Winds of Change Across Africa, 1958-1969 (Luis de Assis Correia)

[Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا‎]

Congratulations to GBC member Luis de Assis Correia (of the UK/Velim/Benaulim) on his latest book making it to the bookstands. As you could guess, it is just out (insider info!) and yet to be formally released.

It's an interesting read, and fills in the gaps of what Bwana Louie shared with me, over many a conspiratorial whisper and extended meetings at the Cafe Prakash, for which I would invariably end up reaching late!

Inspite of being under-slept yesterday, I raced through a third of the book, and found it very insightful and intriguing. It only underlines my suspicion that there are still so many stories out there just waiting to be told. I don't want to act as plot-spoiler here, so let me keep you guessing on its contents. All that I can say is that you won't regret reading it. It's hardbound and costs Rs395 at Broadway.

Congrats again and looking forward to more, Luis! FN

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FN P +91-832-2409490 M +91-9822122436 http://goa1556.in

[Anne Ketteringham]

Congratulations Luis, best wishes for the future... Anne Ketteringham.

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[reena martins]

Congratulations Luis! I look forward to reading your book.

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[Selma Cardoso]

Senor Assis,

If you are on this list many congratulations.

 

I had interviewed Assis de Correia about five years ago. The interview featured on GoanVoice UK and reproduced here.

 

 

Luis Assis de Correia

 

Last year, seized by a not-so-youthful naiveté, I wanted to record the lives of Great Goans. Having read a bit too much of John Updike and his relentless essays on Americans and British artists, writers and poets who have been so meticulously biographied and feeling a certain expansive emptiness in this same region as far as our own intelligentsia went, I was at once filled with the hubris of the naïve and the ambition of the idiotic which lulled me into thinking that herculean tasks are indeed possible equipped with just a tape-recorder and a pen.

I’d read Luis de Assis Correia’s, Goa through the Mists of History  - he has since followed it up with the release of Portuguese India - and been impressed enough to pursue Correia to agree to an interview. “Watch out for an elderly man standing near the fruit vendors,” he told me. Getting off at Harrow, I needn’t have worried. It’s not easy to miss an elegant, tall Goan man at a London tube station.

Correia was born in 1928 in the village of Velim, Goa, the same year Dr Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was to become Finance Minister and begin his ascent to power in what would become Portugal’s Estado Novo. It is difficult to say what forces of history shape personal lives. Are single incidents like the rise of Salazar mere blips on the continuum of time or do they affect us personally? Did the 16 years of Republicanism that preceded Salazar and said to have created the greatest flourishing of Goan intelligentsia responsible for ideas of equality that permeated the Goan consciousness? Or perhaps equality among men is an aspiration that is endemic in the human consciousness and doesn’t need revolutions or religions to stir it to life. Correia’s grandfather and namesake, a man he describes as an “exceptionally brilliant person,” championed caste and racial equality at a time when it was unfashionable to do the former and decidedly dangerous to address the latter.

Like so many young Goan men, his grandfather had been ear-marked for that solemn vocation, which one embarks on with much zeal and absolute faith in the unseen, the priesthood. But he got into a polemic with the Archbishop of Goa and the Director of his seminary, on the finer points of discriminatory practices in the priesthood. This rather premature bid for equality in the naves of Goa’s churches resulted in his departure from the Church and the stigmatization of his family.

But reading Correia’s accounts of Goa’s history, it is hard to decipher what his own feelings are on the Republic or Salazar or the Church for he feels a historian’s voice must not permeate his writing. His responsibility is only to report the facts, a sort of medieval journalist traveling forward in time. In the 21^st century, when personal comment is so difficult to avoid, when controversy and sensationalism of revisionism is what sells history books, Correia has been quite resolute in avoiding both.

Correia’s interest in history goes back to his childhood, which he remembers as being surrounded by books. He had a private mestre who tutored him at home in Latin. His mother taught him Portuguese and he later attended a Portuguese Secondary school. The images of World War II blur in and out during our conversation; the sugar shortages, the gasoline rationing and perhaps most disturbingly the death of his father, Chrisol de Assis Correia, when the passenger ship he was onboard the S S Calabria, waiting to join his own ship the S. S Vasna of the Royal Navy Hosptial, was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in 1940, off the coast of Ireland. Correia also remembers with clarity the harrowing air-raids by the Japanese while he was schooling at St. Mary’s in Broadway, Madras, (what was then called Madras and is today called Chennai).

After a stint with Air India in Bombay, he arrived in Nairobi, Kenya in 1958, just five years before Kenya was to get its Independence from Britain. It was a most exciting time to be alive in Nairobi, its streets abuzz with the whiff of possible freedom and, Correia eventually came to rub shoulders with the likes of Pio Gama-Pinto and Murumbi, who he say was a “very nice man.” Correia also struck a close friendship with Tom Mboya, founder of the Nairobi’s People Congress Party and an active member of the political establishment around and shortly following Kenya’s independence. Correia was heading a travel agency in Nairobi and they were both instrumental players in the Airlift Africa project, working with the African-American Students Foundation in the United States, to provide air-passage to Kenyan students who had won scholarships in American universities. The conversation, amidst a din of recorded music in the café we were sitting at, turns suddenly to Barack Obama Sr, who was one of the students in these batches, on his way to Hawaii, little knowing his progency would forever alter the course of American history. Correia shows me a black and white picture of Obama Sr, along with his fellow batchmates and I’m tempted to convince Correia to let me scan the picture for my personal archives and public posterity – at least that’s the hope.

Amidst the turmoil that followed Kenyan Independence, the corruption, the scramble for power, Mboya’s own life was to end tragically in a political assassination in 1969, at the young age of 39.

Correia made his way to England. Today he splits his time between Goa and what is left of the old Empire, devoting much of his life to his love of reading and recording Goa’s historical past.

 

 

On Monday, 23 June 2014, 10:59, reena martins <reenam...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Congratulations Luis! I look forward to reading your book.