Pio Gama Pinto: Independent Kenya’s First Political Assassination

Although it is generally accepted that the wheels of justice turn slowly, in Kenya, especially in matters that involve skulduggery, such as political assassinations, the question is whether those wheels grind fine.

In 2025, almost all of the key players in the February 1965 assassination of freedom fighter and liberation ideologue Pio Gama Pinto are dead. However, Kisilu Mutua, the man some believe to have been unfairly blamed and convicted for the murder, is still alive and fighting to clear his name.

Mutua served 36 years behind bars for the killing and was released after a presidential pardon on July 4 2001 by President Daniel arap Moi. On release, Mutua denied being the killer and even told reporters that he had been tortured into confessing to the killing. 

The report by Kenya’s Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission (TJRC) set up in 2008 and which operated until 2013, found that “the use of excessive and disproportionate force by the police has been a common theme running through Kenya’s history”.

The TJRC report found that political assassinations were “among the tactics used by the state and the political elite to repress dissent or eliminate political competition”. It found investigations into specific assassinations, when undertaken, were usually deliberately shut down before conclusion. 

“Even in instances where such investigations had been concluded, their reports of findings and recommendations were never publicised. The multiple investigations into the assassination of Robert Ouko are an extreme example of this phenomenon, but it is not the only example.”

The TJRC found that there was a lack of critical political goodwill to conduct thorough and objective investigations into cases where the victims are suspected of having been assassinated for political reasons. 

In its specific findings on Pio Gama Pinto, the TJRC concluded that the assassination was motivated by ideological differences that were at the heart of the global Cold War but also mirrored in Kenya’s domestic politics. 

The Commission found the conviction of Kisilu Mutua did little to clarify the circumstances and motives behind Pinto’s assassination and agreed with the finding of Chief Justice John Ainley who initially tried Mutua, that “the case wears an unfinished aspect and that we may not have all who were involved in the crime before us”.

Ainley sentenced Mutua to death for conspiring in Pinto’s murder. Also charged with Mutua were Chege Thuo and an unidentified man who escaped. 

Mutua and Thuo were arrested on the day of the murder and initially told the police that they were hired by the trade unionist Ochola Mak’Anyengo to scare Pinto, ostensibly because Pinto was his trade union rival.

Mak’Anyengo, a beneficiary of the Mboya-Kiano-Kennedy airlifts, was arrested but was later released after Mutua and Thuo said he didn’t look like the man who hired them. Mak’Anyengo would go on to be elected Ndhiwa Member of Parliament. He died in 1990.

In the end, Thuo was acquitted, but Mutua was sentenced to death although his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.  

The TJRC said Kisilu and Thuo were used as scapegoats to divert attention away from the true motive and the more responsible perpetrators of Pinto’s assassination. 

The Commission found that there was “sufficient circumstantial evidence, including the failure by the government to uncover the truth of who was responsible, to conclude that the government was involved in the killing of Pio Gama Pinto”.

Using this TJRC finding, in 2015 Mutua sued the Attorney General seeking a declaration that his rights under the 1963 Constitution were violated when he was tortured while in police custody. He sought damages for the torture and mistreatment subjected to him by the police, saying that he had suffered physical and psychological injuries. 

At the time, the Attorney General’s office opposed the petition and argued that Mutua had not provided any torture evidence, since he did not provide medical reports. The AG further accused Mutua of being guilty of inordinate delay. 

On their part, the police denied allegations of torture and said that the murder trial was per the law. They argued that Mutua could not rely on the provisions of the 2010 constitution.

However, the judge in the matter, High Court judge John Mativo, said even though the petition came five years after the promulgation of the 2010 constitution, it could not be blocked. He pointed out that the prevailing political situation of the 1960s made it impossible for victims to file cases of this nature. 

The  judge observed, “Owing to the political climate of the day victims of human rights abuses couldn’t seek court redress, this door was opened by the promulgation of the 2010 constitution.” He said that, just like the 2010 constitution, the former constitution prohibited torture and acts of inhuman and degrading treatment.  

