by Brian Tetley
‘From the first seconds, it was clear that this was horror on a monumental scale. The pictures were of people who were so shrunken by starvation that they looked like beings from another planet…The camera wandered amidst them like a mesmerised observer, occasionally dwelling on one person so that he looked directly at me, sitting in my comfortable living room…Their eyes looked into mine…Paula [Paula Yates, television presenter, pop star and Geldof’s wife] burst into tears, and then rushed upstairs to check on our baby, who was sleeping peacefully in her cot.
‘The images played and replayed in my mind. What could I do? All I could do was make records that no one bought. But I would do that, I would give all the profits of the next Rats [Boomtown Rats is the name of Geldof’s group] record to Oxfam. What good would that do? It would be a pitiful amount. But it would be more than I could raise by simply dipping into my shrunken bank account. Yet that was still not enough.’
Next morning in the Phonogram press office, where he had a desk, Geldof suggested the Band Aid record that inspired Europe. In turn, his example prompted American singer and actor Harry Belafonte to initiate a similar effort in America. Together with Ken Kragen, he organised the production of We Are the World, written and composed by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie.
Their efforts in turn inspired ordinary people everywhere to give what they could. ‘The depth of feeling behind these donations has awed me,’ Oxfam director Guy Stringer said early in 1985.
Typical was the West family in a remote Scottish village. Mrs Alick West had burst into tears watching Amin’s film. Afterwards she, her husband Alex, and their 16-year-old son Patrick drew up a list of all the things they no longer needed. Put together, the china and glass, old furniture, a treasured 26-year-old tractor, and a caravan, raised almost £2,500 for Ethiopia’s starving when auctioned.
Six-year-old Janet Joss in southern England put all her toys into a pram and went through the village selling them door to door. She raised £40.
Within 72 hours of the first report, the ordinary people of Britain had already pledged a total of more than £5 million for an appeal which, officially, had closed the week before.
An unemployed man sent his own unemployment benefit cheque of £54—’All I have’—for the Ethiopian famine victims. A farmer’s wife, in tears, rang relief offices and said, ‘I’ve just looked in my larder. And I’ve come away feeling guilty.’ She sent a ton of wheat.
In the words of reporter John Edwards, who has often covered crises in Africa for the London Daily Mail, ‘A tide of help had turned and it was starting to flow towards Ethiopia. Millions of people were involved now.’
Almost as soon as the phones started ringing, John Eke, chief accountant of the Save the Children Fund emergency office in London, totted up the contributions—pennies and pounds mainly from the poor, but also much from the well-to-do and wealthy—and recorded a total of more than £10,000 from 160 donors. At week’s end, the fund stood at more than £14 million. ‘That’s a huge figure,’ he said. ‘We haven’t had anything like this before.’
In Washington, President Reagan saw the NBC telecast of Amin’s film and rang through immediately to pledge US$45 million. When Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke saw a cassette replay before an interview, he wept. Australia launched a nationwide famine appeal.
The London Sun passed on £100,000 from its readers’ fund for children, and within 10 days, over £400,000 had been sent to the Daily Mirror’s special fund. A plane with 30 tons of food, medical supplies, tents, and blankets, organised by the Mirror and with proprietor Robert Maxwell on board, flew out to Addis Ababa.
A remarkable effort by the small Evening Argus, Brighton, in Southern England raised over £46,000 from readers, and the money was used to fly out an Anglo Cargo Boeing 707 from Gatwick Airport loaded with blankets.
The appeal was launched with a front page splash written by editor David Williams, who flew out with the aircraft. ‘The money was raised within six days and I reckon we will top £50,000. It is the most fantastic response to any appeal I have known.’
Some amusing ways were devised to raise money in Britain: a Miss Lovely Legs competition, a Miss Beautiful Eyes contest, a sponsored silence, and a sponsored slim-in, where weight-conscious young British women shed pounds to raise pounds for famine victims.
In one South Wales village, a young woman organised a musical concert in aid of the Ethiopian famine relief. Sharon Harvey, who lives in the mining village of Arbertillery, pooled voluntary resources and talent to entertain local residents and raise money.
