26 Nov 2020  |   05:28am IST

Thus always to tyrants

Thus always to tyrants

Selma Carvalho

Sic semper tyrannis (thus always to tyrants). Yet again, the Latin phrase proved right, as history consigned to its dustbin the presidency of Donald Trump. It ushered in Joe Biden as the new president elect of the United States but perhaps more historic and significant was Kamala Harris’s victory, the first woman, the first Black woman, and the first Asian woman to become the vice-president elect of the United States. Bear in mind, women acquired suffrage (right to vote) in 1920 in America, a mere hundred years ago and effective suffrage for Black women only goes far back as 1965. Bear also in mind that for most part of the 20th century America prohibited the settlement of Asians and denied them citizenship. Kamala wore white for her acceptance speech, in honour of the suffragette movement which made possible the right to vote for women in the western world. Kamala in some small measure rights two wrongs in American history—the brutal subjugation of Black Americans through slavery and the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917 which sought to restrict Asian entry into America, mitigated only in 1952. 

In the last quarter of this year, we sadly bid farewell to another formidable woman, Emma Gama-Pinto, the wife of Goan-Kenyan nationalist Pio Gama-Pinto, who died in Canada on 29 October 2020.  I first spoke to Emma about eleven years ago. I was just starting out on a writing career. Our common friend and owner of Goan Voice UK, Eddie Fernandes, had set up a telephone interview for us. I had no credentials to speak of; indeed, my understanding of the Goan presence in East Africa at that time was sketchy. Yet, she agreed to give me the interview and accorded me the respect, I had not yet earned. She was forthright and incredibly candid, about her life as the wife of a nationalist who was assassinated in 1965 in Kenya. 

Emma arrived in Nairobi in 1953. On first meeting Pio, she noticed he had a slight stoop and walked with his shoulders bent forward. Perhaps to disguise his nervousness, he began talking about the population statistics of Jamshedpur, Emma’s home-town in India. On 9 January 1954, the couple wed at Parklands Catholic Church. Five months into their marriage, Pio was arrested for his involvement with the Mau Mau resistance movement. Only in January of 1958, was Pio released from detention and transferred to Kabarnet, to be held under Restriction Orders, a sort of house-arrest under supervision of District Commissioner, Butler. Emma decided to join him there, an act which earned her much respect.

At the time I spoke to Emma, she had entrusted the task of writing Pio’s biography to a Goan academic who passed away in 2010. Emma was losing hope as the academic had not made much progress. In any case, anyone attempting such an oeuvre would have required extensive financial resources to carry out research in Goa, Nairobi, England and Canada. Interest and assistance to the Gama-Pinto family should have been marshalled by the Goan community in order to preserve a unique piece of our historical past. With Emma’s passing, it is possibly now past the point where an authoritative biography on Pio’s life can emerge.

Another woman of courage who had a milestone this last quarter is Edila Gaitonde, wife of the Goan freedom fighter Pundalik Gaitonde, who celebrated her birth centenary. I got to know Edila when she lived in London, and invited me over to record her story. Later, I wrote the introduction to her collection of short stories titled, Tulsi (Goa 1556, 2011). 

Edila was born on 3 November, 1920, to Adelaide Albertina Brum and Julio Dutra Andrade, on the almost mystical Faial Island in the Azores—an archipelago of islands just off the coast of Portugal. By 1947, Edila, living in Lisbon, was thoroughly immersed in her studies. Exhaustion brought about a prolonged bout of ill-health. Knowing only a few doctors in Lisbon, her cousin and childhood friend Humberto, summoned a young promising Indian doctor Pundalik Gaitonde, who diagnosed Edila with double pleurisy, an inflammation of the lungs. 

The year-long recovery might have been depressing for a young girl, full of life and vitality, except for the fact that Edila had fallen in love with her doctor. They were married in 1948, making Edila the first Catholic Portuguese woman to marry a Hindu Goan man. Pundalik was arrested in 1954, and deported to Portugal for protesting the Portuguese presence in Goa. Edila travelled with him. He was initially detained in the infamous Aljube prison in Lisbon and later kept under house-arrest in Oporto. When he was released in 1955, Pundalik and Edila returned to India, and continued to lobby for the liberation of Goa, using all their persuasive powers to bend the ears of influential politicians in New Delhi, specifically Jawaharlal Nehru.

What these three women have in common is their courage in standing up to tyrants; in Kamala’s case, the dysfunctional presidency of Donald Trump; in Emma’s case the atrocities of British colonialism in Kenya, and in Edila’s case the despotism of Portugal’s prime-minister Antonio Salazar, who repeatedly denied Goans their basic right to freedom. The role of women in history is often neglected, but they have been no less instrumental in doing away with tyrants than men. Their activism, perhaps, is not always direct, but it takes tremendous courage to support the political convictions of one’s husband and bear the tremendous personal loss, it often brings.

(The writer is the author of Goan Pioneers of East Africa)


IDhar UDHAR

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