Pio Pinto: Killed For Believing Black Freedom Was His Fight Too

They killed him. Then they erased him.

Pio Gama Pinto wasn’t just a Kenyan freedom fighter—he was a threat to the post-colonial status quo. A Goan socialist, journalist, and former political prisoner, Pinto built bridges between African, South Asian, and global liberation movements.

After independence, he didn’t stay quiet.

He exposed the hypocrisy of Kenya’s new ruling class—calling out the betrayal of the revolution’s promises. He funded resistance movements across Africa. Smuggled anti-colonial newspapers into Portuguese-occupied Mozambique. Turned his own home into a safe haven for exiled activists. And stayed in constant conversation with revolutionaries across the Black world.

Even Malcolm X reached out.

They never met. But they dreamed the same dream:

a world where freedom crossed oceans.

On February 25, 1965, Pinto was shot outside his Nairobi home. In front of his young daughter.

He was 38.

No one was ever convicted.

And the silence that followed was political too.

They didn’t just kill him.

They made him disappear.

But we remember:

Black freedom wasn’t just his fight.

It was his future too.

☁️ Had you ever heard of Pio Gama Pinto before today? If so, where? If not, how does this story sit with you?