If you talk to an East African Goan, more fondly called Afrikar, chances are he'll tell you about a rumour of a young Goan man being shot like dog because he fell in love with a White Settler girl. Such rumours have a way of becoming part of our folklore, over time one wonders if these stories are true at all or just the outcome of an over zealous imagination, a cautionary tale spun perhaps to dissuade Goans from biting the Forbidden Fruit. Except of course, this wasn't a rumour - for there in the The Times of the twenties, I found this story in print.

John Dias, was a mild-mannered young boy, who in 1929 took up a job at a hotel in Nakuru run by Bernard Joseph Potter. John and Potter's twenty year old daughter fell in love, a star-crossed match if ever there was one, which ended tragically for all concerned. On the night of September 11, 1929, an enraged Potter learned of his daughter's relationship with Dias. Potter was an ex-soldier, who came to Kenya just two years earlier and after a brief stint working as a store-keeper at the Camberwell Board of Guardians, became the manager of a hotel. Potter was by some accounts, typical of the very chauvinistic White settler mindset further intensified by being in the army and according to some reports, surrounded by like-minded individuals fuelled by an abundance of beer, who might have goaded him on about his daughter's relationship with a "coloured" man, a definite taboo in segregated Colonial Kenya. The next morning, Potter saw Dias in the market and later, claiming that he was overwhelmed with emotion, shot him dead with the revolver he carried with him at all times. The cold-blooded shooting sent shock-waves across Kenya and its racial implications were not lost on the Goan community who obviously etched it onto their collective consciousness, a cautionary tale relayed from generation to generation becoming almost folklore, its origins lost in the mist of time. To the credit of the British justice system, Potter was sentenced to ten years imprisonment, the longest sentence ever meted out to a White in Kenya at the time. In large part this justice was the result of tireless lobbying of the authorities by his mother Ezalda Clara Albuquerque and step-father Peter Zuzarte, who incidentally was Joseph Murumbi's father. Murumbi later became Kenya's second Vice-President.

The history of human beings is fraught with prejudice and segregation from that which is different from us and yet from this fray of hate and suspicion, the heart can also gracefully reach out across the divide and forever change the landscape of humanity. It is perhaps reassuring for mankind that from disparate histories, life can intertwine and form a single thread of friendship, union and off-spring. The people who came before us, who extended their hearts in love and friendship to people who did not quite look like us but at their core reflected something that was already in us, made way for generations of Goans who can now love and live without the prejudice and fear of bi-racial integration.