“How can the callous act of a police officer squeezing the testicles of a person in their custody be justified? Such inhumane acts should be consigned to the dustbin of our history never to resurface again.” Justice Mativo said. He ruled that Kisilu proved to the required standard that his rights were violated by police considering the nature of the violation of his constitutional rights. “I must clarify that this award is for the torture subjected to the petitioner while in the hands of the police, but not for trial and conviction,” Justice Mativo said.

Interestingly, for me, Kisilu had initially challenged his trial conviction but decided to drop the issue. This action was never explained.

The High Court’s ruling has now been overturned by a three-judge bench of the Court of Appeal, which in February 2025 pronounced on the state’s contestation against the KSh2.5 million compensation awarded to Mutua, now 82, against the police.

According to a report on the matter in The Star newspaper, in setting aside the award, Justices Abida Ali-Aroni, Aggrey Muchelule, and George Odunga argued that Kisilu conceded that he had been properly charged, tried, convicted, and sentenced over the murder.

“Given that he conceded to all this, it followed that he had abandoned his claim that he had been mistreated and his testicles squeezed to force him to confess to an offence he had not committed,” the judges said. 

The judges argued that trial judge John Mativo had made an error in finding that Kisilu had been tortured, especially after Kisilu acknowledged that his confession was voluntary, which formed the basis of his conviction.

The wheels of justice are still turning 60 years after Kenya’s first political assassination.

In 1995, I  was employed as a reporter for the Weekly Review. I conducted several interviews with people familiar with the matter for a story that the news magazine carried to mark the 30th anniversary of Pinto’s death. The story also relied heavily on news reports from 1965.

I concluded in 1995 that, three decades later, the full truth behind Pinto’s assassination remained elusive, and I opined that, “until those who know what truly happened come forward, Pio Gama Pinto may continue to be the forgotten man of Kenya’s history”.

Another 30 years on, apart from Mutua’s denial of involvement, nobody has come forward to say what part they played in the killing of the liberation hero.

In writing the piece I leaned heavily on news reports of the killing. I also spoke to Pinto’s colleagues such as the trade unionist Dennis Akumu, who died in 2016, and the journalist-turned-politician, Wanguhu Ng’ang’a, who died in February 2020.

From these sources I garnered details about the actual morning of the assassination, what was going on in Pinto’s life, and the politics of the country at the time, in the hope that this might shed some light on why Pinto was killed, if not who killed him.

*** 

According to the recorded weather report, Wednesday, February 24, 1965, was warm, breezy, and partially cloudy.

Had Pio Gama Pinto been one to believe portents of bad luck, he might have looked at the clouds and thought of recent storms he had weathered in the political arena, while wondering what the future held.

In the words of veteran journalist Cyprian Fernandes, writing in the Saturday Nation in 2015 and quoting an unpublished tribute by Pio’s younger brother, the late Rosario da Gama Pinto, “Pio’s death was impending.”

According to the unpublished tribute quoted in Fernandes’ article, “Pio was often threatened, and even a month before his death was aware of a plot to kill him by prominent politicians. Although upset about the plot, he carried on as normal until his assassination.”

“Pio was murdered to silence him and put an end to his dream to implement socialism.”

Cyprian Fernandes writes that shortly before the assassination, the then Deputy Speaker of Parliament Fitz De Souza reportedly witnessed Pinto engaging in a shouting match with President Jomo Kenyatta in the corridors of the House. 

Quoting De Souza, Fernandes writes “I suspect that the shouting match was over Sessional Paper Number 10, which had been the subject of subsequent revision, but at the time virtually legalized capitalism as Kenya’s economic lingua franca.

“Pinto, at the insistence of Jaramogi, then vice president, was going to write amendments which would have been tantamount to a parliamentary challenge to Kenyatta’s leadership.”

