failed to match the enthusiasm of its reception.

  Typical of the reviews was one by Ian Redmond in the influential Wildlife magazine: ‘Large format, “coffee table” books often have lavish colour photos that leave you gasping, but poorly written, inaccurate captions that leave you cringing.

  ‘Here, the text is both well researched and readable, with an extensive bibliography, and the photos, mainly by Mohamed Amin, are superb. Together, words and pictures put one message across loud and clear—we have very little time left.’

  Most of the press notices said much the same. But it was not the only success. In Islamabad, President Zia ul Haq honoured this Kenya-born son of the Punjab:

  I am directed to inform you that the President of Pakistan has been graciously pleased to confer on you the award of Tamgha-i-Imtiaz on the occasion of Independence Day, 1982. This Honour has been published in the Gazette of Pakistan Extraordinary, dated August 14, 1982.

  The conferment of this Honour entitles you to use the abbreviation ‘T.I.’ after your name.

  The medallion of this award will be presented to you in due course.

  Zahur Azar, Cabinet Secretary

  The award, Pakistan’s second highest civilian honour, is equivalent to a British knighthood. But he didn’t learn about this latest honour immediately. The letter came while he was in another frontline situation—stumping through the streets of shell-shattered Beirut in the wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion.

  He arrived, via London, with boxes of chocolates and bottles of alcohol for what he imagined to be his deprived and beleagured colleagues—to find there was almost every luxury available in the city’s rubble-strewn streets from the ‘stop-me-and-buy-one’ vendors with their little push carts.

  He checked in at the Bristol Hotel, down the street from the Commodore, where the rest of the pack, including NBC’s large contingent, were staying. ‘They had about 60 guys in the field. They lived incredibly well. Every evening, even when the shit was hitting the fan, they laid on a full-scale banquet—complete with wines and all the trimmings.’

  On one occasion, this had disastrous consequences for the NBC team. As a Visnews subscriber, NBC had access to Amin’s material and that of the Visnews Beirut bureau chief, Souheil Rached, and his team. In turn, Visnews had access to NBC’s material.

  Nonetheless, the crews were competitive. While Amin and Souheil tried everything to get an interview with the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, who was finally quitting Lebanon—they heard that an NBC crew had beaten them to it at the Lebanese Prime Minister’s house. Amin door-stopped at the Commodore to meet them on their return. But NBC’s crew, waiting outside the premier’s house for Arafat to leave, were still feeling the effects of the evening’s repast.

  ‘The cameraman had drunk too much and needed a leak. The producer told him, “Don’t be stupid. Arafat can come out any minute.” But it got to the point where the guy just couldn’t hold on any longer, so he shoved the camera into the producer’s hands and galloped off to the john down the road.

  ‘Just then, Arafat decides to leave, so the producer switches on the ENG camera, focuses and starts filming as the cameraman comes galloping back in a panic and grabs the camera. The correspondent spoke to the PLO man, who agreed to an interview. They all came back absolutely delighted.

  “Wonderful. We’ve got a great interview. He talked for about 20 minutes.”

  ‘Straightaway, I asked if I could get a “dub” for Visnews. “Sure,” said the producer, “why don’t you come on upstairs and dub it while we run it through the editing machine.” You can imagine his face when they switched it on. The video cassette was blank. There wasn’t any picture or sound.’

  The cameraman had switched the camera off when he took it back from the producer thinking he was switching it on. ‘Ah, well,’ said the crestfallen producer. ‘It wasn’t such a great interview.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ commented Amin.

  Next day, he met Arafat and filmed an interview—which NBC gratefully dubbed.

  His respect for Souheil, his Beirut-based colleague, is immense. ‘He’s a tremendous cameraman,’ says Mo, ‘and we really got some exciting sequences during those three weeks. His battle scenes were terrific. But he takes too many risks.’

  One exci
ting sequence Amin did not film, however, was the bomb that blasted the hospital next door to the Bristol and that took off the hotel’s top floor. ‘I was asleep and I just grabbed my cameras and came out through the door into the corridor running for the stairs when I suddenly realised I was stark naked. I dashed back and threw on a pair of trousers and a shirt and went downstairs. There was a pretty large audience down there waiting for my entrance. I’m glad I realised in time.’

