Recently the following item appeared on the Net, including Goanet: ‘At 20, Roque Correia Afonso (RCA) set up legal practice and emerged a brilliant advocate, with powerful oratory. He had a way with words, both spoken and written. He wrote copiously for Goan papers of the time. The ‘Heraldo’ had been slapped with a State suit. It had published extracts of a sermon by Fr. Sarmento Ozorio, an outspoken critic of Goa’s colonial rule. The editor, Dr. Antonio Maria da Cunha, sat in the courtroom, awaiting justice. When the public prosecutor concluded final arguments, it was RCA’s turn to defend the editor. “I have nothing to say,” RCA submitted, and sat down. The courtroom was stunned. The prosecutor wore a wide grin. The judge was bewildered. After a long pause, he asked RCA, “Have you nothing to say in defence of the accused?” RCA repeated his five words, but implored the judge to look at the accused, who was sound asleep. “Cunha’s conscience is so clean that he can peacefully sleep on a day when he could be sent to jail for years..” Cunha was acquitted. Records and proceedings of the case were published as a book, ‘A Opiniao da Justica e a Justica da Opiniao.’ by Luis de Menezes Braganza who had written the original report in the first place, anonymously, which had landed the editor in trouble.’
Somewhat bemused, I made enquiries online and offline which yielded the following results: I asked Antonio Maria da Cunha’s grandson, advertising icon Gerson da Cunha about this. He wrote back: "Family mythology holds that it was the paper's printing of Sarmento Ozorio's piece that landed my grandfather in Aguada [jail]. Perhaps he wasn't acquitted but got a light sentence. A large crowd greeted him and escorted him home when he was released." A retired judge who read the judgement of the case agreed with Gerson da Cunha. He told me that the magistrate had ruled that it was acceptable for an ethnic Portuguese priest to cast aspersions on the Portuguese but that for a Goan newspaper editor to publish a report on it amounted to a racist slur! New Statesman, London, reported: “... its editor, Captain Antonio Maria da Cunha, a retired Army doctor, was to face a court martial, while its sub-editor, Alvaro de Santa Rita Vaz, was to be tried in a civil court. The latter, a little fat man, trembled with indignation as he told me of his impending trial. He had just returned from Belgaum, the nearest town in British India….” and had nothing to do with it. It turns out that not only were Heraldo’s editors tried. The paper itself was suspended and its editor died exactly a month after it was lifted: BIBLIOGRAPHY OF INDO-PORTUGUESE PERIODICALS: Heraldo. Diário Da Manhã . Ed. Cunha, António Maria da. Nova Goa: Cunha, António Maria da., 1908-present . This daily was published from May 21, 1908 till January 26, 1947, when it was suspended by the Governor General of Portuguese India. British India achieved its independence from August 15, 1947. This suspension continued till April 30, 1947. There were following editors for this long daily. The first publisher & editor was António Maria da Cunha, who published it at the private printing press out of Nova Goa. He was born in Arporá on July 14, 1863 in concelho de Bardês. He was a captain and medic and died on May 30, 1947. He defended his thesis in the medical school of Portuguese India. The topic of his thesis was "Critical essay on etiological diagnosis of Prostatic ischuria". In 1892 he was awarded the degree titled Cavaleiro da Ordem Militar de Nossa Senhora da Conceição de Vila Viçosa" for his services during the military operations in Bissau. From September 1901 till May 1908, he was a journalist in O Heraldo. However from 1908, he founded the daily with the same title. One of his critical works was "A evolução do jornalismo na Índia Portuguesa" that was published in Nova Goa by Imprensa Nacional in 1923. After his death…, Álvaro de Santa Rita Vás continued as editor. In its 53 year on April 15, 1962 Heraldo stopped publication…. " Antonio Maria da Cunha was an eminent journalist who founded O Heraldo in 1900 and when he had differences of opinion with the owners, resigned and launched his own daily Heraldo (without the definite article O) in 1908 which he owned and edited until his death in 1947. His book Evolution of Journalism in Portuguese India is still the basic reference book for historians on the subject. When George V, King of England visited India in 1911 for his coronation at the Delhi Darbar, da Cunha covered the event with a series of dispatches published in Heraldo and then included them in his massive survey of Indian history: India Antiga e Moderna, now digitized by the University of Aveiro and available online at http://memoria-africa.ua.pt/DesktopModules/MABDImg/ShowImage.aspx?q=/Oriente-Historia/IndiaAntigaEModerna&p=1 in the section Goa-Historia of the Biblioteca Digital. António Maria da Cunha’s successor at Heraldo, grandnephew Álvaro de Santa Rita Vaz was a popular journalist rather than a scholar (“a vida do jornal [Heraldo], e que após o seu [Antonio Maria da Cunha] falecimento em 1947 foi mantida pelo seu redactor principal, o jornalista Álvaro de Santa Rita Vaz. Pena fácil e colorida, no artigo do fundo ou na crónica literária, Santa Rita Vaz honrou a tradição ...” Annali - Sezione romanza, Volumes 7-8? - Page 115). An acquaintance recalls: “Whenever I visited him in his house which doubled as his office he would be sitting at his desk talking to visitors while at the same time reading news agency dispatches and similar material. He would then set the dispatches aside and write his own ‘copy’ for the paper. As he reached the end of each page he would send it down to the printer in the basement and follow it up with the next page and so on…. “Many important functions in Panjim, Goa’s capital, were held at the Clube Nacional. Alvaro, sitting in the audience, would write on his knee a report of the event as it occurred. When completed, he would roll it into a tube, tie it up with a string and, making sure no one saw him, drop it from the veranda of the Club which was on the first floor, down on the road where his printer was waiting to catch it! Alvaro would stay back at the Club for dinner along with other journalists and guests. Thus the news item appeared on the next day in Heraldo while his competitors carried it a day later, wondering how Heraldo had managed to beat them to it. “Much that he wrote, however, was unsigned. For example he wrote an article which covered more than the entire front page of the Heraldo broadsheet on the British novelist W. Somerset Maugham when he visited Goa in 1938. It described how the writer went in a horse carriage to pick up the novelist from Hotel Republica (which is still running) opposite Adil Khan palace and took him to the Heraldo building via the Abbe Faria statue. From its first floor office Maugham could admire the Municipal Garden Garcia da Orta. He was introduced to the editor Antonio Maria da Cunha with whom he had tea, visited the printing press and viewed important issues of the paper. And was finally taken back to the hotel. The article, however, was unsigned and I’d never had known who had written if I hadn’t been told about it decades later by someone who had worked there.” Marcos Gomes Catao, nephew of the eminent Church historian Conego F. X. Gomes Catao, wrote: ‘HERALDO [was] a paper one started on at a very tender age so homely in its coverage. We went there to look for 'Arrivals & Departures' with news of GOANS coming on leave from Africa or India or leaving at the end of it; the panegyrics of the dead in the Obituary notice, so romantically titled Goivos e Perpetuas ( i.e. Gillyflower blossoms & Everlasting flower)’. By the 1950s a famous writer’s tongue-in-cheek comment became famous and kept making the rounds: “Goans can forgo anything but not St. Francis Xavier, Heraldo and pork” for their spiritual, intellectual and physical nourishment.
