We have had the great pleasure of working with Salim Amin over the last few weeks, who has agreed to display some of his father’s extraordinary images of Kenya over the years. Salim Amin is not only a trustee of the Ethical journalist network and Chairman of Camerapix, but is also the son of the late great Mohamed Amin whose images captured key moments in Kenya’s history. He was known as the photo-journalist that “moved the world”.
Mohamed Amin died tragically in 1996 during the botched hijacking attempt of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961, which then crashed off the Comoros. The pilot of the ill-fated flight, lived to tell the tale and recalled how ‘Mo’ had attempted to intervene and negotiate with the hijackers. Only 52 people survived that flight and sadly, Mo was not one of them.
Salim has created the most incredible book, which we are proud to have in our shop, but also has printed more than eight images that will now hang in our main areas and capture some of the most remarkable moments in Kenya history. It has been an extraordinary experience looking through all the images, watching short reels of video captured in time and listening to incredible stories of the great Mohamed Amin. Such a pleasure, and we feel so lucky to have met Salim.
“My father had the instincts of a warrior and heart of a leader. He was driven and there was no limit to capturing a good story. He knew his photographs were vital to how the world saw Africa. From his humble roots in a small shop in Dar es Salaam, my father established Camerapix in 1963. He made it into a sustainable, world-class organisation covering news, features and producing documentaries with a variety of global networks including the BBC, NBC and Reuters.”
We hope to have more of these incredible images, but for now we are delighted with what we have in the main areas of the lodge.
In other news, the lodge has closed down the pool area for a major face-lift; the pool will be extended and a new bar, pizza oven, BBQ and seating area will be built. We hope to have this area up and running as soon as possible and are so excited to have a much needed extended day-time seating area and bar by the river! The pool design will also allow that, should any animal happen to go for an impromptu swim, they would be able to exit the area without human intervention.
We had a dreadful night last year when a young female buffalo fell into the pool. Our team reacted with speed and promptly got the buffalo out, ushering her away down the slope. Unbeknown to us, the reason she had gone into the pool in the first place was to escape the jaws of a pride of 4 lions waiting in the darkness. Our team looked on in horror as the Lions took her down – it was not a pleasant evening for our team and our guests.
As for our lions, they have been creeping out of the park at night once again and attacking livestock in our community. Livestock are often entire livelihoods for the Masaai people, and the attacks have an enormous impact on them. In order to assist, we have set up over 15 sets of Lion lights in the community and for anyone who is not aware, the lion light ‘invention’ was created by a young man, one of our neighbours back in the early 2000’s, called Richard Turere then aged 12. He had been put in charge of livestock and got so fed up with the relentless attacks on his precious animals by marauding lions that he ‘borrowed’ some equipment from a family member and set up a flashing light scheme to keep the lions away. Now anyone flying in to Jomo Kenyatta can see the ‘bush discotheque’ lighting in our ‘back yard’ and the lion light project seems to be a huge success. There are well over 50 ‘bomas’ now lit up with lion lights, and so far so good. Richard is now all grown up and is recognised as Kenya’s youngest patent inventor and is a graduate from the African Leadership University.
In other wildlife news our guests are seeing more and more Cheetah on game drives which is wonderful. We had almost 10 years with seeing only one or two Cheetah, and now our Cheetah population is seen almost daily.
The rains look they are almost upon us and we do hope that they are plentiful, although not too much as we do not want our new pool going under water!
