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St. Mary's Convent High school, Mapusa is staging a play titled "Lion King"
December 1, 2007 - Hanuman Hall, Mapusa
to fundraise for a false ceiling for the school hall
& upgrading the school playground
Headmistress Sr. Namika A.C. / Teacher Mrs. Sonia Noronha
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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Pinto, the master strategist among Kenya's radicals
Story by HILLARY NG'WENO
Publication Date: 11/26/2007
In this third part of the series, HILLARY NG'WENO continues his
examination of the men, women, events and political forces that have
shaped Kenya.
One noticeable aspect of the lead-up to the December 27 General
Election is the seeming absence of any major ideological differences
between the contending candidates or their parties. The key issue is
ethnicity.
In any particular political debate in Kenya today, one can easily
guess a protagonist's stance merely by taking note of his or her
ethnic origin.
It has not always been like that. There was a time when ideology
mattered. At independence there was a conservative camp amongst Kenyan
leaders, a camp associated with the county's first President, Jomo
Kenyatta and the ruling Kenya African National Union's first secretary
general Tom Mboya, and there was a radical camp associated with Oginga
Odinga, Kenya's first vice president, and a number of Kenyatta's
former colleagues in pre-independence political detention under
British colonial rule - among them Achieng Oneko, Bildad Kaggia and
Fred Kubai. The story of Kenya's politics during the first five or six
years of independence is the story of the bitter fight to the death
between the two ideologies and the subsequent emergence of a dominant
new camp that has held sway in the country's life ever since.
In every war, there are strategists. They are usually backroom men or
women, faceless, often nameless, but indispensable for the proper
conduct of any war. If in the conservative camp, one was never quite
sure who the true master strategist was, Kenyatta or Mboya, there was
no doubt that the real brains amongst the radicals was Pio Gama Pinto,
one of three Kenyans of Goan descent who were so intimately involved
with Kenya's freedom struggle. The second was Fitz de Souza, who
together with the late Achhroo Kapila, were the only Kenyans in the
team of lawyers who defended Kenyatta and his colleagues at the
Kapenguria trial. The third was Mr Joseph Murumbi, Kenya's first
Minister for Foreign Affairs and the country's second Vice President.
Born in 1927 of Goan parents in Nairobi, Pinto was educated in India
where he had an early taste of politics in the Goan National Congress
then locked in a bitter struggle for Goa's independence from
Portuguese rule. He was only 19 when he returned to Kenya in 1946 and
threw himself into local politics, making friends with Kenya African
Union leaders, especially radical ones like Kaggia and Kubai. Through
Kubai and Pinto he would acquire a lasting interest in trade union
affairs.
But it is as a freedom fighter that Pinto is remembered most. An
accomplished journalist and propagandist, Pinto put his enormous
energies to publicizing the cause of African freedom through strident
anti-government political pamphlets and press articles, including
letters to the East African Standard. When in 1952 colonial government
declared a state of emergency and detained most African leaders,
including Kenyatta, Pinto went into more active duty on behalf of the
freedom struggle. He helped set up a Mau Mau War Council city
headquarters in the Mathare area of Nairobi and arranged for the
supply of money and a cache of arms to hundreds of youths the council
had recruited into the movement to fight in the Nyandarua forest.
In 1954, the British authorities arrested and deported him to Manda
Island where he was the only Indian amongst several African deportees.
In 1958 he was moved from Manda and subjected to a further year of
restriction at Kabarnet in the Rift Valley Province.
Nationalist struggle
On being freed in August 1959, Pinto flung himself back into politics,
joining hands with a number of Indian politicians to form the Kenya
Freedom Party whose main purpose was to marshal the support of the
Indian community for the African nationalist struggle. He would later
join Kanu and go on to become manager of the party's organ, Sauti ya
Kanu.
When the paper was expanded and renamed PanAfrica, he became its
editor in chief. Through PanAfrica Pinto propagated his increasingly
socialist views, that were close to those of his major radical
colleagues in Kanu – Odinga, Kaggia, Kubai and Murumbi. In 1963 this
radical Kanu leadership helped to get him elected as one of Kenya's
representatives in the Central Legislative Assembly of the East
African Common Services Organisation that grouped Kenya, Uganda and
Tanganyika. In July the following year, Pinto entered Kenya's
Parliament as a Specially Elected Member. He was 37. Mboya was three
years younger.
For the next six months Pinto and Mboya would lock horns at many
twists and turns, albeit behind the scenes. In 1964 Pinto joined
Dennis Akumu and other disgruntled former Mboya allies in the trade
union movement to set up the Kenya African Workers Congress (KAWC) to
challenge Mboya's American financed Kenya Federation of Labour.
Late that year, Pinto would help raise money from the Soviet Union and
help set up the Lumumba Institute. It was launched in December 1964
with the aim of training Kanu cadres in organisational and ideological
skills. It was meant to counter Mboya's East African Institute of
Social and Cultural Affairs which had been set up with American
financing only a few months earlier.
Conservatives and radicals
The Lumumba Institute board of management was made up of Kanu's
leading radicals. Kaggia was chairman. Serving on the board with
Kaggia were Pinto, Oneko, Kubai, Murumbi and Paul Ngei. On the
institute's staff were two Russian lecturers. The scene was set for a
major battle between Kanu conservatives and radicals for the hearts
and souls of Kenyans. The battle never did take place
Within weeks of the Lumumba Institute opening its doors to its first
intake of Kanu cadres, Kenyatta and his close conservative associates
were shocked to learn that what was being taught was scientific
socialism, or in plain words, communism. In Parliament voices were
raised against the Institute and against Kanu radicals. By January
1965 a number of Odinga's allies were getting reports that they were
under close surveillance from the Special Branch or intelligence arm
of the police. Close friends of Pinto told him that his life was in
danger and advised him to lie low or even leave the country altogether
for a while. Murumbi, Kenyatta's Foreign Minister, suggested to Pinto
that he could even go to Mozambique and help in Frelimo's freedom
struggle there against the Portuguese colonial rulers.
Pinto did leave Nairobi to spend some time in Mombasa in the hope that
things would be fine by the time he came back home. He returned to the
city on February 23rd. The following morning, he was shot dead by a
gunman as he drove out of his driveway at his Westlands home.
All the Kanu radicals, led by Odinga, were at Pinto's funeral. They
eulogised him as a fallen hero who stood for the rights of Kenya's
poor and freedom fighters. It would not be long before the magnitude
of their loss became apparent. For, Pinto's death marked the beginning
of the collapse of Kenya's radical political left. Thereafter, without
a master strategist to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of the
conservative adversaries, and to study the political terrain and map
out when, how and where to engage the enemy in battle, Odinga and his
friends soon began to make tactical blunders. By the end of 1966, they
had been outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the conservatives.
http://www.nationmedia.com/dailynation/nmgcontententry.asp?category_id=39&newsid=111330
--
DEV BOREM KORUM.
Gabe Menezes.
London, England
