Of all the remarkable true-life lore of freedom fighters from Goa, who have stood up to demand equality in at least ten different countries, the case of Sita Valles in Angola is exceptionally dramatic.
As the veteran Portuguese journalist Leonor Figueiredo put it in
Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death(Goa 1556)– which was launched in an
excellent translation by D A Smith at the Goa Arts + Literature Festival in
2018 – this icon of anti-colonial resistance “lived an intense life during the
final years of fascist Portugal and the early years of newly independent
Angola, and her political journey was marked by important events in the
colonizing country and the former colony.”
Valles was just 26 when she was executed without a trial.
Figueiredo writes, “those who ordered [her] to be shot, those who tortured her,
those who pulled the trigger with refined malice – they belonged to the MPLA,
which Sita had fought for. Not even the then Angolan president Agostinho Neto
allowed her the right to defend herself.” It’s one of the saddest incidents of
those dark times: “The international backdrop was complex, polarized between
the two great powers, the USSR and the USA, each seeking spheres of influence.
The Cubans and Soviets were in Angola out of “international solidarity”; the
South African and Zairean troops present there had opposing political
objectives.”
This was 1977, close to the cessation of Cold War hostilities,
and indeed, Mikhail Gorbachev – the crucial architect of the end– took over the
USSR just 11 years afterwards. But at the time in Angola, it was one of the
most senseless episodes in the history of decolonization. Figueiredo quotes
Edgar Valles –the youngest of three Valles siblings, who later became a lawyer
in Portugal – that at least 20,000 people were massacred in “repression so
brutal that it has no parallel in any independent African country, including
the Sudan in 1971.”
Gorbachev died this past Tuesday, which provided an interesting
historical backdrop to meeting Edgar Valles in Panjim, to view the Solomon
Souza mural of his sister in her indelible avatar of the Pasionária
(passion-flower), that was painted as part of a Serendipity Arts Festival 2019
special project under my curation. The image instantly recalls the 1970s heyday
of revolutionary politics, but then the world changed so much so rapidly in
ways that could never have been predicted. At this very moment, for example,
Luanda is the world’s most expensive city, and the prime minister of Portugal
is an Overseas Citizen of India, and there are two more Goans in his Cabinet.
Edgar Valles told me he was involved with the anti-fascist
communist movement in Portugal and Angola like his sister (another brother was
also shot tragically in prison), although more recently he switched to the
Partido Socialista. He tells me if Sita had lived, she would have been an
important figure in post-colonial Angola “in an organic way.” It is a
tantalizing counterfactual: could the glamorous medical doctor have been
successful in representing cosmopolitan aspirations for the new Angola, like
her Goan countryman Aquino de Bragança managed for a while in Mozambique before
he died in a dubious 1986 plane crash?
The youngest Valles sibling knows all about what happened in
Mozambique, of course, as well as what happened in Kenya, where Pio Gama Pinto
and Fitz de Souza (along with the part-Maasai bridge figure of Joseph Murumbi
Zuzarte) substantially contributed to the making of the modern nations.
Nonetheless, Edgar says it never occurred to him to connect the dots between
these anti-colonial revolutionaries. And when it comes to Angola, specifically,
he says “the Goan community was overwhelmingly conservative.” They mostly went
along with the colonial hierarchy where racism was less de jure than de facto,
in an Apartheid-style state where most Goans were tolerated for their
complicity.
That was less the case with the Valles siblings, however. Edgar
told me his family’s anti-colonial sentiments were stirred by witnessing the
degraded work conditions for the native African staff of the agricultural
department premises where they lived (their father had a good bureaucratic job
afterearning his degree from the College of Agriculture in Poona). He says “we
used to talk with the workers”, as children normally do, and when she was just
13 or 14, Sita was asked by some of the workers to request higher wages, and
actually went ahead to complain about exploitation to the director. “He was
very angry afterwards.”
Figueiredo quotes Ana Maria Valles – Edgar’s wife – about her
late sister-in-law: “We have to accept that there are people incapable of
living a normal life. They need something in order to live outside of reality.
They’re either heroes or saints. Sita was like that. And people are how they
are.” Separately: “the only child spared [still] lives with the memory of two
brutally murdered siblings, a past that weighs heavily upon him. He still
suffers when 27 May comes around each year.” It can only be imagined what the
impact is on João Ernesto Van Dunem, the son of Sita (he was nicknamed Che
after the Argentinean revolutionary) who was only a few months old when his
mother was murdered. His uncle told me he hopes this 45-year-old professor of
economics, who is currently based in Portugal, will visit Goa soon, for the
first time in over two decades.
In
his 69 years, Edgar Valles has seen revolutions come and go, with great
personal cost to himself and his family. For just one momentous churn of
circumstances, India and Portugal have transformed from enemies incommunicado
to the poster-children of postcolonial relationships, and perhaps the best
friends in the modern history of Europe and India. He says“this has really been
amazing to experience. Until recently in Portugal, the idea of India was of an
undeveloped and dirty country. Now that has totally changed. India is very
respected, and Indians are thought about as brilliant in medicine, science and
technology. Now, I am very happy to say, the Goans of Portugal are proud of
being Indians.”