BLACK HISTORY MONTH:Lest we forget -Pio Gama Pinto

What do you know about this Kenyan nationalist? He founded The Pan African Press, Ltd which published Sauti Ya Mwafrika, Pan Africa and the Nyanza Times.
He was the first matyr of independent Kenya . Assassinated in 24th Feb 1965, 3 days after Malcom X was assassinated (they had met before huku vumbistan in 1959 and were offed by the same “interests”). The first real (not fake) HUSTLER cross DYNASTY ya Kenya.

Pinto was a Kenyan of Goan descent who was intimately involved with the freedom struggle. 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 Bildad Kaggia and Fred Kubai.

An accomplished journalist and propagandist, Pinto put his enormous energies to publicising the cause of African freedom through strident anti-government political pamphlets and press articles.

When in 1952 the colonial government declared a state of emergency and detained most African leaders, he mobilised resources for the Mau Mau in Nairobi.

In 1954, the British authorities arrested and deported him to Manda Island where he was the only Indian. In 1958 he was moved from Manda and subjected to a further year of restriction in the Rift Valley Province.

On being freed in 1959, Pinto flung himself back into politics, joining hands with a number of Indian politicians to marshal support for the African nationalist struggle.

He would later join Kanu and go on to become manager of the party’s paper, Sauti ya Kanu. When the paper was expanded and renamed PanAfrica, he became its editor-in-chief. In 1963 he was elected as one of Kenya’s representatives in the Central Legislative Assembly of the East African Common Services Organisation.

In July the following year, Pinto entered Kenya’s Parliament as a Specially Elected Member.

In 1964 Pinto joined Dennis Akumu and other disgruntled individuals in the trade union movement to oppose the leadership of the American-leaning Tom Mboya. Late that year, Pinto would be involved in raising money from the Soviet Union to set up the Lumumba Institute to train Kanu cadres in organisational and ideological skills.

He was reportedly later told his life was in danger because powerful forces in government were unhappy with his activities, but he refused to flee the country. He was shot in 1965 as he drove out of his Westlands home in Nairobi. Kisilu Mutua was arrested and convicted for the killing. Pinto’s was the first post-independence assassination in Kenya.
Pio Gama Pinto had to die because he was perhaps the near perfect African socialist in a Kenya that was probably 95 per cent capitalist.
During the struggle for independence he had been detained at Manda Island .
He was virtually at war with the capitalist conspirators, largely accused of land-grabbing, that included Kenya’s first President Jomo Kenyatta and his “Kiambu mafia”, and the gods of the Western capitalism led by the US and British governments.

The British government, through the Settlement Transfer Fund Schemes, bankrolled the buying of acres of choice arable and prime coastal land, some of which Kenyatta was then said to have resold to his Central Kenya cohorts at prices below what the government had paid.

Thus it can be said it was the Kenyan nation that paid for the creation of the 10 or so millionaires and 10 million beggars, as another hero, JM Kariuki – assassinated in 1975 – once put it.

The then deputy speaker of Parliament, Dr Fitz de Souza, who reportedly witnessed Pinto engaging in a shouting match with Kenyatta in the corridors of the House, said later that Pinto was killed by the “powers that be”.

The shouting match was over Sessional Paper No 10, which has been the subject of subsequent revision but at the time virtually legalised capitalism as Kenya’s economic lingua franca.

Pinto, at the insistence of Jaramogi, then vice-president, was going to write amendments which would have been tantamount to a parliamentary challenge to Kenyatta’s leadership.
Pinto was confident that Kenyatta was not capable of killing him. Rosario noted in his writing that his brother had good reason for such faith. “Pio had worked tirelessly for Kenyatta’s release and had spent his last cent extending and refurbishing Kenyatta’s home. In the process he had antagonised those friends who did not want Kenyatta released. Some of them went on to become ministers in the Kenyatta government,”

The home guards really fcked kenya up for their queen

@mbwakali unaweza kuwa na any biographies or auto bios za kenyan politicians sana sana moi kenyatta 1(ive read facing mt kenya already) odinga 1 in pdf uniskumie.
Na musevenis original sowing the mustard sana.
Thanks in advance.

Story yote kutoka Jomo hadi Kibaki iko hapa a Nation Media Group/Kenya History & Biographies Co. Ltd. co-production ; written, produced and directed by Hilary Ng’weno

[SIZE=7]Makers of a nation : the men and women in Kenya’s history.
Makers of a nation : the men and women in Kenya's history. George Saitoti in SearchWorks catalog [/SIZE]

Thanks. Ive seen some of the clips on youtube but books are more intimate and some of the books were serialised kiasi in the Nation Newspaper years ago.

Nina tamaa ya kusoma hizo books from cover to cover ndio nimalize hizo story ni quell my curiosity.

But thanks sana.

Will do . I also have Moi’s hard copy Kenyan African Nationalism . One of the shitiest book I’ve read to date…full of spelling mistakes and mharo …anyhow Leo nimesoma hii NEVER BE SILENT
http://eprints.rclis.org/8127/1/NBS_Final_13June2006.pdf

Ever heard of a socialist purge e.g the 1976 red terror in Ethiopia?

Kenyatta probably avoided a fate similar to that of his friend Haile Sellasie in Ethiopia.