Mohinder Dhillon is a self-effacing man who has lived all his life with a stammer. But he can also hold a conversation the whole day, literally. For he is a man with many stories to tell, stories of people, places and events that he met, travelled to and was involved in when working as a cameraman and photojournalist from the early 1950s till retiring in the early 2000s.

Dhillon tells his life-story in his memoirs, My Camera, My Life: Sir Mohinder Dhillon (published by Mkuki na Nyota in 2016). The story was narrated to and written by Gordon Boy and David Kaiza.

Below are some snapshots of his work and life in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and the Congo.

Kenya. Dhillon arrived in Kenya in 1947 from rural Punjab, India, with his two sisters and six brothers, and mother, Kartar (affectionately known as Bebe). He was just about 17 years, the same age his father, Tek Singh (affectionately called Bau Ji), was when he left his village for Kenya, to seek work.

The family landed in a country that Dhillon regarded as modern compared with his life in Punjab. But he had the problem of adjusting in school where the medium of instruction was English and not Urdu, which was used back in India. Unlike his brothers, he flunked his O Level exams and could not get college admission, ending up at home without a useful skill for the job market.

But fate took a hand when he went to drop an application at a pharmacy owned by Edith Haller. Dhillon had applied for the advertised post of “a junior accounts clerk.”

He didn’t get the job for obvious reasons but he ended up working for Ms Haller in the dark room of Halle Studio. once again, fate intervened when Dhillon was asked by the social pages editor of the then East African Standard, Lesley Clay, to go take photos at an event because Dhillon’s colleague who “handled the commissions for the newspaper” was away on holiday. This was the beginning of Dhillon’s love and life with a camera.

By 1954 Dhillon had bought the Halle Studio, as Ms Haller had fallen ill. He had several commissions, including producing identity card photos for the British Army, photos for the East African Standard newspaper and the usual undertakings of a photo studio in those days.

In 1961 he teamed up with Ivor Davis, who had been working at the East African Standard to set up Africapix, the company that would make him ubiquitous at nearly all major events in East Africa.

Dhillon had married Amarjeet Kaur Sandhu (Ambi Dhillon) in June 1958. They were blessed with a child, Sam Dhillon. He credits his wife with giving him freedom to do his work, which sometimes involved travelling abroad such as when he was in Aden, Yemen, for eight months covering the war there.

Ethiopia. It was as part-owner of Africapix that Dhillon would end up as the official photographer and filmmaker to the Ethiopian monarch Emperor Haile Selassie I. He travelled with Selassie on a “world tour” that took him to Europe, Asia and Australia. In the process, he came to know the old emperor closely, describing him as “a committed internationalist” who “attached great importance throughout his life to the work of multilateral organisations in collectively promoting peace and security around the globe.”

But the emperor’s travels outside his country, old age and delegating responsibility to his prime minister, increasingly alienated him “from the hearts and minds of the wider Ethiopian public.” Here Dhillon is explaining how a man who he felt was good at heart lost the trust of his countrymen, setting the stage for his overthrow.

Dhillon would later write and film stories on the end of the monarch’s reign and the rule of the military Derg, the Ogaden war (with Somalia) and the famine of 1984.
But Haile Selassie isn’t the only big man who Dhillon photographed.

Uganda. He covered Amin’s rise and fall from power in chapters 14 and 20 of Part Two of My Camera, My Life: Sir Mohinder Dhillon are titled, Uganda Coup d’Etat: A tale of Two Amins and The Fall of Idi Amin, Famine in Karamoja, respectively.

In both chapters he presents “pictures” of Idi Amin from different angles, after covering his rule for more than eight years. Dhillon does not present Amin just as a bloodthirsty, vicious dictator, who murdered people without a reason, as the foreign press would present him. Amin had his foibles, indeed many, but he was a man whom Dhillon viewed with some sympathy.

“My relationship with the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin was perhaps the most bizarre association of all. I tell people I felt safe near Amin and they don’t believe me. The fact is Amin was such a lover of publicity that he would never harm media people, although the same, alas, was not true always of those around him.” I am not sure how many Ugandans who lived through Amin’s reign would agree with this assertion.

Congo. If Dhillon felt safe around Amin, he nearly lost his life in the Congo. He had travelled there twice in 1964. He had gone to “Albertville (now Kalemie), on the western shore of Lake Tanganyika, in southern Kivu Province, to document the Simba occupation there.” Later he travelled to Stanleyville (now Kisangani) to “cover the hostage crisis leading up to the Rebellion’s bloody denouement.”

Stanleyville was a horror story for him, with “corpses scattered all over the place.” Work done and about to board the plane back to Nairobi, a colleague, Andrew Borovic, from the Associated Press, asked Dhillon to shoot a photo of him “against the backdrop of the control tower.”

Dhillon nearly paid for this trivial favour with his life. A security officer arrested him when he lied that he had never been to Albertville, but his passport had a stamp of his previous visit there. He would only be saved by a fellow journalist when there were only eight of the the prisoners held at the airport remaining to be executed.

Tanzania. Dhillon had been in Tanganyika and Zanzibar on several occasions. He covered the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964 as well as the military mutiny in Tanganyika. He later developed a rapport with then president Julius Nyerere, describing him as a warm, unassuming man with a sharp intellect.

Probably Dhillon doesn’t have much to tell about Tanzania because unlike the other East African countries, it remained the most peaceful. There wasn’t much action for his camera.

The picture – really pictures – of East Africa that one gets at the end of My Camera, My Life: Sir Mohinder Dhillon is of a man who thoroughly enjoyed his work and has contributed to the story of humanity not just with photos for news but with films, documentary, and writing.

In retirement, Dhillon reflects on his life, describing it as a life well-lived. Jon Snow, the famed Channel Four News presenter, describes Mohinder Dhillon as “a one-off, and for as long as we live, we shall never see his like again.”

The writer teaches literature at the University of Nairobi. [email protected]