Ten-year-old Londoner Julius Harper raised £96 by busking with his recorder at Camden Lock open-air market. Six unemployed youths from Nottingham played a 48-hour pool marathon that brought in sponsored takings of £673.
In Gillingham, Kent, hairdresser Jerry Harley set up his shaving stand in the High Street and brought in sponsored takings of £150 by shaving, blindfolded, ten people in four minutes.
At St. Peter’s Church in Caversham, Berkshire, the Reverend Richard Kingsbury preached a nine-hour sermon to extract £2,000 from his flock. North Devon hotelier Leslie Oakland drove an old Land Rover through the towns and villages around Barnstaple, inviting people to throw in money towards a new Land Rover to send to the famine zone. Within three weeks, he collected £10,000.
Celebrities gave generously for a series of auctions that netted almost £8,000. Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, donated a silver fruit bowl presented to her by the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia.
Actress Joan Collins contributed a black silk evening gown; jazz musician Kenny Ball, a trumpet; Steve Davis, a snooker cue; Henry Cooper, a pair of boxing gloves. And the entire England football team gave their jerseys after their spectacular 8-0 win over Turkey.
Many people volunteered their labour. In Batley, West Yorkshire, two separate factory shifts toiled without pay through a Friday night and a Saturday morning to prepare ten tons of high-energy biscuits in time for an emergency flight to Ethiopia. At Birmingham Airport, members of the Aston Villa football team, who also helped to raise £86,000 for a West Midlands fund, loaded a Boeing 707 with food and medical supplies.
In Southampton, dockers ignored traditional union demarcation rules to work alongside farmers over Christmas, loading 10,000 tonnes of wheat. They waived overtime payments, thereby saving thousands of pounds in labour charges.
For some Britons, fundraising brought a total change of life. After Cambridgeshire farmer Oliver Walston, 44, set up a famine-relief scheme inviting wheat farmers to contribute the £100-proceeds from sale of one ton of their grain, he found himself transformed into a full-time charity organiser. Turning the running of his 3,000-acre farm over to his foreman, Walston and his wife Anne struggled to deal with sackfuls of mail bringing donations for Send a Ton to Africa, not only from wheat growers but from farmers who sold lambs, calves, and market-garden produce.
His telephone bill soared as he negotiated with bank officials, corn merchants, millers, transport firms, and port authorities for his fund’s cash to be turned into wheat for shipment to Ethiopia. But Wilson considers that the effort and his £9,000 expenses were more than repaid by the satisfaction of knowing that his scheme raised £1.9 million and shipped 12,000 tons of wheat to Ethiopia and Sudan.
Nigel Humphries, 34-year-old managing director and chief pilot of the charter company Air South-West, simply dropped everything to go out to help. When he and his colleague Liz Amos decided that he should fly their one plane—a twin-engine Beechcraft Queen Air—to Ethiopia, they immediately appealed for funds through local press and radio. Within three days, they received pledges of £10,000. Humphries took off at once with a ton and half of plastic sheeting, tarpaulin, and rope urgently needed by the Save the Children Fund for a feeding station.
For the next three weeks, Humphries provided an aerial taxi service inside Ethiopia, flying doctors, nurses, and relief workers to feeding camps. The airstrips he used, perilously deep in valleys, were of
ten little more than rough tracks.
By the time he returned to Exeter, Liz Amos had boosted the total of funds to £70,000, enabling him to go to Sudan for a further two months in February and March 1985.
From their own pockets, Americans gave more than US$70 million to feed the starving. It had come from the hearts as well as the pockets of corporations and churches, parents, and veterans, teachers and children—like six-year-old Sandra Nathan of Brooksville, Florida, who donated her US$5 life savings. And an Illinois company—Lauhoff Grain—put together a nine-company group to deliver a million meals to Ethiopia’s famine-stricken children. Arna Aranki, a Michigan schoolgirl—raised money from her classmates.
It was not just Americans or Britons who rallied to help. From Europeans, Japanese, Latin Americans, Australians, and Asians came gifts of the heart.
