Witness To History: A personal journey

By Mohinder Dhillon

For almost fifty years, Mohinder Dhillon was one of Africa’s foremost news cameramen and documentary filmmakers. This book is both a personal memoir and a photographic record of the many remarkable events he covered over the course of an extraordinary career – events that were to change the course of history.
This book is much more than a collection of photographs. It offers fascinating insights into the behaviour of contemporary African leaders: Emperor Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, William Tubman, Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, Idi Amin, Col. Gamel Nasser, Léopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe among them. Mohinder’s encounters with these and other leading figures of the day took place against the backdrop of the Cold War proxy conflicts that were then tearing Africa apart.
While primarily a vivid eye-witness account of the many turbulent events that shaped Africa during and immediately after the colonial era, this wide-ranging memoir also documents events that Mohinder filmed in South Yemen, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world.
To the fore throughout is Mohinder’s deep and abiding sense of compassion, both in his approach to photojournalism and as a committed humanitarian.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Feb 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398425712

Mohinder Dhillon

For almost fifty years, Mohinder Singh Dhillon was at the heart of the international news-gathering machine. Starting in the 1950s, his lenses recorded the struggle for Independence in Africa, including liberation wars in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. He travelled the world as one of the profession’s most sought-after cameramen, renowned for his extraordinary physical courage. He once fell out of a helicopter at eight thousand feet above the slopes of Kilimanjaro - it was only the dense foliage that saved him from instant death. While covering the conflict in Aden, he was caught up in so much crossfire that the British soldiers there nicknamed him ‘Death Wish Dhillon’. Most notoriously, he came within a few minutes of summary execution in the Congo before an international camera crew passing by identified him as one of their own and persuaded his captors to let him go. When he was not covering news, Mohinder shot many award-winning documentaries on subjects as various as wildlife conservation, Kenyan athletics and global health initiatives. Above all, his footage of the Ethiopian famine in the 1980s was instrumental in raising more than 100 million dollars for famine relief. His career came to an end not long after the bomb blast that shook Nairobi in August 1998, an event that gave rise to a deeply moving film about the impact of international terrorism on ordinary people. Mohinder’s value system was profoundly influenced by his Sikh upbringing. Sikhs believe in one God and provide selfless service, believing in universal love. ‘Humility is Virtue, Arrogance is Evil’ is a Sikh proverb by which he lives. Before he died, Mohinder’s father once told him: ‘My son, if you live for yourself it is not considered living, but if you live for others, that is the real meaning of living.’ It is a sentiment by which Mohinder lived consistently, and with the utmost sincerity.

Book preview

PART ONE:

Beginnings

Punjab

I CANNOT tell you when exactly I was born. In rural India back in those days, births were neither recorded nor registered. Only much later in 1947, when I was in need of a passport, would a birthdate be assigned to me in order to satisfy officialdom. The date chosen, 25 October 1931, was based on family recollections of contemporaneous events in Babar Pur, the village of my birth in Punjab.

All agreed that I had come into this world on the back of an exceptional grain harvest that could be traced back to 1931 after a season of prolonged monsoon rains. Life was hard in Babar Pur; so good harvests, being few and far between, lived long in the memory.

Originally, our village had been called Retla, meaning Place of Sand, on account of the harsh surrounding terrain. The village had been renamed in the 16th Century after Babur, the Mughal Emperor whose all-conquering Muslim armies had annexed Punjab and other parts of India in 1526. Babur is reputed to have camped near our village for several months shortly before his death in 1530.

Mughal rule would continue until well into the 18th Century. And it was resistance to the Mughal occupation of Punjab that led to the formation of the Khalsa, the fighting force that gave birth to Sikhism – my religion. Although Hindus originally, my forbears were to become devout Sikhs, proud of the martial tradition they had helped to forge in resisting and ultimately overcoming the great cruelties meted out by successive Mughal Emperors.

The Babar Pur of my childhood was a remote and isolated place, well off the beaten track. We had almost no contact at all with other parts of India, let alone the wider world. Operators of the two-wheeled horse-drawn tonga carriages, the fastest means of transport available in those days, were loath to visit Babar Pur, such were the punishing demands of the journey. There were no radios in our village, so momentous global events like World War II simply passed us by. We had never heard of Mahatma Gandhi, nor had we ever seen a white man, even though we were living under British colonial rule.

Instead, our lives as children revolved around tending crops of wheat, sugarcane, yellow maize and vegetables, and caring for our livestock animals – chickens, goats, a few cows and some water buffaloes. The climate in our region was extreme. The Punjab summers were dry and oven-hot, the winters bitterly cold. On frosty winter nights, we shared our sleeping quarters with our buffaloes and other livestock animals. The dung that we collected in the mornings, on being dried out in the sun, would be used to make the fuel patties upon which we cooked our meals in the open courtyard outside.

The first school I attended was in another village, eight kilometres from Babar Pur; so running to and from school each day was another aspect of my childhood which, I can say now in retrospect, mirrored the childhood routines of so many of the people I was later to meet in Africa.

