Statecraft & Independence
Landmark
Pio Gama Pinto
1927 – 1965
Independent Kenya's first political assassination
Landmark is level 2 of 4 in the Kenya Hall of Fame: a first that opened a door, or the pre-eminent figure of their generation in this country. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A journalist and socialist of Goan descent who armed and funded the independence movement, and was shot dead in 1965 — the first political killing of the independent state.
Pio Gama Pinto was born in Nairobi to a Goan family, worked briefly in India where he was involved in the movement against Portuguese rule in Goa, and returned to Kenya in 1949 to organise.
He did the unglamorous and dangerous parts of the independence struggle. He ran the printing presses that produced the movement's newspapers and pamphlets, raised funds, organised the trade unions, and supplied arms and logistics to the Mau Mau fighters in the forests — work that made him one of the very few non-African Kenyans the colonial state regarded as a serious threat. He was detained without trial in 1954 and held for six years on Manda Island and then in restriction at Kabarnet.
After release he helped run the legal and publicity campaign that kept Jomo Kenyatta's case in front of the world, and became a member of parliament at independence. He then pressed, inside KANU, for the land redistribution and the socialist programme the independence promises had implied, aligning with Oginga Odinga against the direction Kenyatta's circle was taking.
On 24 February 1965 he was shot dead in his car in the driveway of his Nairobi home, with his youngest daughter beside him. He was thirty-eight. It was the first political assassination in independent Kenya and set the pattern for those that followed — Tom Mboya in 1969, J. M. Kariuki in 1975 — none of which has been satisfactorily accounted for.
He did the unglamorous and dangerous parts of the independence struggle. He ran the printing presses that produced the movement's newspapers and pamphlets, raised funds, organised the trade unions, and supplied arms and logistics to the Mau Mau fighters in the forests — work that made him one of the very few non-African Kenyans the colonial state regarded as a serious threat. He was detained without trial in 1954 and held for six years on Manda Island and then in restriction at Kabarnet.
After release he helped run the legal and publicity campaign that kept Jomo Kenyatta's case in front of the world, and became a member of parliament at independence. He then pressed, inside KANU, for the land redistribution and the socialist programme the independence promises had implied, aligning with Oginga Odinga against the direction Kenyatta's circle was taking.
On 24 February 1965 he was shot dead in his car in the driveway of his Nairobi home, with his youngest daughter beside him. He was thirty-eight. It was the first political assassination in independent Kenya and set the pattern for those that followed — Tom Mboya in 1969, J. M. Kariuki in 1975 — none of which has been satisfactorily accounted for.
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