by Brian Tetley
As he spoke, Amin’s thoughts drifted back to the night 13 months before when, soaked to the skin by a mountain mist, his soul had been chilled to its depths. The satisfying sense of acknowledgement, which he had travelled 12,000 miles to savour, faded.
Now Norman Corwin launched into his eulogy.
‘It takes minimal scholarship to know that journalism has no season; no day or night; that it’s an estate both local and global; that it probably was started by the first talking head, a spear-thrower just back from the hunt; and that it progressed through the classic agencies of pen and pencil, through generations of printing presses and typewriters and daisywheels, to a point where even the magnificent Linotype is now a museum piece, displayed for its quaintness in the lobby of a great newspaper—something out of an early dynasty. And now the tools are electronic and the sky is not the limit, as we witness a communication satellite, which at this very moment is riding in stationary orbit 23,000 miles above the Galapagos Islands—an instrument owned and operated by one of tonight’s awardees.
‘And journalism is a photographer working for months in Nairobi, day after day, week after week, seeking permission to cover a famine, trying to persuade assorted political and military people who distrusted journalists of all stripes, that he was not interested in spying on army installations in the region: that what he wanted was to document the ravages of hunger, to make it known. And finally, he got what he was after—and what he was after turned out to be so grave and tremendous that it stirred the conscience of the world. All this in reference to Mohamed Amin of Nairobi, Kenya—known to his friends as Mo.
‘Mohamed Amin, when he sought entry to the afflicted regions, knew that the dimensions of the famine were little understood. After all, hunger is not uncommon in the world. Not even here at home. Right now, the US mails carry a stamp showing emaciated faces, brown, black and white; beneath is printed the stark appeal. HELP END HUNGER.
‘It was to do just that, to help end hunger, that Mr Amin packed his cameras and went across the border into Ethiopia.
‘The pictures that he took there are not the kind you put up on your wall; but then neither is a good deal of pictorial news in this cruellest of all centuries. The pictures were first shown, not without hesitation, let it be said, in Britain; then, in this country, by NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw. The rest is journalistic and humanistic history.
‘It would be inappropriate for me to tell you much more about Mr Amin’s work in the sub-Saharan dying fields, and about its effect, because he and his pictures tell the story so much better than anyone else.’
Now the lights dimmed and for Amin, the glitter of the evening again palled. On a large screen, above the guests, stunning life-size images of skeletal babies and human beings in their last moments of life seemed to fill the banqueting hall.
Even seen for perhaps the third or fourth time, the video footage still shocked. It was like being swept overboard into an icy sea, the body left breathless, numb, and sick. The festive mood of the evening had changed, too. There was a solemnity about it that had been lacking before, as Norman Corwin wound up, ‘Mohamed Amin, I invite you on behalf of the Journalist Alumni Association of USC, to add a few more steps to your long journey, to accept the first award given to a photographer in the 26-year-old history of these celebrations.’ He took those last few steps on the journey begun so long ago in Dar es Salaam, when he first discovered the magic and the power of photography.
To Tom Hudson, head of news of the world’s largest television agency, he is ‘the greatest pictorial journalist I have ever known, and I have known some, courteous and kind, with a highly developed intelligence, the ability to “talk a bird out of a tree,” which has enabled him to talk himself into the most secret enclaves, and out of some of the most dangerous situations.
‘The world will always remember that he once trod this earth, with dignity and stature.’
The way for this son of a poor railway worker had been gruelling, paved with frequent injustice and studded with ordeals. But he persevered. In doing so, he had inspired compassion and generosity in millions of people all round the world.
Now, with sincerity and characteristically uncompromising directness, he used the platform and the mood of the evening to make his own personal statement about the politics of hunger, a mood reflected in his opening words:
‘For me, this is a sad occasion. The reports which win this award were of half a million deaths which need never have happened.
