Pio Gama Pinto

Pio Gama Pinto was born in Nairobi on the thirty-first of March 1927, the son of Goan immigrant parents — his father was a clerk at the Treasury of the colonial government. He took his early education at Saint Teresa's Boys School in Nairobi and his university studies at Karnataka College in Dharwad, India, from 1944 to 1949 — where he became active in the post-independence Indian socialist movement under Jayaprakash Narayan.

He returned to Kenya in 1949 and entered Kenyan trade-union and nationalist organizing through the Kenya Indian Congress. He worked alongside Kenyan Asian and African leaders to financially and operationally support the Mau Mau forest fighters under Dedan Kimathi (also placed in this archive), Bildad Kaggia (also placed in this archive), and others.

He was arrested by the British colonial authority in 1954 under the Emergency Regulations and detained without trial on Manda Island for four years (1954-58). His detention was unaccompanied by formal charges. He continued political organizing on release through legal challenges against the colonial detention system.

After Kenyan independence in 1963 he was elected a specially nominated Member of Parliament and served as one of the principal voices of the radical wing of the Kenya African National Union — alongside Bildad Kaggia, Achieng' Oneko, and the future Vice President Oginga Odinga. He opposed the Kenyatta government's accommodation with the British settler land-tenure system and with U.S. and Western commercial interests.

He was assassinated outside his Nairobi home on the twenty-fourth of February 1965 by gunmen never satisfactorily identified or prosecuted. He was thirty-seven. He is the first Member of Parliament assassinated in independent Kenya — and remains the only one assassinated for explicitly political reasons.

He is honored here as the Goan-Kenyan socialist whose assassination marked the closure of radical Kenyan independence politics.