  For three weeks, he covered this bloody conflict and wrote a background piece for a Kenyan newspaper, Coastweek, entitled ‘The Agony of Beirut’. It provoked a brief sensation with an allegation in the Daily Nation of October 12 that at the annual conference of the International Telecommunications Union at the KICC, police had seized thousands of copies of the paper following protests by Israeli delegates. In a denial, Coastweek editor Adrian Grimwood concluded, ‘The report and photographs were featured because they were an “exclusive” contribution from an award-winning correspondent well known to Kenyan readers for his often dramatic coverage of the world trouble spots.’

  Amin went to Beirut, not his area, to enable Visnews staffers there to take a break from the constant pressure of work in Lebanon’s war-torn capital.

  Back on base in Nairobi, he started planning to augment Journey through Pakistan with a large-scale photomural exhibition in Washington attended by the president of Pakistan. The prints were produced in the ultramodern Florida laboratory of his friend Masud Quraishy.

  The two Journey through books were hailed as ‘marvellous testimony to this lovely land,’ ‘travel books extraordinary,’ ‘perhaps unnecessary to add that they are superbly produced and printed like all Mohamed Amin’s recent books,’ ‘heartwarming and delightful’.

  They were solid evidence of Amin’s skills as a publisher and invaluable to him at the Frankfurt Book Fair of October 1982. By now, Camerapix had formed Camerapix Magazines Ltd to produce Selamta, the quarterly in-flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines, and it was becoming a complex organisation in its own right.

  He also had to complete work on Portraits of Africa for Collins-Harvill and set up his Journey through Pakistan exhibition. It was a formidable schedule to accomplish in the first three months of the year, but he was determined.

  At this time, he was also working to have his ban on entry into Tanzania lifted. It helped that Tanzania’s Tourism Corporation had commissioned a Journey through Tanzania book. At the beginning of 1983, Willetts and writer Peter Marshall were in Tanzania working on the book, but Amin planned to do the photography for the final chapter, which involved climbing to the top of Africa’s highest mountain, Kilimanjaro.

  On Saturday February 19, he asked if I’d like to go with him.

  ‘When are we leaving?’

  ‘In about two hours.’

  He had won his fight for readmission to Tanzania. It was his first official visit since his 1966 eviction.

  As he reached the lip of 18,700-foot-high Gillman’s Point on the rim of Kibo Crater (highest point 19,340 feet) on February 24, 1983, his cousin Mohamed Shaffi took the picture, which appears in Journey through Tanzania, although with goggles and parka, it isn’t easy to see that it’s him. Nonetheless, it was a characteristically exuberant end to a 17-year exile.

  Two days later, he flew to Lahore to set up the Journey through Pakistan exhibition. Shipped from Washington, where it was first shown, the boxes were offloaded from the PIA 747 onto a camel cart, ironic contrast to the sophisticated processes that had been used to produce the exhibition material in Florida.

  For once, ‘Mo’s Luck’ failed. A monsoon downpour laid several feet of water over Lahore’s ancient streets. The official opening was cancelled. President Zia ul Haq, however, had resolved to put his personal seal of approval on the exhibition, and Irish-born Begum Noon, head of the Pakistan Tourist Development Corporation, told Amin that the presidential opening would take place in the capital, Islamabad, soon. He returned to Nairobi on March 22, and the following night, acquaintances, admirers, and friends at Nairobi’s Serena Hotel, celebrating Pakistan’s National Day, saw him invested with the presidential award, the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, by the Pakistan Ambassador to Kenya, Mr N. A. Ashraff.

  Three days later, March 26, he was filming on the island of Lamu off the Kenya coast when he received a message that the Pakistan President was opening the exhibition at the Islamabad Hotel on March 29.

  He immediately flew back to Nairobi just in time to catch the only flight that would get him to Islamabad for the event. Then he flew straight back to Nairobi on the return flight to cover the first leg of the Safari Rally.

  He now planned a long swing with Dolly, Salim, and myself through Pakistan and India, the latter to survey the possibility of a Journey through India book.

  An interesting insight into his attitude to books and writers came about during this trip, when I referred to Journey through Kenya as ‘my book’. Salim, then 13, asked me, ‘What do you mean by your book?’

  ‘Well I wrote it, Salim.’

  ‘Yes, but words have very little to do with books.’

  He could only have heard that from his father.

