Elizabeth II smiling at African children waving small flags, getting off the “royal train” or shaking hands with a curious little boy: these shots, among many others, slept until then in the archives of the famous Kenyan photographer Mohamed Amin.
These black and white photos of the queen, seen by AFP, reflect a level of access to a sovereign that is impossible today: he captured her chatting quietly with three successive Kenyan presidents, at each of their visits.
Elizabeth II, who died last week aged 96, had a special relationship with Kenya, where she was in 1952 when she learned of her father’s death. Arriving as a princess in what was still a British colony, she left as a queen.
Cameras in hand, Mohamed Amin covered all the royal visits to Kenya during his lifetime. This prolific photographer, who became famous with his shocking shots of the famine in Ethiopia in 1984, which helped shine the international spotlight on this tragedy, has taken nearly 3 million shots in his career.
For decades he ran Camerapix, a company that provided photos and videos to several media, before tragically dying in 1996, aged 53, in the crash of a plane hijacked by hijackers.
His son, Salim Amin, took over in Nairobi where he manages his father’s huge private archives, including many photos never shown to the public.
Although her father, who was born in Tanzania to a family from South Asia, was “a child of colonialism”Salim Amin points out that he rarely expressed his opinion on the British royal family. “He couldn’t afford it, because it would have had an impact on his work”, he told AFP. The photographer did not prostrate himself in front of the authorities, and did not make a difference between princes and the poor, adds his son.
He tells how his father had, in Saudi Arabia, landed an exclusive interview with the Ugandan dictator in exile Idi Amin Dada, nicknamed the “butcher of Africa”, because he had discussed by chance with one of his guards of the body one day in Uganda. “If he hadn’t been nice to the bodyguard he would never have had this interview!”.
The Queen’s death has revived the debate over Britain’s colonial past and its abuses and discrimination in Africa, including under her reign. But Mohamed Amin’s brilliant career is all the more remarkable given the context.
A self-taught photographer, he was often the victim of racism in the field, with authorities who tended to turn to his white colleagues. But he made his identity a strength. According to his son, he realized that his success was primarily due to the fact that “he was a local” and that he “knew the continent by heart”.
In 1992, Mohamed Amin, who throughout his career was a privileged witness to all the important events on the African continent, was decorated by Elizabeth II and raised to the rank of Member of the Order of the British Empire.
Last year, Google built an online catalog to archive its work, in collaboration with the Mohamed Amin Foundation, which notably trains young Africans in journalism and filmmaking. The site already includes more than 6,000 photos. And others will follow, including the rare unpublished visits of Elizabeth II.