by Brian Tetley
‘Mo’s efforts, incidentally, have formed the basis for two countrywide satellite broadcasts in the USA: World Vision linked stations to a question-and-answer session two weeks ago, and UNICEF produced a similar programme this week. Ed Helfer reports from Viscom that both were successful productions and well received.’
And Bob Geldof had by now turned himself into the world’s greatest long distance fundraiser. Within days, he was organising the cream of Britain’s pop stars to make a chorus record, Do They Know It’s Christmas, which was to inspire the formation of USA for Africa, stimulate an even greater financial response from the American public for We Are the World, and finally generate the ultimate, that incredible space shot, the 16-hour Live Aid concert marathon—the greatest single charity event in mankind’s history.
As African Calvary neared completion, Amin also began to organise contributions of time, services, and material from many people so that all the revenues from its sale could go to the charity fund he was establishing.
‘To make a documentary on this scale is a very expensive business. I was prepared to do everything I could within my own resources but I obviously needed help and backup.’ One of the first persons he discussed this with was Peter Searle, the British director of World Vision, who remembers, ‘I found myself in Nairobi in November 1984 having difficulties getting into Addis because all accommodation was taken for some Economic Commission for Africa junket. With a day or two to spare, I decided to drop into the Nairobi Press Centre, not then appreciating that it was another wholly owned subsidiary of Amin Enterprises.
‘I visited one or two people on spec and finally decided to go down the end and see whether the legendary Mo Amin was around. He welcomed me when we met for the first time. An hour later, we shook hands on the outline deal that produced African Calvary.
‘It was a unique and, I believe, divinely ordained meeting. Mo had produced the initial footage that exposed the drought to the world but knew well that the picture was bigger than Ethiopia and there was much more to tell.
‘I represented the admittedly quite small British office of the world’s largest private voluntary agency and was conscious of the fact that we were working in many countries that had not received the publicity which Ethiopia then had. It seemed natural that we should get together and, there and then, I committed my own office to make this film without consultation or authorisation.’
Others rallied round, too. Sony Broadcast provided the equipment needed for filming. Mohinder Dhillon filmed the documentary with Amin. Bert Demmers of UNICEF also helped, as well as Diverse Productions in London, who gave the editing and post-production facilities as a donation.
‘Frank Dynes telexed me that the only cost would be the overtime of the engineers, the editor, and the graphics personnel,’ remembers Amin. ‘A few hours later, Frank telephoned to tell me that the staff would donate all the time that was needed to produce this film.
‘The dedication of the people, particularly during the editing, was incredible. Mike Ray, who worked as the editor—and later in fact joined us—Frank Dynes, Philip Clark, spent night after night with us trying to put it together. Everywhere I went, all along the line, people were so generous, it was incredible. The dedication was total and absolute.’
Visnews and the BBC made library material available and Visnews later provided the facilities to market the documentary at the MIP television fair in Cannes, France. About 7,500 video cassettes were sent free to libraries, schools, churches, and hospitals: all done at cost by Twentieth Century productions.
‘We provided many facilities and support for Mo when he shot the film, and it was seen at Easter 1985 in Britain and subsequently around the world,’ recalls Peter Searle. ‘The proceeds from the actual sale of it to the television stations went to another charity but World Vision benefited very substantially—far above our initial investment—from spontaneous donations from the public who saw it. Thus, our involvement and investment were returned to us. We also had a hand in one of the most effective pieces of television documentary ever seen in this area on this theme.
‘The effect of Mo’s camerawork and his involvement continued both before and after the showing of African Calvary. I visited Ethiopia with him on a number of occasions and watched his own unique blend of dealing with officialdom.
‘Arriving with half a ton of excess baggage, he would seize the senior customs official from his office, inform him that he was “a guest of the government again” and have the chalk cross placed on everything, including my own humble suitcase, so we received VIP treatment through customs.
‘While treating with appropriate deference those senior government officials who were helpful, he had a uniquely brusque way of handling petty, obstructive officials and the inevitable minders.
‘The motivation was always the same. Mo was in a hurry to get the story and get it out: those who sought to get in the way of those he sought to help with his uniquely probing lens simply had to get out of the way or—suffer the consequences.
‘I watched him take risks with his safety, with his reputation, and with his contacts. Happily, none of them seem to have suffered. I watched this normally smartly dressed and comfort-loving Kenyan sink to his knees amidst the excretion and vomit of desperately sick children to catch the images which would bring their plight to the attention of an increasingly jaded world. All considerations of personal comfort and health were secondary to what he was filming.
‘Mo is an African and I am British. Mo is a devout Muslim and I am a committed Christian. Mo is a professional photographer, cameraman, and entrepreneur. I serve with a relief agency.
‘In many ways, we have little in common, in others, we have much. I remember bouncing along with him and the crew in the back of a World Vision Land Cruiser from a camp in northern Ethiopia. I said, “Mo, I know we believe different things about Who is up there, but I think we could both agree that someone up there has decided that we deserve one another.’
