How the media exposed East Africa's worst famine

Covering the famine in 1985 in northern Uganda with Halle Hanssan (cradling a child) of the Norwegian broadcasting. Sir Mohinder Dhillon (right) and Pritpal Dhillon. PHOTO | AFRICAPIX 

By Compiled by Kingwa Kamencu

In Summary

Part One: How I escaped death in the Congo
Part Two

• BOOK SERIALISATION: In this second instalment of Mohinder Dhillon's My Camera, My Life, the author describes Kenyan and Ethiopian media censorship and their poorly executed public relations in the face of famine.

Over lunch, I told John Amos (a famous African-American Hollywood actor) what I knew about the Turkana people (of northern Kenya) and about their never-ending struggle for survival in some of the harshest and most inhospitable terrain on the face of the earth. I told him about how the Turkana and their suffering had been ignored by successive governments since Independence, just as in colonial times.

“The Turkana are still dismissed as backward, and are viewed as a national embarrassment,” I said, “when in reality,” I added, “they rank among the toughest and most resilient people on the planet.”

I told John, too, about my experiences, with the ITN-TV News reporter David Smith, in 1980, of documenting the famine in Karamoja, in northeastern Uganda across the border from Turkana, and of how we had succeeded, within a matter of weeks, in raising $7 million for famine relief.

The Turkana are an offshoot of the Karimojong (the inhabitants of Karamoja, eastern Uganda), and yet the two groups, despite their shared ancestry, have long been fierce rivals, engaging in continual cross-border livestock raids and skirmishes.

For the Turkana, the impact of the 1980 famine was just as devastating as it was for the Karimojong. Yet in Turkana, the famine then had gone largely unreported, having been swept under the carpet by the Kenyan authorities. That famine had continued, I told John, and only now, late in 1984, it was coming to the notice of the outside world.

I showed John some of the still photographs I had taken of the Karamoja famine back in 1980, together with stock images of mine showing Turkana people in typically desolate landscapes.

John was shocked. “Some of these children,” he said, holding up one of the photographs to the light, “they’re just skin and bone. There is no flesh on them at all.” The forbidding semi-desert landscapes in other pictures he found just as harrowing. “But how can these people get by,” he kept asking, “in such extreme conditions?”

The next day, when we landed at the Lodwar airstrip, we were met by a delegation of government officials, none of whom was a Turkana, from the local district council. They had been instructed, they said, to inform us that, because there was no famine anywhere in the district, we were to leave immediately and fly back to Nairobi.

We pleaded with them to be allowed, at least, to proceed as far as the Catholic mission, as the sisters there would be expecting us and might raise the alarm if we failed to appear. Reluctantly, the officials agreed, but on condition only that we take one of them to “look after” us.

As our plane was circling low over the mission, preparing to land, we could see scores of people running towards the airstrip. After landing, all these people, stark naked many of them, converged on and surrounded the plane. Most were emaciated and sickly – no more than walking skeletons, some of them.

Dhillon tells his life-story in his memoirs, My Camera, My Life: Sir Mohinder Dhillon (published by Mkuki na Nyota in 2016). PHOTO | JEFF ANGOTE

Photography not allowed

All were motioning to us that they were desperately hungry and thirsty, lifting bony knuckles to their mouths and tapping on their parched lips. When the pilot, reaching into the back of the aircraft, extracted a small jerrican of water, our government minder told him off, warning us that we were to have nothing to do with “these beggars.” Then, as I was taking out my camera, I was told that “photography is not allowed.” John was shaking his head. “Mohinder,” he muttered under his breath, “I cannot believe this.”

There was nothing we could do, except get back into the place and leave. There was no point even in going over to the mission. The pilot started the engine. The plane’s propeller picked up a cloud of dust, forcing the cluster of people into taking prompt evasive action. Looking back while we were taking off, the disappointment and despair etched into the faces of those desperate people was nothing short of heart-rending.

John was rendered speechless; he said nothing during the flight back to Lodwar. And nor did he utter a single word on the two-hour flight from there back to Nairobi.

Head in hands, he was in a state of shock. As a guest, not just of Catholic Relief Services (CRS), but of the Kenya government as well, he realised there was nothing he was going to be able to do or say.

As far as the government of president Daniel arap Moi was concerned, there was no famine in Kenya. And that was that. The government would go on doing everything in its power to conceal the truth from the outside world.

John could not understand this mentality. He was a famous actor, at the peak of his career, and a household name across much of the developed world. Just a short clip of John on location in Turkana, appealing for urgent relief aid, had the potential, almost overnight, of bringing tens of millions of dollars pouring into the Kenya government coffers.

This would be more than enough money to address the immediate impact of the Turkana famine. And, with CRS workers on the ground to implement the famine-relief operation, the government of Kenya itself would not have to lift so much as a finger to alleviate all this needless suffering and misery. And yet the government was determined, it seemed, to make nothing of the opportunity.

John simply could not comprehend how any national government could turn its back on the suffering of its own people in this way.