All heeded Mohamed Amin’s call and the whole world came together as one.
16. Together We Can Build a Better World
TELEVISION NEWS LIVES BY THE size of the audience it attracts. Whatever Mohamed Amin’s thoughts about stills photography, there is no doubt in his mind that it was the moving images that served as the catalyst to arouse mankind’s conscience.
‘I don’t think still pictures would have carried the same impact at all. It is certainly television because it’s moving pictures, it’s sound, that really pierced the hearts of the people who saw it.
‘I shot still pictures as well and it is the most syndicated story I have come across. I have cuttings two-feet deep. ‘But it wasn’t these photographs or the article that moved anybody. It was the television news clips that made the impact.
‘Television certainly has more power than any writing you can do. Mike Wooldridge filed his story well before us because with radio, you can pick up the phone and deliver your story. With television, it’s more complicated. Mike had better descriptions than we did of what was happening. He was 24 hours ahead.
‘But I haven’t heard many people talk about the radio piece. It was the television pictures.’
With Mohamed Amin’s film, according to figures supplied by the broadcasters it serves, Visnews achieved saturation, reaching an estimated one billion viewers.
To any communicator, the idea of reaching the minds and touching the hearts of one billion people at virtually one and the same time is awesome.
Yet, incredibly, once again, at first, Amin’s role in the achievement was virtually ignored. Rather like a replay of the publicity they put out about the Idi Amin exclusive—which had been entirely his work—the BBC built all their publicity around their reporter, Michael Buerk, and ‘his’ film.
Nobody denied the power of Buerk’s superb commentary. But for a television company to behave as if pictures are secondary reveals something very strange at the least about its view of what television is all about, quite apart from the fact that Buerk—as he admitted—would never have got near the story himself. He was only there because Amin took him.
Later, BBC News did give Mo credit. But not before another injustice had been done. Around the world, the report that galvanised the world into an unprecedented frenzy of giving was already known—as it still is, to many—as ‘the BBC or ‘Buerk’s’ report.
Just how interested the BBC was in putting the record straight was to be made clear during the submission for the British Royal Television Society’s Television News award entries. It was agreed that the joint entry of Amin’s film and Buerk’s commentary would be submitted as a ‘Visnews-BBC entry. It went in as ‘BBC-Visnews’, and the award was made to ‘BBC Television News/Visnews.’
The cameraman was singularly unconcerned. Hours after the initial telecast, he had telexed Buerk:
Well done with all your pieces—the world is proud of you and eight million Ethiopians grateful. Please telex when you coming back through here. If you stay the night, I promise an Indian banquet. If you don’t, I will meet you at airport to collect tapes. World Vision Tony Atkins and Jacob [Akol, World Vision’s information officer in Nairobi] anxious to see all the footage. They have agreed to provide plane just about anytime we ask. For your information, have told the Ethiopians we want to make a return visit in a couple of weeks. Assume you would want to join us. Bestest Mo Amin.
Later, at the award ceremony, Buerk stressed the more important part played by Amin. In fact, two weeks after the first report, Buerk telexed Mo: ‘See from current edition of Newsweek the balance of credit for the Ethiopian masterpiece is adjusting itself. Quite right, too! I keep mentioning—and spelling out, however incorrectly—your name when interviewed by all and sundry. I will make you famous, Mo, given half a chance.’ There was never any dispute between the two professionals.
But, as Visnews duty editor Tim Arlott says, ‘The two stories the BBC claimed most credit for in the past ten years in fact were both Visnews stories, and both from Mohamed Amin—tracking down Idi Amin, and getting to the heart of the Ethiopian famine and bringing back the pictures that showed the world what it meant.’
It brought some droll repercussions for Visnews. Apparently unaware that the pictures were Visnews copyright, BBC Enterprises sold them to Visnews’s opposition in America, ABC and CBS. And that wasn’t the end. The Australian Nine Network—the only one in Australia without access to Visnews material—then got it off ABC America. UPITN (Visnews’s greatest competitor) then got it from the Nine Network, who sold it to USIA (the American information agency). The final touch was given when USIA sent it to Visnews complete with American information, which explained that this was BBC material shot by a BBC crew on a routine journey bringing equipment back to London for servicing. That particular error started with a London Sunday Times report.