‘There are in my mind two serious questions. And, in thanking you for the honour you do me, I ask you briefly to consider them with me. The first question is: how long are we to allow the political divisions of the world to obstruct the supply of basics like food and medicine to the needy? And the second: does television act responsibly regarding Third World problems, or simply exploit them for their emotional impact?’
Saying that the political question raised itself, he charged that governments and international organisations knew of the situation in Ethiopia ‘long before my reports, yet did little or nothing’.
He spoke of UN warnings in 1980 and again in 1983. ‘Yet no government heeded the cries for help to any significant extent.’ Was it, he asked, the politics of Ethiopia, which were behind the West’s failure to respond?
‘Ethiopia received nothing matching its needs, despite all the warnings. Whatever the reason for it, combined with drought and other factors, it produced the most appalling tragedy we know of only too well.
‘That surely is a scandal for which no right-minded government anywhere can duck the responsibility. There can be little doubt that had the matter been left in the hands of the world’s governments, an even more ghastly tragedy would have developed and might yet be going.’
Nor did he spare the very television organisations which aired his pictures. ‘I believe this Ethiopia tragedy has proven beyond doubt that they do underestimate the amount of public interest there is in the Third World. Why do I say this?
‘You may find it hard to believe now, but when my first report about the famine in Mekele was offered to Europe’s broadcasters, they turned it down. I understand the story was pretty much the same here, but when they (the viewers) saw, they proved beyond all question they were not as small-minded as some of the people who run the media…the power of television news could not be demonstrated more clearly.
‘But there is a responsibility that goes with that power. We fail in that responsibility if we do not report the often horrendous problems of development facing the peoples of the Third World. We must report them courageously, without favour to East or to West.
‘If we do that, we can then trust the people of the world to see that their governments will take their responsibilities to the Third World seriously.
‘If we do that, I believe that the day will quickly come when no child, or man and woman, anywhere, need ever again go hungry to bed or starved to the grave.’
Postscript
Nairobi, Kenya
January 1986
NOT FOR NOTHING IS MOHAMED Amin known as the ‘Man Who Always Gets His Picture’. Now 43, he has been scoring world scoops ever since he was the first television and press cameraman into Zanzibar after the 1964 coup.
The secret of his success is incredibly hard work, painstaking and thorough planning, a meticulously updated list of contacts, an uncanny knack of anticipating the big story—and an enviable measure of luck.
Combined with incredible timing, it all came together last weekend when, on Friday January 24, all radio and telephone links with Uganda and its capital, Kampala, went down.
Early in the week, Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army closed in on the city for an expected showdown with the troops of the discredited President Tito Okello.
Amin decided that the fall of Kampala was imminent, that it was time to move. Too soon, of course for such a highly volatile situation, and he could have found himself stopping a bullet; too late, and somebody else would get
the all-important first story.
But travel to Uganda out of Kenya was banned, and in eastern Uganda bordering western Kenya, all the border gates were locked and barred.
So on Friday, when he went to cover the arrival of Tanzanian President Ali Hassan Mwinyi on a brief official visit to Kenya, he also saw Habib Halahala, the new President’s press secretary, at the Inter-Continental Hotel.
With his exact knowledge of East Africa, his canny mind planned an adventure across Lake Victoria to Tanzania and by road from there into Uganda through long-held NRA territory.
But there was a seven-day moratorium on all departures to Tanzania, too, which was the reason for his early morning visit to the senior Tanzanian Government man on the Saturday.
Later that day, Boskovic’s Africair—who’ve been flying Amin around Africa for the best part of 25 years—telexed the Tanzanian aviation authorities to obtain landing clearance for an early morning Sunday flight from Nairobi via Mwanza to Bukoba.
‘If you ever want to beat the opposition,’ notes writer Angus Shaw, ‘study that location on a map—Mwanza is so far from the action, only a fool would go in that direction.’
Meanwhile, Mohamed Amin’s TV rivals CNN and WTN went the obvious way, travelling overland to the Kenya-Uganda border, where they filmed activity at the gate and what could be seen of Uganda from the Kenya side of the fence.
