Mohinder Dhillon has a photographic memory, which is a fitting turn of phrase for someone whose name is synonymous with the camera.

After he ambles his way to a favourite seat in his Nairobi flat, it soon becomes clear that Mohinder, 85, is a captivatingly detailed storyteller with his distinctive stammer adding to the sense of drama.

A moment later, he is lucidly describing to Lifestyle a scene 52 years ago in Albertville (now Kalemie) in the present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, as if it were yesterday. There he is, waiting for his turn before the firing squad behind a decrepit airport hangar after government forces accuse him of collaborating with the rag-tag Simba rebels involved in a brutal insurgency that is a piece in the vicious Cold War jigsaw. Pleas that he is a news cameraman lured by the magnet of exclusive war-zone images fall on deaf ears.

Squatting on a strip of tarmac in the sweltering heat with his hands on his head, like about 50 other people sharing a similar dark fate, thoughts shuffle through his mind like a pack of cards — he thinks of his wife Ambi back in Nairobi, then wonders what will happen to his corpse or how people will react to news of his death before a tinge of regret creeps in about his risky choice of career.

Every few minutes a stern soldier comes to pick one victim at random, takes them behind the hangar before the loud silence is shattered by the boom of a gunshot. With only eight people left to complete the macabre ritual, his stomach is cramped with fear and his head drops between his knees, letting go of the faintest hope of survival. Then a miracle happens. Someone kicks him gently and, with a British accent, asks him what he is doing there. It is Jon Lane, a cameraman from the British Independent Television News (ITN), accompanied by war reporter Sandy Gall and a soundman. With the help of Mike Hoare, a famous mercenary commando, they convince the bloodthirsty Congolese soldiers of Mohinder’s true identity.

“I felt like I had been brought back from the dead. If the crew had not appeared when they did, I would not have lived to tell this tale,” he says.

PERFECT SHOT

It was not the first time the man renowned for his fearlessness, and who British troops in Yemen once half-mockingly nicknamed “Death-wish Dhillon”, was risking life and limb in pursuit of the perfect shot. In 1967, he left Nairobi in a chartered plane to Aden for what he thought would be three or four days covering the intractable Yemeni war but ended up shooting eight months of dramatic and daring pictures for ITN. In 1971, he was at the frontline in Uganda as Army Commander Idi Amin – who was to become one of Africa’s most notorious dictators – overthrew President Milton Obote. In the 1970s he risked it all to film investigative stories on the illegal ivory trade in Kenya. Then in 1982 he took an excruciating trip behind enemy lines to film Kurdish rebels fighting the Iranian government forces. Not even a helicopter crash while on assignment in Tanzania would stop him — although today he continues to grapple with the health effects of the accident.

“Looking back over the years I have spent in the world, I cannot help but feel a sense of wonder. Did I really do all these things? Go to all these places? Meet all these people? How, as a simple village boy from Punjab who never even finished school, did I end up travelling the globe, dodging bullets to make a living by shooting thousands of metres of film in some of the world’s most dangerous trouble spots?”

It is only fitting that Mohinder’s remarkable story is now the subject of My Camera, My Life (Mkuki na Nyota, 2016) — which he narrates to writers Gordon Boy and David Kaiza in a three-part book that traces his epic journey. The book will be launched today in Nairobi by former Chief Justice Willy Mutunga.

“As a cameraman, I feel privileged to have witnessed – at first hand – some of the most dramatic events of recent times,” Mohinder writes.

He photographed Kenya’s independence heroes and forged a close relationship with top political leaders including Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and Tom Mboya among others. He details some of the “countless” official public and State House events.

“Travelling with Jomo Kenyatta’s presidential motorcade could be an adventure-filled experience, sometimes involving lengthy detours, very often on the most appalling roads. When, as often happened, the convoy would get bogged down in thick mud, Jomo Kenyatta himself would jump out and organise an impromptu Harambee (a rallying call) among pedestrian onlookers who would have to push his Mercedes, as well as all the accompanying escort vehicles,” he writes.