  Almost everywhere he went during this trip, Mohamed Amin was treated as a hero. The Journey through Pakistan exhibition had just been used as the centrepiece presentation of a presidential visit to Japan in the 60th floor Sky Lounge of the Tokyo Sheraton.

  In Lahore, outside the museum founded by Rudyard Kipling’s father, a taxi driver screeched to a halt, opened his window, and said, ‘Mohamed Amin. May I have your autograph?’

  In Bombay, a young photographer stopped him in the street, introduced himself, and invited us to his flat, where he knelt at Mo’s feet. ‘You’re my God,’ he said. ‘I’d do anything to work for you. Just tell me what you want.’

  Coming out of the flat, he turned to me and said puckishly, ‘Why can’t my staff treat me like that?’

  He enjoys the company of those in power. Photographs of him with royalty, Heads of State, the rich and the famous, adorn his office walls. When Queen Elizabeth II of Britain was in Kenya in November 1983, Amin, Willetts, and I attended the reception hosted by the monarch for the press at State House. He had arranged through the queen’s press secretary, Michael Shea, to present a leather bound copy of Journey through Kenya to Her Majesty.

  When the moment came to present the book, however, for once, he fluffed his lines and forgot to mention its title (perhaps he remembered that royal admonition of 20 years before in Sudan). The queen looked quizzically at Duncan, who said quickly:

  ‘It’s called Journey through Kenya, Ma’am. By the three of us.’

  ‘The three of you wrote it?’

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ I was able to say. ‘They photographed it. I wrote it.’

  Ironically, two months later, Mohamed Amin received an unexpected letter from one of the queen’s aides. It said simply:

  I have the honour to inform you that The Queen has been graciously pleased to grant you unrestricted permission to wear the insignia of Tamgha-i-Imtiaz, which has been conferred upon you by His Excellency the President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan in recognition of your services.

  14. There Are People Dying

  MOST TV VIEWERS KNOW BBC’S Michael Buerk or CBS’s Dan Rather or NBC’s Tom Brokaw, but few know the camera aces around whose material their careers have been built. The cameramen record the video and film images that provide television news with its living drama, moments of tragedy and triumph. It is their eyes and hands and brains that represent viewers at assassinations and coups, typhoons and air crashes, rescues and romances.

  Why are they so anonymous? Visnews sells most of its syndicated services on the backs of its cameramen.

  As Brendan Farrow once observed, ‘Visnews surely relies on more field cameramen around the world than any other news organisation, and all our success stands through their skills, reliability, and dedication. None of us can afford to forget that.’

  But television ne
ws in the main, particularly solo networks and stations, have built their star systems first around the anchor person in the studios and, secondly, the front-of-camera reporters in the field.

  Yet the stories cameramen tell about their work are in turn frightening, poignant, comic, and almost always interesting. Some have long careers, others are cut down prematurely.

  Michael Roe, another colleague at Visnews who used some of Mo’s earliest work when he was deputy editor of the Standard in Nairobi during the 1960s, says, ‘When there’s a big story there’s no better cameraman to have on your side than Mohamed. In addition to his superb eye for a picture and his ability to beat the bureaucrats who are so often a thorn in the cameramen’s flesh, he has repeatedly shown himself fearless in his pursuit of the coverage that television news editors are clamouring for all over the world.’

  All these skills came into play in 1984, the most significant year so far in Mohamed Amin’s life. It began with a BBC special he filmed in Uganda in January. It continued with a three-week assignment in Nigeria for Danish television and diverted through two episodes of fun filming for a US television programme starring Brooke Shields, the Maharajah of Jaipur, and film star Persis Khambatta, and an airlift of rare, wild game from Mombasa to a safari park in Florida, before coming horrifyingly back to reality.

  He produced more books: Journey through Tanzania, The Beauty of Kenya, and We Live In Pakistan. For the latter, he and I flew to Karachi early in March on a two-week cross-country trip. His energy was still phenomenal. He ranged across that large country, flying long distances and working relentlessly from 5a.m. until midnight each day, before returning for his annual Easter assignment covering the exhausting Safari Rally, when he impressed me with his readiness to look at everyone’s pictures. My own pictures and the work of his son Salim, for example, went round the world daily through The Associated Press. His only criterion was that the picture had to be good enough. He was also open to anybody’s suggestions regarding things visual.