My father’s legacy: Remembering Mo Amin

Mohamed 'Mo' Amin (right) with Salim Amin in Naivasha, 1995. [Courtesy]

Salim Amin’s office in Lavington is a perfect blend between the present and the past. An ornate desk could sit anywhere in Nairobi’s corner offices while the artefacts take a visitor to another era, one where his father, the legendary photojournalist, Mohamed ‘Mo’ Amin, thrived.

His father’s legacy looms large in Salim’s office: a picture of Mo, as he was fondly known, stooping low to listen to another Amin, the late Ugandan dictator. Mo surrounded by dying villagers in Korem, Ethiopia, in 1984, an episode so profound and indelibly etched in his mind that he later said that “nothing that he had witnessed in 25 years in covering wars, disasters, riots and even the previous Ethiopian famine could have prepared him for this.”