However, according to Fernandes, Rosario Da Gama Pinto, who died in 1998, appears to doubt Kenyatta’s hand in the killing of his brother.

“Pio was confident that Kenyatta was not capable of killing him, and had good reason for such faith. Pio had worked tirelessly for Kenyatta’s release and had spent his last cent extending and refurbishing Kenyatta’s house and in the process, he had antagonized those friends who did not want Kenyatta released.”

Rosario further said that Pio made great efforts to improve and correct Kenyatta’s damaged reputation.

Earlier, during the Mau Mau rebellion, Pinto had worked to procure arms for the movement. He played a key role in securing legal defence for the Kapenguria Six—Jomo Kenyatta, Achieng Oneko, Kung’u Karumba, Bildad Kaggia, Paul Ngei, and Fred Kubai. His activism led to his detention in 1954, making him one of the few non-Africans imprisoned during the Emergency.

Whatever the case, on the morning of Wednesday, February 24, 1965, Pinto, a 37-year-old father of three, drove out of his home for the second time. This time he was headed to the National Assembly.

Earlier that morning Pinto had sat down to breakfast with his wife, Emma, and their daughters; Linette, aged eight, Malusha, aged four, and little Treshka, just one year old.

After breakfast Pinto and his wife stepped out of their comfortable Westlands bungalow and got into the car. He drove his wife to work at Jogoo House in Nairobi’s central business district where she was a secretary with the Ministry of Information, Broadcasting, and Tourism.

Pinto returned home briefly that morning before setting off again for the National Assembly where he served as a specially elected member of the House of Representatives in Kenya’s initial post-independence experiment with a bi-cameral parliament.

Like many an indulgent father, Pinto allowed little Treshka to hop into the white Saab for a pretend spin down the driveway where he was to have dropped her off and watched as she toddled on back to the house.

For those few seconds it took to get to the gate, nothing seemed amiss, but a split second later everything would change dramatically, scarring the little girl for life and cutting short the life of a man who had already packed in so much in such a short span of time.

Two men—possibly more—suddenly appeared from the street-facing side of the fence. In full view of the little girl, they fired three shots through the front side window at her father killing him on the spot, before jumping into a nearby getaway car and escaping. 

Foreshadowing events four years later when news photographer Mohammed Amin just happened to be in the neighbourhood of Tom Mboya’s shooting, unofficial accounts at the time stated that an ambulance that happened to be passing by arrived within minutes. 

However, the ambulance and the paramedics inside were too late. Pinto, a leading Kenyan nationalist seen by many as the chief political strategist of then Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga, was already dead.

Two days later he would be buried without national honours or flags flying at half-mast. The closest he got to national recognition at his funeral, was his burial in a coffin draped in the Kenya African National Union (Kanu) flag at City Park Cemetery, and then only because his close political allies pushed for it.

As news spread that Wednesday morning of Pinto’s death, talk of assassination was in the air. One of his closest associates, Minister for Information, Broadcasting, and Tourism Achieng Oneko told Parliament that the murder was “a deliberate and cowardly move in what I believe to have been a planned assassination”. 

Oneko said: “Any attempt to introduce gangsterism into Kenyan politics must be denounced in the strongest possible terms.”

Chairman of the parliamentary group of the National Assembly, Henry Wariithi said, “MPs who worked closely with Pinto are appalled by this cowardly act of gangsterism. This is a murder that cannot be left shrouded in mystery or without public inquiry and explanation through the process of law.”

By contrast, President Jomo Kenyatta described the killing only as criminal. “By his death, our country has lost one of the most conscientious workers for freedom, who suffered many years in detention for his uncompromising stand in politics. This is a shocking crime which, by its nature, must plunge the country into sadness.”

The question here is why Pinto’s friends and associates leapt to the conclusion that his death was a political assassination.

In 1995, I wrote that to understand this, one would have to examine Pio Gama Pinto’s short but dynamic political career. 

