In a world gone mad, professional journalism becomes ever more crucial
ATCHING the nightly international news bulletins has become a harrowing experience. I am a news junkie, always have been, always will be. But I am very glad I walked away from the frenetic and soul-destroying world of being a correspondent for an international TV network – I would have crashed and burned had I still been doing it.
It was bad enough covering the extreme violence and death convulsions of the end days of apartheid, when the whole country went mad. Now, it seems, a large part of the world has gone mad. And I keep seeing familiar faces, reading familiar names, old colleagues filming or reporting from Gaza, Iraq, Syria for the BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, CNN, and my old employer, Canada’s CBC.
But the game has changed. Everybody now thinks they can be a “content pro-
Wducer” without any journalistic training, and there is plenty of stuff being aired and printed without professional scrutiny on the internet and other media. We are being numbed and desensitised by war porn.
And it made me think back to one of the finest journalists I have met and briefly worked with, the late, great Kenyan cameraman, Mohamed Amin. If Mo was alive today, he would be as appalled as I am at just how numbed the world has become to death and suffering, a by-product of the 24/7 bombardment of unfiltered, untested information we get constantly.
Because Mo was the cameraman behind the lens of a piece of television that unleashed one of the greatest and most spontaneous acts of global giving ever.
On October 23, 1984, the BBC’s Six O’clock News opened with Michael Buerk intoning: “Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century.
“This place, say workers here, is the closest thing to hell on earth.”
The images were haunting, from the charnel houses of hell. People died on camera, the potential was there for this to turn into a documentary snuff movie.
“Ethiopia has changed me,” Mo told his biographer, Brian Tetley. “Before the 1984 Ethiopia story, anything that I filmed was to me always just a story. I couldn’t have cared less. There’s not much you can do in most situations. I was just doing a job, and that was it... we were looking at hundreds of thousands of people who were dying simply because there was no food. The government couldn’t care less, the world couldn’t care less, they were helpless ...”
Tetley wrote: “Mohamed Amin filmed his nightmare images between October 19 and 21, 1984, at three places now as firmly inscribed in the history book of human horror as Belsen and Auschwitz: Mekele, Alamata and Korem. It was impossible to be a cool, detached observer... All that mattered now was to let the world know.”
The astonishing pictures reverberated around the world, and were eventually seen by an estimated one billion viewers. They triggered the biggest act of giving in the then history of the world.
Bob Geldof came home and switched on the telly. “I was confronted by something so horrendous I was wrenched violently from the complacency of another rather dispiriting day... In that brief, shocking but glorious moment, Mo Amin had transcended the role of journalist-cameraman and perhaps unwittingly become the visual interpreter of man’s stinking conscience.”
The result was Band Aid, and the single, We Are The World. Geldof raised £76-million in the UK alone. US President Ronald Reagan pledged $45m. Money poured in from around the world. Mo’s pictures alerted the world to one of the worst humanitarian disasters in global history.
In 1991, Mo returned to film the dying hours of the regime that oversaw the murders of more than a million Ethiopians. As he was filming, an ammunition dump exploded. Mo’s soundman, John Mathai, was killed instantly. Mo’s left arm was blown off. Michael Buerk, radio reporter Colin Blane, and cameraman Nick Hughes got Mo out of there. He was fitted with a bionic arm which could operate a camera, and he went back to work, driven, demanding and devoted to Ethiopia.
Mo Amin died in Africa the way he lived in Africa. Dramatically. On November 23, 1996, Mo and Brian Tetley were flying from Addis Ababa to Nairobi when three hijackers tried to force Ethiopian Airlines Flight ET961 to fly to Australia. When the plane smashed into the sea off the Comores, Mo probably had his eye to the viewfinder, photographing the desperate battle. We will never know. Mo’s cameras died with him.
tonyweaver@iafrica.com