How Mohamed Amin’s lens healed the world

By PETER NGANGI NGULI

From the shores of Cape Town in South Africa, to the delta of River Nile in Egypt, the story of Africa is clearly told and retold. The story of its wonders, a chronicle of its wars, a cord of its finest hours and of its utter follies is told almost entirely by the work of one man. This is none other than Mohamed “Mo” Amin, described as one of the greatest photojournalists of all time. No one has ever caught Africa’s pain and passion more incisively than Amin, a Kenyan hero photographer and front-line cameraman extraordinaire.

Mohamed’s luck was legendary. Good fortune, tip-offs, planning and taking calculated risks all meant he was where the action was, sometimes under gunfire yet almost always managing to capture the images he risked his life for.

Mohamed will best be remembered for helping to bring the attention of the world to the famine in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa in 1984 with BBC Television reporter Michael Buerk, a long-time colleague. That’ was when fame caught up with him.

By filming starved refugees, he presented the horrors of the situation in Ethiopia yet preserved the dignity of this very proud people.

A seven minute clip was shown on BBC’s Six O’clock news on October 24, 1984. The pictures were stark and shocking, but the reaction unprecedented.

As a result, tens of millions of dollars were donated to famine relief and water projects. Millions of people worldwide saw his images and, with Amin’s energy, the project ‘We Are the World’ was born, bringing in more donations and aid.

His coverage of the 1984 Ethiopia famine proved so compelling that it inspired a collective global conscience and became the catalyst for the greatest act of giving ever. Unquestionably, it also saved the lives of millions of men, women and children. He received dozens of international television awards and in almost every continent, he was honoured.

 Amin was born on August 29, 1943 in Eastleigh, Nairobi. Born as the second son of eight children to a poor railway engineer of Punjabi descent, he was obsessed with photography right from the start. Unfortunately, he was soon faced with racism, an inevitable product of colonialism. He never forgot those underdog years and fought against prejudice for the rest of his life.

Mo, as he was popularly known saved up for two years to buy his first camera, a Box Brownie at the age of 11. He spent time snapping students’ activities and sold the pictures to his friends at a profit. At 19, to everyone’s disbelief, he quit school and set up the Camerapix Company.

Overcoming disability

From the time he acquired his first camera, his future was determined. Swiftly, he learned photographic and darkroom skills and was already applying them to commercial use when he went to secondary school in Tanganyika. Later, he covered every major event in Africa and beyond, braving torture, surviving bombs and bullets and overcoming disability to do what he treasured most. However, in 1991, Mohamed lost his left arm during an ammunition dump explosion in Ethiopia while covering the Ethiopian Civil War. But within six months after the tragedy, he emerged as the most decorated news cameraman of all time.

In a career spanning four decades, he covered almost every major news story on the continent and elsewhere. For Amin, getting the story first was not just a goal. It was an obsession.

He covered many world famous events. One of his firsts was the handover of Kenya by the British to Jomo Kenyatta during independence in 1963. The images secured his reputation as a photojournalist of note and won him his very first Cameraman of the Year Award. But more exclusives were soon to follow. He captured events in the brutal reign of Uganda’s Iddi Amin and documented the famines that followed the war in Biafra, Nigeria.

Tom Mboya’s images

On July 5, 1969, Kenyan politician Tom Mboya was gunned down as he left a pharmacy in Nairobi and within minutes, Amin had arrived at the scene. He was voted the British Cameraman of the Year over his coverage of Mboya’s assassination, which had captured the last moments before he died.

Later on, he captured exclusive images of the Pakistan military and the Afghan mujahedeen in the 1970s. He was indeed one of the first TV reporters in Baghdad after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. He was awarded the M.B.E. in 1992 to honour thirty years of covering trouble spots in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

As a result, the world wanted to see the man whose images had moved many. He found himself rubbing shoulders with the high and mighty. But as fate would have it on November 23 1996, his frenetic life was cut tragically short. Terrorists took over an Ethiopian airliner, forcing it to ditch in the Indian Ocean, killing 123 passengers and crew. On that day, Amin had boarded Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 with 61-year old Brian Tetley, a colleague who wrote text for Amin’s photography books, to travel to Nairobi after a business trip.

Awards after death

The terrorists stormed the cockpit of ET-AIZ, the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing B767-260ER and forced the pilot, Leul Abate, to fly east over the Indian Ocean. Amin attempted to rally the passengers to attack the terrorists unsuccessfully. The plane ran out of fuel and Abate ditched the aircraft off the coast of the Comoros Islands. Amin died at 53 in the crash. Tetley also died. He had started his career on his knees with his camera recording events, and Mo died on his feet negotiating with terrorists.

Amin, though a recipient of many awards in person, also had a few awards named after him after his death. Reuters launched the News World Mohamed Amin Award in 1997 to reward his acts of outstanding courage, professional skill and initiative in bringing news.

The American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists established the Mohamed Amin Humanitarian Service Award to honour his great humanitarian spirit among disabled persons.

At the end of 1997, David Johnson collaborated with Salim Amin, Amin’s only son, to launch The Mohamed Amin Foundation’s Broadcast Television Training Centre, a professional media-training centre based in Nairobi.