A Case Study: Augustino de Colaco

 A Case Study: Augustino Caetano de Colaco and his descendants from 1809- Present Day

Adolph de Sousa

There are eight phases in the history of migration of Goans. They are 1. Pre 1830 (The Adventurers);
2. 1830-1896 (The Early Coastal Settlers);
3. 1897-1910 (The Pioneers)

4. 1911-1945 (Goan Consolidation)
5. 1946-1960 (Goan Blissfulness)
6. 1961-1975 (Goan Exodus and Expulsion)
7. 1976-1999 (Goan New Life in the Western World) 8. 2000 Onwards (The New Millennial Goans)

The story of Augustino Caetano de Colaco starts during the second phase of history of migration of Goans. It is drawn from diaries maintained by his descendants, primarily from Pedro (Peter) Colaco, a third-generation descendant of Augustino. The names, places and dates have been changed. Any resemblance to any known family is purely coincidental. However, the story of this family fits the mould of stories coming out in personal diaries or memoirs being currently written by East African Goans.

A family tree appears as an Appendix.
1. The Early Coastal Settlers (1830-1896)

Joaquim Figuerado Augustino Caetano de Colaco, was born around 1809 in Parra village in the Bardez Taluka of Goa. He loved the sea and fishing. He attended a parish school and spoke Portuguese and his native Konkani. He befriended some Portuguese mariners in Panjim and went with one of the Portuguese sailing ships to Sofala (later Laurenco Marques now Maputo) in 1829. He took his wife who was sixteen with him. The story within the family is that he migrated so that he could service the Portuguese sailing ships, which had rounded the Cape of Good Hope from Portugal and were on their way to Goa. Some family members believe he was heading for Portugal, but the Portuguese captain convinced him that Sofala was a place of growing commercial importance for the Lusitania and needed people like him to explore the opportunities. However, records in the archives in Panjim has no evidence of such a migrant but does record the transportation of some Goan dissidents to Mozambique at about this time1. Augustino established a market garden growing vegetables and tapioca (cassava) and orange groves. He worked as an agent for the Portuguese ships and supplied them with drinking water, oranges and fruit and vegetables for the onward journey to Goa or to the Cape of

1 It was not typical of Goans to have taken their wives to Africa during this phase. It was much more common for men to have ventured to Africa alone, leaving their wives and children in Goa. There is evidence through records of passenger manifests that a number of single men going to Mozambique were forcefully repatriated because they made trouble for the Portuguese rulers.

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Good Hope. The story goes on to state that he had three sons who were born in Sofala. In 1840 Augustino’s spouse (Matilda) took her sons and went back to Goa never to return.

Matlida returned to Parra and Augustino sent her money and trophies from Africa on a regular basis. Matlida’s brother-in-law (Augustino’s younger brother) managed the family finances and Augustino’s remittances were such that he could build a huge mansion for Matilda and her three sons. The compound of the house has an inscription to state that Augustino built the house although there is no evidence to suggest that Augustino himself ever returned to Goa or lived in the premises. Many years later, Pedro – a fourth generation descendant of Augustino – was in Mozambique in 1984-5 and tried to trace his great-great-great grandfather’s life in Mozambique. Sofala does not exist today as it is probably underwater as a suburb of greater Maputo (formerly Lourenco Marques). However, Pedro found that several Goans did migrate from Goa in the 1830s and established a community in Sofala. A church built by the Franciscans (from Goa) has a pew where Augustino’s name is etched on the side. It appears that Augustino became a well- known local entity who traded in Portuguese and European liquor and ran a stevedore business for berthing ships. There is also a suggestion that he had children who were part African although Pedro was not able to establish the veracity of this. Whilst on a posting in Mozambique, Pedro went to Mass at the church in Maputo and at one of the church functions he connected with the mainly African congregation. One Mozambiquan gentleman who spoke English showed Pedro the grave in the church grounds where Augustino was buried. Upon closer inspection it was established that this was a family grave and other descendants of Augustino – presumably part African were also buried there.

