Background
Pinto was born in Nairobi on 31 March 1927 to Goan parents. His father was an official in the colonial government of Kenya.
Pinto was born in Nairobi on 31 March 1927 to Goan parents. His father was an official in the colonial government of Kenya.
At age eight, he was sent to India for his education and spent the next nine years there, passing his matriculation exams at Saint Joseph"s High School, Arpora and then studying science at Karnatak College, Dharwar for two years before joining the Indian Air Force in 1944 as an apprentice ground engineer When only seventeen, he started an agitation in Bombay against the Portuguese colonial occupation of Goa. His political activism soon made it necessary for him to return to Kenya to avoid being arrested and deported to the Tarrafal concentration camp in Cape Verde.
He turned to journalism and worked with the Colonial Times and the Daily Chronicle.
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.
In Nairobi, on February 25, 1965, Pinto was shot at very close range on the driveway while waiting for the gate to open. Kisilu Mutua was arrested for the killing.
Kenyans widely believe that he was killed by Kiambu mafia.
Pinto became the first Kenyan politician to be assassinated after Independence. At the time of his assassination, Pinto was 38. Different theories have been forwarded about the assassination with some suggesting that Pinto was killed by Jomo Kenyatta"s men and others seeing Pinto"s assassination as the extermination of an avowed Communist with links to the Mozambican liberation movement by neocolonial forces.
When Mutua, convicted for the murder of Pinto, was released after 35 years in prison through a presidential pardon by President Daniel Arap Moi, Mutua insisted on his innocence and called for thorough investigations to identify Pinto"s true assassins.
In 2008, Kenya released a series of four stamps titled Heroes of Kenya, one of which depicted Pinto.
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. In 1949 Pinto returned to Kenya and, after a succession of clerical jobs, became involved in local politics aimed at overthrowing British colonial rule in Kenya. He worked to establish the Lumumba Institute in 1964 to train KANU party officials.
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. 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.