But Africair’s Cessna 404 5Y-HCN was cleared to depart from Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport before sunup, bound for Mwanza and Bukoba.
Arriving in Mwanza for customs and immigration clearance at 7.30a.m., Amin and Duncan Willetts had to make a ten-minute walk to the customs officer’s house. The cheerful but reluctant Tanzanian official, a woman, agreed to get up and come down to the airport to clear them. But she insisted on having her bath first, which created a one-hour delay.
‘There was no sign of immigration,’ Amin recalls, ‘so we decided to check in the other side of the lake in Bukoba.’ There was another snag. Because it was Sunday, the customs lady did not have a rubber stamp. She gave them a clearance letter instead.
With that, the Cessna, carrying Amin, Reuter’s Michael Rank, the BBC’s Michael Wooldridge, and Duncan and Mohamed Shaffi, both of Camerapix, flew the second leg across Victoria to Bukoba.
When the plane landed in Bukoba, both luck and planning began to play their parts. First, Amin found the driver of a pick-up truck waiting for a coffin at the airport and persuaded him to give them a lift into town. On the way, the driver stopped to introduce him to the region’s Number Two civil servant.
Impressed, this man said he would contact his superior, the regional director—the Number One man in Tanzania’s West Lake Province—and arrange for him to meet Amin at the Lake Hotel. The kindly motorist then shipped all the cameras and other equipment to the hotel as the party walked down from the airport.
When the director arrived, a photograph showing Amin and Duncan with the recently retired President Julius Nyerere, together with a presentation copy of Journey through Tanzania, opened all doors.
‘We’ve transport,’ said the regional director, ‘You can use it to get you to the border. But we’ve no petrol.’
Amin had foreseen this probability and carried his own 200 litres in ten jerricans. He says, ‘Always remember, in a war situation there are plenty of vehicles but never any fuel.’
So by noon, the party was walking across the Uganda border at Mutukula—still without formal Tanzanian immigration clearance. The man in Bukoba had no stamp either, so he too had given them a letter.
The border officer reading through this sniffed huffily but gave them a ‘transit’ pass. On the other side, they were welcomed by a 22-year-old Museveni army chief called Commander Fred, who said he had been instructed to meet them.
‘I’m not sure if he really had been,’ says Amin. ‘But we certainly weren’t going to argue.’
Commander Fred—elderly by comparison with the rank and file of what the party began to call the Schoolboy Brigade—had an ordained minister, the Reverend Samuel Kiwanuka, as his driver.
Stopping for refreshments on the rough road journey, they met a driver with a pickup, who had just driven down from Kampala. Questioned for news, he was so overcome by the party of world pressmen he got out of his pickup and offered it to them.
‘You’ve got to get there quickly—and you’ll never do it in that truck. Take this. Please.’ He even topped it up with petrol.
They arrived at Masaka well after sundown and were given rooms at the Laston Hotel. ‘You wouldn’t have thought there was a war,’ says Amin. ‘It was spotless. And although they had no water and no power, they filled large drums in the rooms so we could all have baths.’
Though they were dubious about the NRA promises that their drive would show up for them on time the next morning, the Reverend Kiwanuka brought the pickup to the front of the hotel on the dot of five.
Mist shrouded the road to Kampala and the cold was piercing, but the party made it to Kampala in time to film, photograph, and report exclusively the entry of Yoweri Museveni into the city. There, the drama ended, except for one other extraordinary element of ‘Mo’s Luck’.
Entebbe Airport was closed. The only way out was back to Bukoba through Kassese into Rwanda. On an off-chance, Amin asked Museveni if Entebbe was clear and if there were any planes they could commandeer.
The new president summoned a top military commander and assigned him to Amin with orders to do everything possible to get them back to Nairobi that day.
