Pio Gama Pinto (31 March 192 to 24 February 1965)^[1] was a Kenyan journalist, politician and freedom fighter. He was a socialist leader who dedicated his life to the liberation of the Kenyan people and became independent Kenya’s first martyr in 1965. He was born in Nairobi to a family of Konkani Goan Catholic descent. He studied science at Karnatak College, Dharwar, India, for two years before joining the Indian Air Force in 1944 as an apprentice ground engineer. He then took up a job in the Posts and Telegraph office in Bombay, participated in a general strike and became a founding member of the Goa National Congress whose aim was the liberation of Goa from Portuguese rule. His political activism soon made it necessary for him to return to Kenya in 1949 to avoid being arrested and deported to the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde.

After a succession of clerical jobs, he became involved in local politics aimed at overthrowing British colonial rule in Kenya. He turned to journalism and worked with the Colonial Times and the Daily Chronicle. In 1954, five months after his marriage to Emma Dias, he was rounded up in the notorious Operation Anvil and spent the next four years in detention on Manda Island. He was kept in confinement from early 1958 until October 1959 at Kabarnet. In 1960 he founded the Kenya African National Union (KANU) newspaper Sauti Ya KANU, and later, Pan African Press, of which he subsequently became Director and Secretary. Pinto played an active role in campaigning for KANU during the 1961 elections which it won. In 1963 he was elected a Member of the Central Legislative Assembly and in July 1964 was appointed a Specially Elected Member of the House of Representatives. He worked to establish the Lumumba Institute in 1964 to train KANU party officials.

On 24 February 1965, at the age of 38, Pinto was shot and killed at close range in the driveway of his home in Nairobi. His daughter was in his car when he was shot. Pinto was the first Kenyan politician to be assassinated after Independence. He was survived by his wife, Emma and his three daughters Linda, Malusha and Tereshka. The assassination was clearly politically motivated because of his political opposition to the growing neo-colonialisation of Kenya under Jomo Kenyatta’s regime.

Pio Pinto’s colleagues established a Pinto Trust Fund to help his widow and family to which a number of governments, including China and Tanzania, contributed. In September 1965, his widow, Emma Gama Pinto ,was invited to Santiago, Chile, to receive a posthumous prize awarded to her husband by the International Organisation of Journalists for his contribution to journalism and to the liberation of African countries from foreign domination and exploitation. In 2008, Kenya released a series of four stamps titled Heroes of Kenya, one of which depicted Pinto.