The family home in Babar Pur. When I was growing up, this was the only brick house in the village. The double door was to allow livestock to get in and out

Like these village boys, I spent my childhood in the close and constant company of buffaloes

Family

MY father, Tek Singh, was the first person from our village to receive a formal education. He and Bebe, later to become my mother, were married while still in their early teens. Unlike many of today’s Indian weddings, the ceremony was a very simple occasion in front of half a dozen witnesses. It was followed by a second ritual called a ‘maklawa’ in which my mother went into my father’s house to signify their living together as husband and wife. Before long they produced two children – a boy and a girl, Gurdev Kaur and Gurdev Singh. However, prospects in sleepy Babar Pur were limited for an educated man like Tek, who wanted only the best for his family.

So in 1918, at the age of 17, Tek had joined other young Sikh men from Punjab in answering a call for additional recruits to operate the Uganda Railway in faraway British East Africa. This was Britain’s ‘Lunatic Line’ from the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to Lake Victoria, 930 kilometres inland. Constructed between 1896 and 1901 with the help of Sikh labourers, this line had subsequently been extended into what is now Uganda.

On leaving for East Africa, Tek had entrusted the care of his family to his older half-brother, Ram Singh. Uncle Ram had been adopted as a child by my grandmother, and he took this responsibility extremely seriously, to the extent of never getting married himself.

Tek returned to Babar Pur whenever he could, but these visits were few and far apart, being confined initially to six-month-long periods of home leave, granted once every five years. I was conceived during one of these visits, as were four of my five younger siblings – Mohinder Kaur, Joginder (alias Jindi) Singh, Manjeet Singh, and Inderjeet Singh.

By 1945 ours was a family of seven children – five boys and two girls. We must have been quite a handful, but under the watchful eyes of our doting grandmother Bobo and Uncle Ram, we grew up in a very happy home. Bobo was a strict disciplinarian who kept us all in line, while sharing with my mother Bebe the burdens of providing for such a large and demanding brood.

Uncle Ram was the village herbalist, but he doubled as a vet, and as children we would spend hours with him on his rounds, attending to sick or injured animals. It was Uncle Ram who managed the remittances sent home by my father to fund our education.

My father wrote to us often and at length. Still a farmer at heart, he wanted to know how our crops were faring, whether we were getting enough to eat, which of our animals had calved and so on. Most of all though, he wanted to know how each of us was getting on at school, urging us always to try harder, to do better. His letters, delivered by runners from Ludhiana, took anywhere from seven to nine weeks to arrive. All would end with an affectionate note to the effect that he was longing for the day when we could join him in Africa.

In May 1947, that day finally came. In a letter received the previous September, Tek had earlier announced that he would be taking us to Africa on completion of his next home leave. I was 16 years old at the time, and the course of my life was about to change forever…

My father, Tek Singh

My mother, Bebe

My paternal grandmother, Bobo

Uncle Ram with my father

Africa

UNTIL 1947, the year of our departure for Africa, I had never seen a car or a motorcycle. Nor had I ever seen, much less travelled on, a bus or a train. I had never seen a flush-toilet either. All these things, and many others, I encountered for the first time as we were preparing to leave India.

It was in Ludhiana while having our passport pictures taken that I saw a camera for the first time. This was one of those contraptions with a long black shroud, under which the photographer’s head would momentarily disappear. And then, at the clinic where we received our smallpox and yellow-fever jabs, I visited a flush-toilet too.

The journey to Bombay, where we were to board a ship for Africa, was an eye-opening experience. First, we travelled by ox-cart to Malaudh, the nearest small town, where I had been going to school. There, with the Partition of India looming and with electioneering already in full swing, a bus service had just been introduced. In one of the new buses, we travelled on to Ludhiana, where we boarded the train for Bombay.

Bombay, the first big city I had ever seen, was overwhelming – and rather frightening. Knowing nothing about motor cars, and least of all about how in India they were supposed to be driven on the left side of the road, I was scared even to cross the busy streets. It was here that I saw white people for the first time – British officials decked out in starched Imperial uniforms.

The ship we boarded, the SS Khandala, was an old, decommissioned coal-carrier that had been converted into a passenger liner. As lowly ‘deck-class’ ticket-holders, we were among the last to embark. We were on that ship for 14 days, docking briefly at two ports along the way – Porbunder in Gujarat, India, and Mahé in the Seychelles. It was an exhilarating journey, and we spent most of our time just gazing in awe at the big, choppy waves of the seemingly endless sea all around us, with no shoreline in sight.

Then one day we saw the lighthouse of Mombasa. A tugboat came out to meet us and escorted our ship across a narrow bay into the port. The Africa at which I arrived was green and lush. Palm trees swayed in the breeze against a clear blue sky. Clouds, when they appeared later, dotted the sky like puffy white mushrooms. The distant hills were green-blue, as far as the eye could see. What a contrast this was to the drab and dusty Punjab we had left behind!

After the ship had docked, we as deck-class passengers were the last to file through the immigration and customs booths. The air into which we disembarked was hot, sultry, and oppressively humid, and in next to no time we were drenched in sweat. We began to feel as if this sticky tropical heat might fry us alive. But here we were – in Africa, at