Seraphino Antao, Joe Faria, Pascoal Antao and Albert Castanha, the fastest Goan sprint relay team in the world.
Photo Credits: Photo Courtesy: Antao Family Album
There was a time (and we may never see the like of it again) when Goan men and women climbed some of the highest rungs of the international sports ladders. They excelled in field hockey, athletics, cricket, soccer, badminton, table tennis and many other sports. It happened during our once-upon-a-time yesterday in the mostly glorious country of Kenya.
In those pioneering days, many Goans sent their sons to school in Goa, Bombay, Belgaum and other parts of the country. However, if you wondered how virtually every Goan social club in East Africa fielded a men’s and a women’s hockey team, it would seem we took to hockey like ducks to water.
For some, the journey began while at school, the revolution to aspire to represent Kenya at the Olympics was the dream of one man: Anthony D’Souza who was the Maths and English master at the Dr Ribeiro Goan School in Nairobi. A gentle considerate man, his only qualification was that he played for the world Lusitanians team from Bombay. D’Souza would go on to nurture many, many up the ladder of success to the Olympic Games. As far as the Goans were concerned, the Dr Ribeiro Goan School was the nursery for some of the finest Goan hockey Olympians from Kenya.
While we were growing up, it was no big deal and did not treat them as anything other than our friends who were very good at hockey, soccer, cricket, tennis… or whatever other sport. It was no big deal, they were just the young men and women who lived next door, in the same suburb, or not too far away.
However, spread around the world, at least those that are still with us, we celebrate their skills the best way we can. We will also never forget those who have left us and remember them as they once were great sportsmen and women who did their community proud and wrote many pages of history that I hope will never be forgotten.
Two tribes, the Goans and Sikhs dominated hockey on the playing field. Sikhs also dominated the administration of the game which may have been the cause of some disappointment in Goan circles. However, the friends we made then are bound together just as strongly today even though we may live very far apart.
In case you did not know, I began my journalistic life as a sports reporter before going on General News reporting: Court, Local Government Affairs (councils), local and national politics, Parliament, and the whole spectrum of life that abounded Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania before spending considerable time investigating various aspects of life wherever the story was to be found.
However, most Goans still remember as a sports reporter covering, as far as they were concerned, men’s and women’s hockey (local and international), soccer (especially those involving the Goan clubs) cricket, table tennis, tennis, golf, a little rugby union and whatever else came my way.
Over the past 30 years or so, I have hankered for someone to come along and write the complete anthology of the Goan (both male and female) in sport in East Africa. I have always felt, like the true histories of the Goans – from the earliest migrations with the Omani Arabs to the final exodus first in 1966, then in 1968 and then by dribs and drabs after 1970 – which were never officially recorded in the written word and much later with the advent of the electronic media (tape recordings), histories of sport and musicians would go the same way, and it probably will.
My book ‘Stars Next Door’ does not in any way compensate for the loss of the histories of the Goan community in the African diaspora. Like everything else, that too will be lost to the swirling sands of time, carrying away memory into the depths of forgotten infinity.
Over the next few weeks, I will introduce to you these Goan sporting heroes of yesterday.
[Cyprian Fernandes was the first full-time sports journalist hired by Daily Nation in Nairobi, Kenya in 1960. In many ways, he changed the way sports was reported.]
