‘If I have been extinguished, yet there rise a thousand beacons from the Spark I bore ‘

Walking from Mathare Valley through Mau Mau Road, as you cross the foot bridge along Thika Road, that connects Mathare and City Park cemetery where Pio Gama Pinto was buried, you meet hundreds of working class people coming from middle class Parklands Estate, walking  as they pass through Pio Gama Pinto Grave adjacent to the Joseph and Sheila Murumbi Mausoleum heading back to Mathare slums where Pio Gama Pinto helped set up a Mau Mau War Council City headquarters before he was taken to detention in 1954. This serves as a reminder that the struggle for  social justice is still unfinished. As Comrade Firoze Manji has written in Pio Gama Pinto: Kenyans Unsung Martyrs: there is a similarity between Pio Gama Pinto’s memory with Amilcar Cabral Mausoleum, located inside military headquarters in Guinea-Bissau, a clear demonstration that those who assassinated Cabral feared him in life and in death. Cabral was one of the greatest Africa revolutionary intellectuals and freedom fighters. He was assassinated before the dawn of Guinea-Bissau independence.

Firoze Manji has argued that ‘Memorials are more about the future than they are about the past’.^[1] Thus, so long as our people lack the basic need food, housing, education and human dignity, the grave of Pio Gama Pinto and Amilcar Cabral will continue being the memory of the future generation of freedom fighters and revolutionary shrine hope that spark resistance against imperialism and struggle for social justice and human rights in Kenya and Africa.

On February 24, 2021, it was 56 years since Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated. Comrades from Mathare Social justice Centre and the Revolutionary Socialist league and Ukombozi Library gathered again at the Pio Gama Pinto grave for reflections, reading poems, engaging in political education and book reading in memory of Pinto as we forged organic intellectuals for the liberation struggles. We reflected on the internationalists who continue to inspire our community struggles and resistance against the neoliberal economy and imperialism, that has continued to dehumanize our people in Kenya and Africa a struggle that Pinto planted seeds of resistance through Mau Mau Movement and Pan Africanism.

Pio Gama Pinto was a great political organizer and thinker for Mau Mau liberation movement. The Pan African Movement, in its formative stages of Africa’s liberation movement, Pinto played great role in resource mobilization and helping to set up organizations to ground freedom struggle with Pan-African perspectives. Through his writings, memorandums and letters to comrades and international solidarity networks, Pinto amplified the struggles of Mau Mau and Pan Africanism. Pinto was well-read and active in the international solidarity movement of Black People in the USA and he was in contact with great revolutionary Black people in the struggle such as Malcom X. And when Malcom visited Kenya in 1959, he was hosted by Pinto in his house in Westland. Together they planned on how to unify the Pan–African Movement with Black people struggle against racism and police violence in USA. Pio Gama Pinto was also instrumental in fundraising for air tickets for Patrice Lumumba, to travel to Ghana in 1958, during the All African Conference that was organized by Kwame Nkurumah for Africa liberation movement. The seeds of Pan–African Movement and Africa Union was sowed in the all African conference,

Pinto was great Pan–Africanist and freedom fighter for Africa that today is remembered more in Pan African movement internationally than in his home country Kenya. Hence the title of the book, Kenya’s Unsung Martyr where his contribution and sacrifice, historical role was obscured by Jomo Kenyatta regime which betrayed the freedom struggle, and created economic model of capitalism which manifest in poverty and homelessness, police killings and hunger, as symbolized in the lives of people in Mathare, the home in which Pinto planted seeds of resistance through the Mau Mau Movement.

The spark that Pio Gama Pinto bore today inspires a new generation of social justice activist such as Mathare Social Justice Centre, which continues with the struggle of Mau Mau and of the ambitions of Pio Gama Pinto, the struggle for land, education and housing, and dignified life. We learn great lessons from Pio Gama Pinto that it’s important to build a political instrument like a social justice movement, a political Party with ideological clarity. As a socialist, as part of nurturing and building cadres for the political struggle, Pinto was committed to this. He was part of formation of Kenya Study circle in early 1950s that were the seeds of political organizing, during the embryonic development of nationalist political movement under Kenya African Union. The Study circle organically linked the political parties, trade unions and social organizations.

These are great political lessons for youth in Kenya to learn as to fight against ethnic mobilization and politics of hate and bankrupt of ideas. The social justice movement and Community Social Justice Centers must learn these lessons. Pio Gama Pinto’s political philosophy and socialist theory must be the basis for study cells in community social justice centers as part of political education and grounding the movement cadres with ideological clarity and as part of building a class consciousness to members of the movement. This is the greatest homage that we can bestow to the great martyr of Kenya freedom struggle, Pio Gama Pinto.

Pio Gama Pinto also helped to set up Lumumba Institute as part of a political school for ideological training for cadres of the political movement, As political movements and Social Justice Centre Working Group, we must learn about the struggle and history of Pio Gama Pinto in grounding our social justice movement, with ideological clarity, commitment, establishing permanent political basic structure in the grassroots that can root the movement for democratic state in Kenya. These must be founded on social justice, a generation of alternative political leadership with solid foundation for the next 50 years as we were advised by Comrade Adwok Nyamba, the freedom fighter from Sudan liberation movement SPLA, He gave a lecture at the Mathare Social Justice Centre hall in 2020 on the challenges of liberation movement in Africa in the last 50 years of Africa independence, the pitfalls of Kenya liberation struggle and the failure to build political organization with ideological base, which was halted after assassination of Pio Gama Pinto. What was created was neocolonial communal violence, divisive ethnic politics, corruptions that breeds social injustices and human rights violations since independence.

The social justice movement must intensify our community struggle in building social justice centers with cadres that have developed working class consciousness and dedication as Pio Gama Pinto selflessness. We must read widely about our history of resistance and of the betrayals, to be able to anchor our movement in the path of building a democratic state in Kenya with the dream of Pio Gama Pinto of socialism as part of social justice and human rights, and hence the spark of Pinto bore lives in our struggle and our memory.

Pinto’s family had deep roots in both India and Kenya. Rosario’s daughter, Audrey Da Gama, said in a recent interview: ‘My grandfather, Anton Filipe Da Gama Pinto, worked for the British civil service in Nyeri, Kenya, from 1919 to 1941. Pinto, Sevigne and my dad were born in Kenya, but educated in India.’