Fighting was still taking place on the road from Kampala to Entebbe and hundreds of prisoners were still being seized. The party arrived just minutes after Entebbe Airport was grabbed by Museveni’s National Resistance Army. In fact, the officer in charge was on the intercom refusing permission for a Bellair plane piloted by Colin Stewart—carrying drugs for the United Nations—to land. The NRA’s Number One man for Kampala countermanded these instructions and gave Stewart clearance to land.
And when the drugs were offloaded, he told Stewart, ‘Now take these gentlemen back to Nairobi.’
That night, Mo Amin’s Visnews film went by satellite from the ‘broadcasting station’, via the Longonot ground station, to the Eurovision network and, via Visnews, to almost 500 million homes around the world.
From Nairobi take-off to satellite transmission, the entire operation had taken less than 40 hours. Another Mohamed Amin success. Another world first.
Photo Section
Bob Geldof with kids in Ethiopia.
Brian Tetley, aurtor of the book Frontline Cameraman.
Dictator Idi Amin carried in triumph.
Dolly admires the Tamgha ribbon and medal awarded to Mo.
Europeans in uganda swear loyalty to the man who overthrew Milton Obote, Idi Amin.
In 1978, Bokassa invests himself as an emperor.
Macias Nguema of Equatorial Guinea.
Mo recounts his imprisonment in Zanzibar.
Mohamed Amin and Michael Buerk share royal television award.
Mohamed Amin beside Emperor Haile Selasie’s palace lions.
Mohamed Amin emaciated after release from Kilimamigu terror prison in Zanzibar.
Mohamed Amin in Somalia in 1977.
Mohamed Amin presents British Prime Minister Margaret Thather with copies of his books.
Mohamed Amin readies Yoweri Museveni for an interview.
Pope Paul II blesses Kenyan people.
President General Charles de Gaulle greets the people of Djibouti.
President Idi Amin smiles to phographer Mohamed Amin.
Several people killed and hundreds injured in anti-France occupation protests.
‘We are the World’ song session in Los Angels.
Young Mohamed Amin and Dolly dating.
Young Mohamed at Camerapix studio.
Young photographer Mo Amin back in action.
Epilogue
THIS IS BY NO MEANS the end of Mohamed Amin’s story.
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In the year after the awards ceremonies in Rome, Los Angeles—an event which the Los Angeles Times said clearly belonged to Mohamed Amin despite the other prestigious winners—and New York, he was as busy as ever. Not only filming events like the overthrow of Milton Obote’s second regime, but also in filming for a third time Pope John Paul on his second visit to Kenya.
The Pontiff made history by visiting an African wildlife sanctuary, the Maasai Mara National Reserve. As the highlight of this visit, he blessed an orphan rhino calf flown more than 300 miles by light plane from its haven in northern Kenya specially for the event. Amin filmed the flight two weeks before the papal visit.
Then he was told that the visit to Maasai Mara was strictly off-limits to the media. Indeed, if the press attempted to cover it, His Holiness, he was warned, would cancel that section of his itinerary. It was another challenge to be overcome.
Amin flew to the Mara with his cameras at the personal request of Kenya’s then Minister for Tourism, Mr Andrew Omanga. As usual, Visnews got its expected exclusive.
This third meeting also gave Amin the opportunity to present the Pontiff with copies of three of his books which he thought appropriate on such an occasion: Run Rhino Run, Journey through Kenya, and, in reciprocation for the papal rosary he treasures, his testament to his own faith, Pilgrimage to Mecca.
In December 1986, he flew to London to receive the Order of Christian Unity’s Valiant for Truth award, perhaps to him the most cherished recognition of his work for the world’s starving and for the homeless.
For by then, he was completing Give Me Shelter, a major 27-minute documentary marking 1987 as the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless. He had been among a list of nominations that included Lord Denning, Mary Kenny, Sir John Junor, Bernard Levin, Bishop Desmond Tutu, Peregrine Worsthorne, Winnie Mandela, and Dr Wendy Savage.