They say a picture tells a thousand stories, but Mohamed Amin's pictures saved a million lives. Amin was the cameraman who took the haunting footage of the famine in northern Ethiopia that shocked the world in 1984. Band Aid, Live Aid and the world's largest collective act of charity would never have happened but for the images of hunger and death he filmed in the relief camps of Korem and Mekele.
Like most scoops, it didn't happen by chance. Amin had been fighting for months for permission to visit the stricken areas. Only he had the contacts to get into Ethiopia; only he had the guile to get around the mistrustful, murderous regime that then ruled the country. In a profession not known for the timidity of its practitioners, Amin had the hardest neck of all.
For three decades, Mohamed Amin chronicled the sad, bloody unravelling of African dreams, a time chock-full of two-bit wars, mad despots and unspeakable acts. There was Idi Amin of Uganda, his fridge full of human limbs; JeanBedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who crowned himself emperor of one of the poorest countries on Earth (his wife's crown cost £2.5 million); Ethiopia's multiple famines; and Somalia's descent into anarchy and bloodlust.
A relentless workaholic, driven by an obsession to get the "scoop", he was invariably first on the scene. If things were quiet, he wasn't above faking the action. If he wasn't covering the news, the world's most famous frontline cameraman was often making it. And he would do anything to give his rivals the slip.
In these days of personality journalism, Amin's work is a reminder that the eye behind the camera lens is often more important than the face in front of it. All too often, especially for his liking, Amin got the story but the reporter got the credit.
Throughout the period, he lived life on the edge, his every day filled with more adventure than most people experience in a lifetime. He covered countless wars, coups, riots and killings. He was locked up on a regular basis, and expelled from more than a dozen countries.
Amin survived an incredible 18 car crashes; breaking his leg on several occasions left him with a pronounced limp. He was injured by bullets and shrapnel in a number of countries, and saw colleagues die in front of him while on the frontline. And yet he always seemed to survive. On a return visit to Ethiopia in 1991, he lost an arm in a massive munitions explosion which killed his sound man. Within six weeks, he was back at work. He was fitted with an artificial arm and re-learned how to hold a camera. But two years ago, his luck finally ran out - in the most stupid way. Amin and his writing colleague Brian Tetley boarded a regular Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to their homes in Nairobi, Kenya. Just minutes into the flight, three young hijackers took over the plane. They threatened to blow it up unless they were flown to Australia. The plane ran out of fuel off the Comoros Islands and the plane crashed into the Indian Ocean. Of the 175 passengers and crew on board, 123 died - Amin and Tetley among them.
On the second anniversary of his death, a new biography has been published to celebrate the extraordinary life of this talented, driven cameraman. The Man Who Moved the World is a racy account of a racy life, written by a journalist colleague, Bob Smith, with help from Amin's son, Salim. Amin had many Irish links and the book is to be launched separately in Dublin early next month (Dec).
The second son of a railwayman who had come to Africa from the Punjab in India, Amin grew up in Tanzania and made Kenya his home. As an Asian in Africa, he was something of an outsider, though he described himself as African. He was certainly far more of an insider than the trail of Oxbridge types who regularly came to Nairobi to work as foreign correspondents for a few years.
At 11, he acquired his first camera, a second-hard Box Brownie. By the end of this teens, he was an established freelancer in Dar Es Salaam and his work had been published in all the main London dailies. In later years, he expanded his work to include a series of pictorial travel books on Africa.
Michael Buerk, the BBC journalist who made the reports from Ethiopia with Amin, describes his colleague as a "strange man. He looked and sounded tough. A bit of a swagger, lots of bravura. Brisk, brusque, sometimes downright rude". In the midst of the great famine "he worked with ruthless compassion, emotionally engaged, but professionally detached. We didn't speak much. I don't know what we could have said to each other that could have been adequate".
As Smith writes, the Ethiopia footage was "not objective journalism but confrontation". It dared the viewer to do something. One who did was Bob Geldof, then the mere lead singer of the Boomtown Rats.
"In this brief, shocking but glorious moment Amin had transcended the role of journalist/cameraman and perhaps unwittingly become the visual interpreter of man's stinking conscience. I thank God that Mo Amin sickened and shamed me," Geldof says.
Yet Amin was far from angelic himself. Getting stories meant trying every ruse in the book to get by guards and officialdom. He played fast and loose; on one occasion in the 1960s, he forged a letter from a Mozambican guerilla leader in order to infiltrate a secret Soviet military base in Tanzania. On another occasion, he painted the Red Cross on a Landcruiser in an effort to get into a mercenary training camp in Rwanda.
A favourite trick when confronted by an angry guard was to secretly switch films in his camera and when challenged to open the device and surrender the - empty - reel. On a quiet day at anti-British demonstrations in Nairobi in the 1960s, he persuaded the marchers they should burn the Union Jack. The result made good pictures.
And that, as far as Amin was concerned, was all that mattered.
The Man Who Moved the World; The Life and Times of Mohamed Amin, by Bob Smith with Salim Amin, is published by Camerapix Publishers International, £20 in the UK.