Meanwhile, a paper titled “Pio Gama Pinto: A Political Biography”, was presented at Kenyatta University’s Department of History in 1991. According to the unpublished tribute quoted in Fernandes’ article, Pinto was born in Nairobi on March 31, 1927, to a Goan family. 

At eight, Pinto was sent to India for education and spent nine years there. After completing his studies, he worked briefly for the Indian Air Force and later as a clerk for the Post and Telegraph Company in Bombay (now Mumbai). 

It was around this time that Pinto’s radical ideas began to take shape. In 1947, he participated in a large-scale workers’ strike in Bombay. Fearing arrest, he returned to Kenya and joined the East African Indian National Congress (EAINC) as an executive officer.

Pinto eventually became disillusioned with the EAINC’s moderate stance and, along with figures such as Fitz de Souza, Arvind Jamidar, R. B. Bhandari, and Keshav Sharma Singh, formed the Kenya Freedom League, advocating equal political rights for all races.

Pinto’s influence was felt not just in Kenya but also as far as Mozambique and Goa, where he was deeply involved in the fight against Portuguese colonialism. By the time he died, Pinto had celebrated independence in both Goa and Kenya, but his life was cut short a decade before he could witness Mozambique’s liberation. FRELIMO eventually achieved Mozambique’s independence under the leadership of Samora Machel.

I wrote in the Weekly Review: “Pinto’s socialist leanings, at a time when the Communist Eastern Bloc and the capitalist Western Bloc were competing for influence in Kenya, had attracted the unfavourable attention of socialism’s virulent opponents, both in the West and in Kenya. 

“Kenyatta was seen as the West’s preferred leader, while his Vice President Odinga was aligned with the East. Their key lieutenants, Mboya and Pinto respectively, were therefore seen as crucial players in determining Kenya’s political alignment. 

“Historians and analysts argue that these two men – and possibly others – were pawns in the Cold War power struggle that sought to shape Kenya’s future.

“Some observers believe Pinto was assassinated when the Western Bloc began gaining the upper hand. Eliminating Pinto would weaken Odinga’s influence, ensuring he would lack a chief strategist when the time came to sideline him politically.”

Sure enough, in June of that year, a few months after Pinto’s assassination, the nation witnessed the next shots fired (figuratively this time) in the political war that has defined a large part of the country’s politics ever since.

In a speech delivered in Kisumu, to mark the third anniversary of internal self-government, or Madaraka, Vice President Jaramogi Oginga Odinga launched his first direct attack on his boss, President Jomo Kenyatta.

Jaramogi, who had been at the forefront of the campaign for Jomo’s release from detention by the British, was fed up with the country’s pro-Western ideological stance led by Kenyatta and archrival Tom Mboya.

In his speech, Jaramogi said that his erstwhile buddy Jomo had been seduced by the British and through Mboya, the Americans, and had fallen just short of taking orders from the two Western powers.

To put it in some context, Jaramogi’s speech came shortly after Jomo and Mboya had shut down Jaramogi’s pet project, the Russian-financed Lumumba Institute, saying it was never intended to be an ideological base. 

Jomo also returned a shipment of Russian arms donated free of charge by the Soviet government. He claimed they were second-hand and useless to Kenya’s “modern army.”

Remember that Jomo and Mboya, with the assistance of Mwai Kibaki, had come up with a manifesto for what they called African Socialism hoping to counter Jaramogi’s ties to Chinese and Soviet communism.

Jaramogi would stay on in the ruling party, trying to change things from within, for about another year before the infamous March 1966 Kanu conference in Limuru showed him the door.

Odinga left Kanu in protest and formed the short-lived Kenya People’s Union (KPU), which was banned in 1969, leading to the detention of its leaders. 

Some believe and argue that had Pinto been alive, Odinga’s political downfall might not have been so easily orchestrated, potentially altering Kenya’s political trajectory.