While some of his encounters with Mzee Kenyatta, who referred to him as “Toto”, were friendly, others were uncomfortable — like the day he put on the podium an old microphone.

“Whose disgusting microphone is this? Get rid of it!” Mzee thundered.

In October 1961, despite a strict embargo, Mohinder used one of his staff posing as a family friend to get iconic photographs of the new-born Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta (now President) “being held aloft by hospital nurses”.

Face-to-face with Jomo Kenyatta in 1966 (above): Kenyatta was a stickler for decorum. PHOTO | COURTESY

FRONT ROW SEAT

At another time at State House, Mombasa, Mzee Kenyatta noticed his powerful minister Mbiyu Koinange dozing off as traditional dancers performed and shouted: “Koinange enda lala ndani” (Koinange go and sleep inside). Ironically, the President would often doze off during his sunset years.

One of his more enduring relationships with a political leader was with Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. This culminated in filming the emperor and his extravagant entourage on an eight-nation world tour in 1968, travelling to India, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Australia, South Korea, Malaysia, and Singapore. He was often struck by teh Emperor’s “dimunitive size” and wondered how such a man commanded so much power.

His relationship with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin has perhaps been the most bizarre. He says that during the eight years he covered Amin in the 1970s, he felt safe around the burly man. While he tells Lifestyle that Amin was not an angel, some of the atrocities attributed to him were fabrications.

His encounters with Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, former Ugandan President Milton Obote, Tanzania’s Mwalimu Nyerere and various celebrities are also detailed in the book. There are also interactions with Mother Teresa, Charlie Chaplin, Queen Elizabeth of Britain, and artistes like Bob Geldof and Harry Belafonte.

Mohinder’s story is even more remarkable given that his love affair with the camera happened by chance.

His life in the village of Babar Pur in rural Punjab under India’s British colonial rule was a picture of charming simplicity even though “just being born alive was a victory in itself”. The nearest hospital was 30km away, the only means of transport was an ox or donkey cart and the closest schools in far-away villages taught only in the Urdu language. Mohinder believes the tough upbringing would years later sharpen his survival instincts as a cameraman.

“I do not know the exact date of my birth although, for passport purposes, my parents settled for 25th October, 1931. This is probably about right, I think, given the accounts I would later receive of events, relating to the season’s wheat harvest,” he writes.

It is not surprising that living in a far-flung village where “no one had a radio, and television had yet to be invented” he did not know anything about a camera until “shortly before we left India in 1947” when he went to a nearby town of Ludhiana to have passport pictures taken.

“The camera was one of those contraptions with a black shroud underneath which the photographer’s head would momentarily disappear,” he says.

Young Mohinder together with his family travelled by ship to Kenya in 1947 to join his father Tek Singh – fondly referred to as Bau Ji – who had been working for the Uganda Railway since the age of 17. Life in Nairobi was fairly modern compared to his village. Ironically, says Mohinder, he learnt many things, including about Indian nationalist Mahatma Gandhi after coming to Kenya since “there were no newspapers or magazines from which to learn about the world” and “(Indian) cities like Bombay, or even Delhi, might as well have been on another planet”.

In Kenya, Mohinder struggled to make a mark in school, especially with the transition from Urdu to English.

“All five of my brothers passed their ‘O’ level examinations. I was the sole exception, failing the exam,” he writes.

His consolation was a gift of a second-hand camera from his father.

“Neither he nor I knew it at the time, but this simple gift marked the beginning of a 60-year-long career in photography,” he says.

A proud moment: With Sam and Seema after their wedding on January 7, 2012. PHOTO | COURTESY

GREEN MANGO

The first real break in 1950s Nairobi happened when Mohinder was given a job by Edith Haller, the owner of a pharmacy that also had a small photo studio. He had gone job hunting but had been turned away for lacking qualifications before he pleaded to be allowed to work in the studio on probation.