Slowly, the balance of credit for Amin’s work began to be restored. In both Europe and America, he won, or shared, some of the greatest honours his profession could bestow. They included the Royal Television Society award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts trophy, which was presented to him at about the same time that Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Diana Ross, Lionel Ritchie, and almost 50 top stars, organised by Harry Belafonte and Ken Kragen, gathered in Los Angeles for the lengthy recording of ‘We Are the World’. Five days before the Royal Television Society’s event, the premier European television festival awarded Buerk and Amin the Monte Carlo Golden Nymph Award for International News. A snowball began.
Soon, in the company of such distinguished names from the entertainment world as Albert Finney, Jim Henson, Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Dame Peggy Ashcroft, and Kirk Douglas, Amin was sitting with Michael Buerk, this time at the British Film and Television Academy Award ceremony—the British Oscar—to pick up the trophy for Best Actuality coverage of 1984.
The BBC-2 premier of African Calvary on April 2, received glowing critical tributes from the cream of Britain’s television pundits; acknowledgement not just of his superlative skills with the camera, but also of his remarkable talents as a producer.
‘Unbearable in its unwinking, almost poetic portrayal of Africa’s famine…Margaret Thatcher, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda, the Pope, and many others voice their concern. Otherwise, there is very little commentary…none is needed.’—Daily Mail (April 3, 1985).
Hugh Herbert of the Guardian also noted the producer’s definition of the film as, ‘Not a news story, nor an orthodox documentary; more a requiem for the dead in Ethiopia and elsewhere on the continent.’
Similarly, his name was already being acknowledged in the United States. The day after the premiere, he was in New York to receive the Long Island University’s coveted George Polk Award for Best Foreign Television Reporting at the Hotel Roosevelt, and later, the Overseas Press Club of America award.
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bsp; During this visit, after addressing members and representatives of the United Nations and affiliated non-governmental organisations at a showing of African Calvary in New York and the School of Journalism of Columbia University, he was feted and honoured at the White House by US Vice President George Bush.
Hundreds of important guests in government, defence, business, and private voluntary organisations were invited to witness the Vice President put his signature to a unique American Congress Bill. It gave an appropriation of an additional one billion American dollars as emergency aid to Africa. Bush ascribed it all to the power and persuasiveness of Mohamed Amin’s visual reporting.
Introducing him as the man who ‘mobilised the conscience of mankind’, Vice President Bush told the guests, including the US Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Chester Crocker, that by the end of February 1985, Americans privately had donated US$70 million through the mail alone, while the US Government had already allocated US$700 million, none of which would have happened ‘if the world had not first seen the misery for itself’ as a result of Mohamed Amin’s persistence and courage ‘in risking his life time and again’ to bring the world the first television report. Many millions were alive because of his photography, the Vice President said.
Thanking the government and people of America for their generosity, in reply, Amin presumed to tell them what else they needed to do to avert a major crisis in Africa. The continent, he told the Vice President and Chester Crocker, desperately needed long-term help to recover and rebuild.
And, recalling that the United States had shown the way after World War II by rebuilding Europe and its economy under the Marshall Plan, he expressed the hope that Africa, too, in its hour of need, might now look to American compassion.
Subsequently, the two US awards and his other wholly individual awards became the pennants not only of cameramen colleagues in Visnews but of photographers and cameramen throughout the world. ‘Could not have been better deserved,’ cabled an exultant Souheil Rached, his Visnews contemporary in shattered, war-torn Beirut.
In Kenya, however, Amin gave himself no time to reflect on the honours which were being showered on him. Instead, he threw himself into an endless round of assignments and planning. Indefatigable in his efforts to help the starving, his 1985 air travel record equalled perhaps his accumulated mileage of the previous decade. He flew across Africa, Europe, and America regularly. One immigration officer at London’s Heathrow Airport, leafing through his passports, asked him disbelievingly, ‘Are you resident in a plane?’
Yet in mid-year, he found time to dedicate two weeks to an air-ground safari across East and Central Africa with Harry Belafonte, Marlon Jackson, and Ken Kragen, USA for Africa’s top management, and other executives and stars. Treasurer Len Freedman, the same age as the cameraman, dropped out in the middle from exhaustion, and looking at him, asked, ‘How the hell do you do it?’
Amin also organised pool coverage of the tour for the American television networks, as well as a meeting for the USA for Africa group with Julius Nyerere, then President of Tanzania, Abdul Rahman Sowar el Dahab of Sudan, and Chairman Haile Mariam Mengistu of Ethiopia.
The group flew to the gravest-hit areas to decide how the funds raised could be used most effectively and humanely. ‘It will be a momentous occasion for USA for Africa,’ executive director Marty Rogol had said before he set off. It was more. It left this extraordinary mixture of showbiz stars, business executives, and marketing experts, who whistle-stopped through Ethiopia, Tanzania, Kenya, and Sudan, somewhat sadder, wiser, and profoundly moved, all inspired by what We Are the World was to achieve.
Amin’s energy remained unflagging. He was contacted by an American entrepreneur, Lou Falcigno, who was in the satellite television promotion business. With World Vision, Falcigno had dreamed up one of the most bizarre spectaculars ever conceived, to mark the first anniversary of Amin’s historic Ethiopian famine film.
