https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/The-Ballad-of-Edgar-and-Sita/193593
Of all the remarkable true-life lore of freedom fighters from Goa, who have stood up to demand equality in at least ten different countries, the case of Sita Valles in Angola is exceptionally dramatic. As the veteran Portuguese journalist Leonor Figueiredo put it in *Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death* (Goa 1556) – which was launched in an excellent translation by D. A. Smith at the Goa Arts + Literature Festival in 2018 – this icon of anti-colonial resistance “lived an intense life during the final years of fascist Portugal and the early years of newly independent Angola, and her political journey was marked by important events in the colonizing country and the former colony.” Valles was just 26 when she was executed without a trial. Figueiredo writes, “those who ordered [her] to be shot, those who tortured her, those who pulled the trigger with refined malice – they belonged to the MPLA, which Sita had fought for. Not even the then Angolan president Agostinho Neto allowed her the right to defend herself.” It’s one of the saddest incidents of those dark times: “The international backdrop was complex, polarized between the two great powers, the USSR and the USA, each seeking spheres of influence. The Cubans and Soviets were in Angola out of “international solidarity”; the South African and Zairean troops present there had opposing political objectives.” This was 1977, close to the cessation of Cold War hostilities, and indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev – the crucial architect of the end – took over the USSR just 11 years afterwards. But at the time in Angola, it was one of the most senseless episodes in the history of decolonization. Figueiredo quotes Edgar Valles – the youngest of three Valles siblings, who later became a lawyer in Portugal – that at least 20,000 people were massacred in “repression so brutal that it has no parallel in any independent African country, including the Sudan in 1971.” Gorbachev died this past Tuesday, which provided an interesting historical backdrop to meeting Edgar Valles in Panjim, to view the Solomon Souza mural of his sister in her indelible avatar of the Pasionára (passion-flower), that was painted as part of a Serendipity Arts Festival 2019 special project under my curation. The image instantly recalls the 1970s heyday of revolutionary politics, but then the world changed so much so rapidly in ways that could never have been predicted. At this very moment, for example, Luanda is the world’s most expensive city, and the prime minister of Portugal is an Overseas Citizen of India, and there are two more Goans in his Cabinet. Edgar Valles told me he was involved with the anti-fascist communist movement in Portugal and Angola like his sister (another brother was also shot tragically in prison), although more recently he switched to the Partido Socialista. He tells me if Sita had lived, she would have been an important figure in post-colonial Angola “in an organic way.” It is a tantalizing counterfactual: could the glamorous medical doctor have been successful in representing cosmopolitan aspirations for the new Angola, like her Goan countryman Aquino de Bragança managed for a while in Mozambique before he died in a dubious 1986 plane crash? The youngest Valles sibling knows all about what happened in Mozambique, of course, as well as what happened in Kenya, where Pio Gama Pinto and Fitz de Souza (along with the part-Maasai bridge figure of Joseph Murumbi Zuzarte) substantially contributed to the making of the modern nations. Nonetheless, Edgar says it never occurred to him to connect the dots between these anti-colonial revolutionaries. And when it comes to Angola, specifically, he says “the Goan community was overwhelmingly conservative.” They mostly went along with the colonial hierarchy where racism was less de jure than de facto, in an Apartheid-style state where most Goans were tolerated for their complicity. That was less the case with the Valles siblings, however. Edgar told me his family’s anti-colonial sentiments were stirred by witnessing the degraded work conditions for the native African staff of the agricultural department premises where they lived (their father had a good bureaucratic job after earning his degree from the College of Agriculture in Poona). He says “we used to talk with the workers”, as children normally do, and when she was just 13 or 14, Sita was asked by some of the workers to request higher wages, and actually went ahead to complain about exploitation to the director. “He was very angry afterwards.” Figueiredo quotes Ana Maria Valles – Edgar’s wife – about her late sister-in-law: “We have to accept that there are people incapable of living a normal life. They need something in order to live outside of reality. They’re either heroes or saints. Sita was like that. And people are how they are.” Separately: “the only child spared [still] lives with the memory of two brutally murdered siblings, a past that weighs heavily upon him. He still suffers when 27 May comes around each year.” It can only be imagined what the impact is on João Ernesto Van Dunem, the son of Sita (he was nicknamed Che after the Argentinean revolutionary) who was only a few months old when his mother was murdered. His uncle told me he hopes this 45-year-old professor of economics, who is currently based in Portugal, will visit Goa soon, for the first time in over two decades. In his 69 years, Edgar Valles has seen revolutions come and go, with great personal cost to himself and his family. For just one momentous churn of circumstances, India and Portugal have transformed from enemies incommunicado to the poster-children of postcolonial relationships, and perhaps the best friends in the modern history of Europe and India. He says “this has really been amazing to experience. Until recently in Portugal, the idea of India was of an undeveloped and dirty country. Now that has totally changed. India is very respected, and Indians are thought about as brilliant in medicine, science and technology. Now, I am very happy to say, the Goans of Portugal are proud of being Indians.”