“Ms Haller must have been taken aback by my torrent of broken English, by my gangly appearance, by my ill-fitting lopsided turban. This was the first time I had ever addressed a white person at any length. And miraculously I never stammered once,” he narrates.

He worked in the dark room developing pictures but one day the social editor of the East African Standard (now The Standard) called the studio asking for a photographer to cover a horse race. Mohinder offered to take pictures, despite his inexperience, and was pleasantly surprised when they were published. It was a milestone in his career that would be cemented years later when he bought the studio in 1954 after the owner fell ill.

Going through years of struggle looking for clients to sustain his business, it came as a surprise when, one evening in May 1958, his father told him, “Mohinder, you are getting married”. As shocking as it was, Mohinder ended up marrying a girl who had grown up in Kisumu, Amarjeet Kaur Sadhu, known throughout her life as Ambi (signifying baby green mango). It was an arranged marriage that he never regretted getting into even after Ambi’s death in 1992.

In 1961, Mohinder teamed up with the journalist Ivor Davis, who had been working for the East African Standard, to form the news company, Africapix, significantly covering the political transitions in Africa in the early 1960s.

“Rushing from country to country, Ivor and I became almost dizzy from covering the euphoric pre-independence build-up in so many African nations; now Tanganyika (later Tanzania), now Uganda, now Zambia,” he writes.

But some of the most remarkable descriptions in the three-part book are on 1980s famines in Ethiopia, Karamoja in Uganda and Turkana in Kenya. In Karamoja, he earned the nickname “seven-million-dollar cameraman” after helping to raise money for the victims.

But the Ethiopian famine, which the government tried to cover up, was the worst.

“What I witnessed in Ethiopia during the famine of 1984 has never left me. I wish I could erase the images from my mind, but even now I am visited by nightmares of starved children dying of hunger, their ribs protruding from their wasted flesh, and their heads too heavy for their emaciated frames to support,” he says.

His images would lead to a global fundraising effort. In America it led to the release of the charity song, We Are the World, co-written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, and sang by superstars known as USA for Africa to raise millions of dollars.

The film African Calvary would, however, once again open the love-hate relationship Mohinder and fellow famous cameraman Mohamed Amin (Mo-Mo rivalry as some called it). To this day, Mohinder feels Amin schemed to take all the credit for a collaborative effort of filming the harrowing scenes in Ethiopia. It wasn’t the first time the two were at loggerheads, as narrated in the book.

As he looks forward to the launch today, Mohinder believes he has “lived a life millions will wish and pay anything for”. His mission now, he says, is to see a better world. Mohinder says most of his work was paid like a kibarua (casual job) and he did not make much money. It is these words by his father, he says, that inspire him: “If you live for yourself, that is not true living, but if you live for others, that is the real meaning of life.”

Mohinder has won many awards for his photographs, news clips and documentaries. In 2005 he received a knighthood for his services to humanity, becoming among the few Kenyans to be referred to by the title “Sir”.

Jon Snow, the world-famous veteran presenter of ITN’s Channel Four News in the UK, in his foreward to the book, describes Mohinder as a mentor and lifelong friend.

“You cannot write about Mohinder without first mentioning his fundamental humanity – the abiding reality that he is an all-round lovely man. That’s before you get round to his loyalty, steadfastness, and utter dependability. Put simply, Mohinder Dhillon is a rock. In the field, he was my mentor — somebody without whom I might never have progressed in television news,” he says.

Mohinder’s is a story of a dedicated photojournalist, filmmaker, philanthropist, father, husband and activist. He later took up painting after retirement and has sold some of his pieces for charity. His only son, Sam, has followed in his father’s footsteps.

“Now my book is laid to rest and I am faced with a rather troubling question, what comes next? After living a very active life of travelling the globe and meeting the world, sitting back and relaxing has never been easy for me during my retirement,” he says.