Cover up

Back in Nairobi, I had to explain to John that it was normal for African governments to cover up anything that they felt might reflect badly on their dictatorial regimes.

I recall how, on another occasion, while I was making a film in Turkana for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, my Kenyan government minder — a fellow by the name of Billy Mutta, who was actually quite a good friend of mine — had been trying to talk me out of filming certain things.

“No, no, Mohinder, you can’t film that,” he’d say. The problem, it turned out, was that some of the Turkana people standing before us were naked. The Moi government was scared lest footage of naked or semi-naked citizens, beamed around the globe, would create the impression that the country was a primitive backwater, bristling with unclothed, uneducated savages!

Ethiopia’s starving masses

In Ethiopia, the famine of the early 1980s was on a scale infinitely larger than any famine experienced anywhere in living memory.

Come 1984, millions of Ethiopians — as opposed to mere tens of thousands in, say, Karamoja or Turkana — were in imminent danger of starving to death. And yet, until 1984, the government of Ethiopia had, like its counterpart in Kenya, been doing all it could to conceal the looming catastrophe.

Emaciated children using their teeth to get scraps of dried food from a metal drum used for cooking during the Karamoja (Uganda) famine in the early 80s. PHOTO | AFRICAPIX

When David Smith and I visited Korem in the Tigray province of northern Ethiopia in April 1983, we had done our best to raise the alarm internationally. Our footage, shot over four days in Korem, site of one of the earliest refugee camps for Ethiopian famine victims, showed appalling scenes of hunger, disease, suffering and despair.

The footage had been broadcast widely, and David had even predicted in his commentary that, if no intervention was forthcoming, as many as six million Ethiopians could starve to death. The report raised eyebrows in some media circles, but the coverage — shocking though it was — elicited no concerted response from richer nations, or from the global aid and development community. It was as if the world were at a loss how even to begin to respond to a crisis of such magnitude.

Sadly, the attitude in some Western countries seemed to be that, because the Ethiopian government of the day — that of Megistu Haile Mariam — was a communist regime, then perhaps it was only fitting that Ethiopia should be left to stew in its own juice.

Gradually, however, attitudes began to change. A television appeal in Britain, based on the findings of a Save the Children Fund report issued later in 1983 on hunger in northern Ethiopia, succeeded in raising almost two million pounds sterling for famine relief in the region. Then, from Nairobi, in April 1984, the BBC correspondent Mike Wooldridge was able to travel to Ethiopia with cameraman Mohamed Amin, of Camerapix, while both were covering a United Nations High Commission for Refugees inspection tour of refugee repatriation schemes in and around the Horn of Africa.

'Seeds of Despair'

One of the people they met on that visit was the head of the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, Dawit Wolde Georgis, who warned of the impending catastrophe in his country. In May 1984, a front-page ‘exclusive’ on the crisis unfolding in Ethiopia was published in the Sunday Nation newspaper, under Amin’s byline.

A news team from London’s Thames Television, meanwhile, had managed to visit Korem — still the epicentre of the Ethiopian Famine — and had then produced a report bemoaning the shocking disparity between Ethiopia’s starving masses and the grain surpluses of the European Community.

Then, in July 1984, an hour-long documentary, Seeds of Despair, directed by Charles Stewart for Central Independent Television, was shown on ITV. Filmed over a period of several weeks, Seeds of Despair was remarkable in that its makers, Stewart and Malcolm Hirst, had travelled to Ethiopia initially to make a film about soil erosion!

Both had very soon realised that something much more serious was going on, and so had made a film instead about the effects of three consecutive years of drought on Ethiopia’s rural populations, showing how thousands of children and old people had died, and were dying still, from starvation and from famine-related diseases.

Britain’s Independent Broadcast Authority had been reluctant to authorise a second appeal for emergency relief aid for Ethiopia. But then, in June 1984, after being shown a preview of the Seeds of Despair documentary, the authority changed its mind. Britain’s Disaster and Emergency Committee, meanwhile, had also launched an 11-nation global appeal.

By this time, even Ethiopia’s own Relief and Rehabilitation Commission, jolted out of denial mode, was calling for outside help, warning of “frightening consequences” for as many as one-fifth of all Ethiopians (roughly eight million people), if no such aid was to materialise.

By the middle of 1984, then, more than one year after my visit to Korem with Smith, and the airing on ITN TV of our report lifting the lid on the massive scale of the Ethiopian famine, the world at large was finally beginning to sit up and take notice.

Another take

It was still not easy though, for foreign reporters and crews to get into Ethiopia. Given how the reporting of the Wollo famine of the early 1970s had been instrumental in turning the tide of opinion against the regime of Haile Selassie, so precipitating the fall of the emperor, the Marxist regime of the dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam was now worried that it would suffer the same fate.

The fear now was that foreign journalists, entering Ethiopia ostensibly to report on the famine, could incidentally provide a convenient platform for dissenting groups opposed to Mengistu’s dictatorial rule.

Eventually however, in September 1984, BBC Television at last received permission to send a team to Ethiopia to film the second authorised British TV appeal for emergency famine relief aid. I was asked to join BBC TV reporter Michael Buerk, then based in Johannesburg, South Africa, who would be leading the BBC team.

