The Association for International Broadcasting has presented its Founders Award to Abdul Rahman Ramadhan

Abdul Rahman Ramadhan (centre) receives the AIB Founders Award from Alexey Nikolov, Chairman of the AIB Executive Committee and Managing Director, RT (left) and Simon Spanswick, Chief Executive, AIB (right)

Abdul Rahman Ramadhan started work in 1980. It wasn’t a typical career for someone living in Nairobi’s Kibera slum. He graduated from the local madrasa and chose the profession of sound, landing a job at the Camerapix news agency run by Mohamed Amin in the Kenyan capital.

He honed his skills on the job, working with the standard location sound kit of the time – a Nagra reel-to-reel tape recorder. Those skills, which would be developed over the following three and a half decades, have brought the world sound from across Africa.

For Abdul has recorded the sound that has accompanied TV news reports from many of Africa’s most troubled places and challenging events. His first truly dangerous assignment was the civil war in Sudan in 1992. This was the first war zone that the young sound man had experienced. Along with the other Camerapix team members, Abdul dodged bullets from soldiers and bombs dropped from Antonov planes. He slept among the dead to avoid detection – a certain route to death.

Soon after, he accompanied Mo Amin to Ethiopia which was in the grip of the worst famine to hit the country in a century. It was the pictures and sound captured by Mo Amin and Abdul for the BBC and other organisations of the plight of tens of thousands of starving people led to the establishment of Live Aid. Bob Geldof saw the report that Michael Buerk filed for the BBC and was so moved that he organised Band Aid that recorded the global hit “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, followed in 1985 by Live Aid.

In 1994, with his wife pregnant with their second child, Abdul was sent by Mo Amin to Rwanda where the genocide had started. There Abdul and the Camerapix team witnessed many of the atrocities that occurred during the 100 days of the genocide. It was the first time that Abdul had seen tens of people being killed at the same time. In Somalia, it was just one killing a day, he recounts. In Rwanda, Abdul saw gangs killing ten people or more at a time, all in the most horrific ways.

He’s covered stories in his native Kenya, too, including the election violence in 2008. The two main tribes in the country fought running battles and up to 1,500 people died in the violence, with half a million or more displaced. Abdul was on hand, recording the sounds of battle on his own home turf.

Abdul is sanguine about the risks to his own life, saying that when his time is up, that’s just the way it is, however his life should end.

His wife supports him, despite not knowing if Abdul will come back from his latest assignment. She knows that capturing the sound that tells the most important stories is in Abdul’s blood, and that it is far more than just a job.

Sound is Abdul’s passion. Over the past 35 years, he has brought us some of the most momentous moments from Africa’s recent history.

Abdul shows no sign of hanging up his microphone. The Association for International Broadcasting is proud to recognise the work that Abdul has undertaken to help bring us the stories from Africa that need to be told. The AIB Founders Award pays tribute to a remarkable man – the Sound Man Abdul Rahman Ramadhan.