It involved lifting into Ethiopia and hopefully cutting through their top-heavy bureaucracy, something like 100 tons of heavy transport and the latest and most sophisticated transmitting equipment. Amin had agreed to be chief regional consultant and liaison specialist.
In the end, as the outline became more and more stupendous, the detail more and more vague, the Ethiopians more and more incredulous, and Amin more and more cynical about the project’s viability, he withdrew. He had considerable concern for the loss of funds for the famine victims and he was convinced this programme could only end in trauma for all involved.
Within days, World Vision abandoned the project in favour of a much more realistic project—a 12-hour live telethon fundraiser to the USA out of Nairobi. A team of expensive US television executives arrived to set this up and Mo sat on the sidelines until, panic-stricken, Lou rang and asked for help.
Swiftly, he moved into action. Together, he and Brendan Farrow organised meetings with Voice of Kenya. It seemed as if it would be okay. They could use the VOK studios. Then came a snag. He told Farrow to see the principal at the KIMC, a large, government-run, mass communications training complex in one of Nairobi’s inner suburbs. It was agreed the transmission would originate there.
The visiting television hoi polloi moved in to start rewiring and rehearsing. They were delighted. Hours later came a call from Lou.
‘My bums have been thrown out, Mo. There’s only 24 hours to go before we start transmitting. You gotta studio in the game park or something?’
As he left the office that night, Mo told me to wear a suit. ‘We’re going to see the permanent secretary in the morning.’ He had no appointment, but when we got there, the permanent secretary agreed to see him. An hour later, he had permission to use the KIMC facility until the Monday morning. The Americans moved back in.
What remained for Mohamed Amin was to travel to Europe and America to receive three more awards, perhaps the most distinguished awards of his career: the A.H. Boerma Award from the Food and Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations in Rome on November 11, the Distinguished Achievement Award of the University of Southern California on November 19, and the Kenny Rogers World Hunger Media Award at the United Nations Headquarters New York on November 26.
‘I believe,’ observes Michael Wooldridge, ‘it meant a great deal to him that a cameraman from Africa—from outside the European and North American mainstream of television journalism—had won such prestigious awards. And he always used the platform that these award ceremonies gave him to plead for help for the famine victims: that the world might not forget, once the memory and the horror of his own pictures had faded.
Says Amin, ‘Since the story, I have changed in a number of ways and one is that every time I look at a situation, it comes to me very strongly that I am very fortunate, that my colleagues, my friends, my family, are very fortunate.
‘Ethiopia has left a scar on me that will last the rest of my life. It has made me constantly aware of how desperate the situation is for a very large part of the world.’
The list of journalism award winners at the University of Southern California glitters with the names of all the greatest American communicators of the last half of the century; people like Henry R. Luce and Walter Cronkite, Art Buchwald and John Chancellor, Alastair Cooke and Dan Rather, Drew Pearson and many more. On the night of November 19, 1985, at the alumni’s annual awards dinner in the Sheraton Premiere, Universal City, Los Angeles, Mohamed Amin’s name was added to this impressive roll of honour.
Despite the misspelling of his name on his award (Mohammed), it was vindication for many injustices delivered professionally, as well as compensation for a life sometimes spent in the shadows and slurs of racial prejudice.
In selecting him as the first non-American in its 26-year history to receive its Theodore E. Kruglak Special Award, the USC Journalist Alumni Association was not breaking with tradition and precedent simply in the fact that he was a non-American. The award signified a major and radical shift in the thinking of those who decide why—
as well as who—a person should be honoured for their work in journalism. The letter inviting him to accept the award noted the importance of the cameraman:
‘If one of the basic goals of journalists is to present the public with the information it needs to make decisions and take action, then your work is a true model of noteworthy achievement. Your acceptance of the award and presence at the banquet would be something of which both you and our university could be very proud.’
For the guests, as for the recipients, it was an evening charged, like all such evenings, with expectancy. The atmosphere at the Sheraton Premiere, a hotel built up in the backlot of one of the oldest of filmland’s production companies, was drenched in glamour. Universal Studios was just about to finish post-production work on their Oscar-winning classic Out of Africa, filmed in Kenya, so it was fitting, perhaps, that it should have been chosen as the setting.
Six hundred of the film capital’s leading citizens had donned formal attire to feast on the double boneless breast of chicken laced in champagne sauce, followed by hazelnut ice cream with praline sauce, and to listen to Norman Corwin, for many the ‘father’ of American broadcasting, conduct the ceremonies staged with all the fanfare and glamour for which Hollywood is renowned.
Introducing Amin, Norman Corwin said, ‘In the 26 years of these occasions, the proceeds of which are directed always to scholarships for deserving journalism students, awards have gone to reporters, editors, publishers, broadcasters, columnists, networks, newspapers, magazines, filmmakers, foreign correspondents, educators, and government officials.
‘Tonight, for the first time, a photojournalist will be added to the roll. It’s a little late to be sure, but then, we’re only in our second quarter-century.’