Mickky Pacheco may apply for anticipatory bail
7 Jun: Herald. With Mickky Pacheco going underground since the last two days, there appears a strong possibility of the Benaulim legislator moving the Court for anticipatory bail on Monday… 379 words. Click here.

Former Goa minister eludes crime branch for second day
6 Jun: PTI. Miccky Pacheco eluded the Crime Branch for the second day today even as police said the politician was not treated as an accused in the case… State police has launched a massive search for Pacheco … Click here.

Summer has finally sprung on England. Beautiful warm rays of sunshine emanating from the heavens above. Mornings are a wonderful time to observe life. I sit at the railway platform, watching the heaving nucleus of life form; the White British man trapped in the mundanity of his briefcase and pin-stripped suit, the African boy with his over-sized backpack thrown lazily about his shoulders, the young Indian girl sitting next to me, texting gingerly on her cell phone. Just a mass of humanity bubbling away, many spilling forth from lands which were too poor to sustain them.

The intricate web of racial relationships between the English, the African and the Indian, one sees everyday in Britain, has its genesis in Empire and was formed centuries ago on the plains of East Africa. It is a common misconception that Indians and Goans who worked for the British Empire, were servile, obsequious men, who kept their heads low and carried out orders. In fact, they were dynamic men who exerted as much power in Africa as the British. Perhaps not direct power but certainly implied power. The courage of these men was as necessary for building Empire as the Colonial officers entrusted with that work. Nor were these Indians averse to the very notions of colonisation. Indeed after World War I, the East African Indian National Congress had passed a resolution that West Africa be allowed to be colonised by Indians.

John Francis Fernandez was a young man in 1901, when he, like so many other young men, seized the opportunity to work as a clerk for the Uganda Railway administration. Tracing the life of Fernandez is like watching an epic motion picture. His father, a Mangalorean, had been an Assistant Conservator of Forests in India. He himself, had been educated at the Bombay University and after working for a while for the Indian Civil Services had applied for a three year assignment with the Uganda railways and been posted at Kijabe, a small village to the northwest of Nairobi in Kenya, and then to Fort Ternana and Muhoroni, both in the Nyando District of Kenya.

But the initial plan of spending three years in Africa turned into a lifetime. In 1909, he accepted the post of District Clerk, working with Geoffrey Archer, who would soon embark on the ambitious Marsabit Expedition. Archer would go on to be knighted, and become Governor of both Somaliland and later Uganda but in those early years, his career had hardly been promising taken up more by hunting rather than strenuous administrative service. When he became District Commissioner in 1907, he was given the arduous task of pioneering into Kenya's arid, Northern Frontier District, a cauldron of tribal discontent in which the British literally survived by the skin of their teeth, to set up a military outpost.

John proved to be indispensable to Geoffrey Archer. The Northern Frontier District had to be triangulated and mapped, involving complex surveying techniques and mathematical calculations. On the trail leading through Gilgil, Rumuruti and Nyiro River, John quickly learnt to use the Prismatic compass, plane tables, write the angle books and work out computations. It is astonishing how Indian aptitude for mathematics assisted the British, whether it was the explorers who set out into the interiors of Africa, or later Colonial officers who needed areas to be mapped or Empire's administrative offices which needed an endless supply of book-keepers and cashiers, who actually did the more compelling work of accountants but were never officially promoted to that level. Follow the adventures of John Francis Rodrigues across Africa next week.

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