I met Mike Buerk for the first time in the transit lounge of Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. There, we were soon joined by my nephew Pritpal Dhillon (fondly called Pal), who would be our soundman in Ethiopia.

At the airport in Addis, we were met by a delegation of senior Ethiopian government officials. Two of them were known to me from the days when I worked for the emperor. Both men greeted me warmly, in the Ethiopian style, with hugs followed by air-kisses on both cheeks.

The officials asked me where the other members of my team were. So I pointed to the man in the safari jacket standing in the queue at the immigration counter.

“That is Michael Buerk,” I said, “and over here, looking after our bags,” I added, pointing to Pritpal, “is my nephew Pal Dhillon, my older brother Gurdev’s eldest son.”

The sight of Mike, a white man, clearly bothered them. “This white man, Buerk, whom you are with, Mohinder,” one of the men said quietly, pulling me over to one side, “We cannot let him in, as we know nothing about him. I am sure you understand the sensitivity of our military regime.”

I told the officials they had nothing to worry about regarding Mike. “Mike Buerk,” I avowed, “is a dedicated BBC Television correspondent who, at present, just happens to be based in Johannesburg. He has come all this way to help you in your efforts to alleviate the suffering of your famine victims, and he will not disappoint you or your government. That I promise you.” The officials, after consulting among themselves, relented finally and instructed the immigration desk to go ahead and stamp Mike’s British passport.

No-go area

From the airport, we were to be driven — the officials informed us — directly to a place called Nazareth, south of Addis Ababa, where we were to be given six hours to see, at first hand, how the Ethiopian government was responding to the famine crisis.

We, of course, had been hoping to travel north, to the areas worst affected by the famine, around Mekele and Korem in Tigray Province. So we were disappointed to learn that we were going to be taken somewhere else instead. Obviously, the Ethiopian authorities were still not ready, or willing, to allow the outside world to see the ravages of the full-blown famine in the north, in Tigray, then also a hotbed of internal political dissent.

I told Mike that, for now, we had little choice but to go along with the government’s plan, but that we might yet be able, if we could build up official trust and confidence in us, to get our way in the end.

Mike, Pal and I were shown outside, to where a military vehicle was waiting.

One of the officials — my old friend Tafari Wossen, now the Ethiopian Relief and Rehabilitation Commission’s Chief Information Officer — jumped into the front passenger seat, saying he would be “escorting” the three of us.

What he meant was that he was under strict orders to keep a close watch over us, to make sure we did not stray from the government-controlled agenda. A scion of upper-class Ethiopian society, Tafari spoke good English, having been educated in Britain, and his manners were impeccable.

On the drive to Nazareth, Tafari confirmed apologetically that the government was still not allowing journalists and film crews into those northern areas of the country worst affected by the famine.

Ghostly enigma

As we approached Nazareth, the countryside all around us was surprisingly green and lush. There were puddles of rainwater lying about everywhere. And, over one stretch, on both sides of the road, as far as the eye could see, we passed through rippling golden fields of ripening wheat, almost ready for harvesting. We motored on in stunned silence.

We had come to Ethiopia to cover a severe famine and yet here we were being taken to the wrong place — helpless pawns of the Mengistu government. Mike and I looked at each other. We felt angry that we were being duped in this way, by a government that, even now, seemed determined to go on betraying its people by denying there was a famine in the country.

By the time we got to Nazareth, it had started raining. Nazareth itself turned out to be a mass of scattered huts, most of them seemingly recently abandoned. There was nothing we could see that I could film: no people, let alone hungry or starving people, and certainly no food distribution or medical relief facilities. The place seemed empty, almost dead.

In the eerie stillness, under a continuing light drizzle, Mike, Pal and I walked from hut to hut. Poking about in the darkened interiors, we could find no signs of life.

Why had all these dwellings been abandoned, we wondered? And where had the occupants gone? Had they been forcibly evicted perhaps, under some sinister government ‘resettlement scheme’ to dispossess them of their land? With all the greenery around us, and the rain, Mike and I were at a loss for answers to the ghostly enigma.

The three of us opted to walk further up the hillside, to another cluster of seemingly deserted huts. Through a half-open door, I pushed my way into the nearest of these huts, and was just about to pronounce the place vacant as expected when, low down, in the semi-darkness, I heard the unmistakable sound of somebody groaning. This gave me such a terrible fright, that it would be no great exaggeration to say I almost jumped out of my skin.

I staggered outside, and then, after regaining my composure, I signalled to the others to come over. Pulling the hut door open wide, the slanting light fell on the emaciated, almost skeletal form of a haggard, dying woman, lying motionless on the floor.

There, beside her, slumped against the wall of the hut, was another human figure, that of a man, perhaps the dying woman’s husband, his face totally expressionless, as if frozen with grief. He too was clearly dying. Neither one had energy enough left even to register our presence.

Part 1: How I escaped death in the Congo
Next week: Third and final instalment is on the late environmentalist Wangari Maathai.