The Man Who Moved the World: The Life and Work of Mohamed Amin by Bob Smith Salim Amin Michael Buerk

Author:Bob Smith, Salim Amin, Michael Buerk [Bob Smith, Salim Amin, Michael Buerk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-9966-05-203-2
Publisher: Master Publishing
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

Three’s Company

There was nobody I would rather have

been with in a dangerous situation

Graham Hancock, Author

ANYONE FOLLOWING MO’S CAREER WILL know how closely his life was interwoven with those of his two friends and colleagues, Brian Tetley and Duncan Willetts. Together they formed a triumvirate that produced a phenomenal volume of high-quality work, putting Mo’s company Camerapix at the forefront of African, and international media companies. In the early years Mo concentrated almost entirely on news expanding from stills to cine as his experience grew. He met Tetley in Nairobi in 1969, and Willetts eight years later. After they joined forces Camerapix gradually expanded to include publishing and, largely through Willetts, to studio and broader-based commercial work (though Mo drew Willetts into the news forum whenever he could).

In many ways, Tetley and Mo were chalk and cheese, but they worked well together each tacitly acknowledging the formidable talent of the other, and just as frequently lambasting each other as ‘a complete bastard’.

Tetley had an awesome appetite for his favourite warm Tusker beer. But this was more than matched by a genius for the written word—graphic and rich in imagery for his extensive work in Mo’s many publications, and sharp, accurate, and precise in his coverage of news events.

Tetley was born in Birmingham, and went to school in Solihull before beginning his career as a copywriter at an advertising agency in 1951. He soon moved to mainstream journalism, and during his lifetime was an editor on no less than 13 occasions, was an editorial director three times, and consultant to many august publications. He was a hard news reporter, feature writer, and investigative reporter with many newspapers. Tetley won awards on several occasions. A veteran of Fleet Street, he caught the Africa ‘bug’ early in his career and moved to Kenya in the 1960s, becoming a citizen 20 years later. He often told people that he was “born in England, but made in Kenya.” Like so many creative people he was a maverick whose chaotic private life led him into a riot of marriages, romances, barroom scrapes, and the occasional night in the cells.

Where Mo was a paragon of punctuality and sobriety, Tetley—once described by the Baluchistan Times as a ‘reputed personality’—was notoriously unreliable, sending the photographer into apoplexy when he went walkabout at a crucial time. I can testify to his idiosyncrasies for I worked in the same small office with him for two years.

There were frequent temper tantrums, typewriters thrown, cups smashed, phones ripped out—all too often done in hangover extremis or through an alcoholic haze. There was no middle course with Tetley. He was a peaks-and-troughs man, whose life graph ran like an AC/DC current on overload. The highs were exhilarating for he had a wonderful sense of humour, and could convey it as well by the written word as he could by holding an audience spellbound with one of his vast range of entertaining anecdotes. The lows, when the black dog was on him, were dark times.

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