The Visnews internal report, which noted all this concluded, however: ‘The obvious consolation is that the massive relief effort now under way, tens of thousands of famished people now receiving food, can be directly attributed to Mohamed Amin’s Visnews pictures.’
The next report is also worth quoting: ‘UPITN has made a donation to help the agency World Vision. The contribution was the UPITN profit from mistakenly selling the Visnews coverage to the USIA!’
In fact, as Peter Searle recalls, UPITN had legitimately used some of Amin’s films. ‘Imagine my shock,’ he says, ‘when sitting quietly at home in October, I watched the amazing footage and heard Michael Buerk say, “Only the Red Cross can fly food this far north.”
‘There was the plane I knew and loved delivering a bit of the Red Cross food on, but on a World Vision trip. Michael Buerk and the BBC have not been allowed to forget that! There’s no doubt at all, however, that the prime impetus for that visit, the genius of the camerawork and the contacts to make it all happen belong almost entirely to Mo.
‘Both Buerk and Wooldridge were in the right place at the right time and nothing should detract from their professionalism—but it was Mo’s footage.
‘There was an interesting sequel to it, which got lost in the subsequent excitement. Because of our involvement, Visnews agreed that any unshown footage could be used by World Vision. On the night of the first transmission, I discovered that this was actually still with Visnews in London, though technically belonging to World Vision.
‘After 24 hours of hectic negotiation, I was able to go live on ITN News on, I think, the Friday with an agreed 60-second clip from the spare footage and talk about World Vision International involvement and our plans.
‘I think this is probably the only time that BBC and ITN have used part of the same Visnews trip by agreement, again a little bit of World Vision input.’
Mohamed Amin was unconcerned about the glory, only with sustaining the response. Six days after his return from Addis, he telexed London: ‘I am departing now for Addis with soundman and Mike Buerk. BBC clearly desperate to get anything, as last night they were talking about the possibilities of chartering a Lear jet from Nairobi for a satellite feed. BBC have now based their engineer and editor in Nairobi with massive equipment, which at the moment has be
en impounded by customs. I have told them what they should do to clear but they seem to think British High Commission will help, which I am afraid is wishful thinking.
‘We are all going in without visas but I don’t foresee much trouble, except several hours delay at Addis airport while the authorities get the paperwork sorted. I am pulling out next Friday, however, and will be prepared to go back following Friday after Pakistan trip.’
On this second visit, he made a firm commitment to himself to produce his own personal documentary about not only the Ethiopian but the African famine, even though as a result of his coverage, some forty television crews were now working in Ethiopia.
‘I felt that it was absolutely crucial to keep this story on television as long as possible as the usual tendency in the media is that you have an immediate impact when a story is shown. People respond and give what they can when the story is on the screen and then the story is forgotten. Everybody goes on to something else,’ Amin says. ‘I felt that it was my duty to do what I could to continue working on the story. Not only did I do dozens of news pieces after the initial story to keep it alive, but I decided that, at my own cost, I would do a documentary.’
His report would be called African Calvary, picking up a phrase used by the charismatic Mother Teresa of Calcutta, who told Amin that the famine in Ethiopia was ‘an open Calvary’. Perhaps it reinforced the sense of destiny that runs through his life when she put her saintly Christian hand on his Islamic shoulder and said, ‘My son, God has sent you for this hour.’
And again, when he approached the Vatican with a request for Pope John Paul II to deliver a special appeal, he flew with his film crew to Rome to record the message. This time, there was no confrontation with Bishop Marcinkus—only a warm papal welcome.
Indeed, Amin had inspired a great deal of activity as the Visnews log noted: ‘The demand for camera crew days continues, not least for services in Ethiopia following Mohamed Amin’s splendid pioneering efforts on the famine story. Recent requests have come from UNICEF and the UN’s Rome-based Food and Agricultural Organisation. World Vision, the American church charity that assisted Mo with his first coverage, have returned for additional coverage.