One of Matlida’s son, Alfonso de Colaco, who was about 17 years old is said to have sailed by Arab dhow from Goa to Zanzibar 1852. He was on a mission to reunite with his father in Sofala, but he never got there. Alfonso got odd jobs and was on one of the European expeditions to the interior of East Africa - probably Stanley’s trip into the interior to find David Livingstone. Tippu Tib, the great Swahili trader in East Africa, apparently introduced him to Stanley. Alfonso got married to a Portuguese subject from Daman whose brother worked in the court of the Sultan in Zanzibar. Her name was Maria de Lourdes and although they are described as Portuguese it is believed that the de Lourdes family originated in South Goa and moved to the Portuguese possessions in Daman and Diu to the north of Goa. There, the brother, and sister somehow learnt Arabic and went in an Arab dhow first to Muscat in present day Oman and then to Zanzibar when a brother of the Said bin Sultan was assigned the Kingdom of Zanzibar by his father. They had one son Moshin Lourdes e Colaco, who was born in 1858 in Zanzibar. By about the 1880s Moshin had got a job with the Sultan’s ‘customs’ department. His job was to collect a tax from the Arabs who landed slaves and ivory from the mainland Bagamoyo. Moshin went on a sailing dhow to Goa and to his ancestral village of Parra for the first time in 1892. There he registered as a ‘zonekar’2 having proven to the local authorities that his father was Alfonso de Colaco who had lived and

2 In Goa it was practice for the males to be registered with the parish/panchyt. The ‘zonecar’ was entitled to the ‘profits’ from the sale of harvests from communal land. It is a sort of right to a village without necessarily owning property in the village.

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registered in the village as a young boy. From all accounts he was a charismatic character who convinced the local elders and the community that he had fortunes in Africa. He married to a local village girl, a Maria Figuerado who was half his age and took her with him to Zanzibar. They had a son, Joaquim Figuerado Colaco (born in 1894), but because the second child born the following year was a girl and had a deformity, Moshin dispatched both his wife and his children back to Goa in 1900 with the promise of sending regular remittances, which apparently never came. (Information from the diary of Pedro Colaco, the grandson of Moshin Lourdes e Colaco and son of Colaco)

2. The Pioneers (1896-1910)

Upon her return from Zanzibar, Maria Figuerado landed in her father’s home seven years after she had been given away in marriage to Moshin Lourdes e Colaco. The promised regular remittances never came from Zanzibar and the family in Parra said to her that she had to arrange to set up her home and look after her children. Maria moved to the neighbouring village of Saligao and there her son, Joaquim went to an English-speaking school. Maria worked hard to bring up the two children. Joaquim had a fondness for English literature and mathematics. There is a story that in 1905 or 1906 her husband, Moshin, came to Goa with a group of his friends from Zanzibar and landed in his wife’s small house. Maria who was busy cooking for them for five weeks straight hosted them. Moshin and his mates bought a lot of liquor from the local Taverna and gambled the whole of that period. At the end of the five weeks the Zanzibar guests, some of whom were not Goan, paid her a large sum of money and gave her gold in appreciation for her hospitality. Then along with Moshin they took the next sailing ship back to Zanzibar. That was the last time Maria and her children saw their father. In late 1909 the family got news that Moshin had died suddenly in Zanzibar. In 1910 Joaquim went to Zanzibar to ensure that his father’s belongings could be brought back to Saligao. Because of his skills in English, he landed a job with the British in their Public Works Department. When he arrived in Zanzibar and introduced himself to the Goan publican who ran a kudd3 on Portuguese Street, he explained to him the mysterious circumstances of the death of his father. There was no body found, and no grave in the cemetery. Joaquim was shown the worldly possessions of his father in the boarding house, but he could not take possessions until all his father’s debts had been paid in full. On making some inquiries it was established that a drinking and gambling habit had taken a toll on Moshin along with some unsavoury characters as his companions. Joaquim spent a full year paying his father’s debts so that the family’s good name and honour could be restored. Having settled his father’s debts Joaquim worked diligently and loyally for the British civil service regularly sending whatever savings he had to his mother to upkeep the family home and support his disabled sister. (Information from the diary of Pedro Colaco, the grandson of Moshin Lourdes e Colaco and son of Joaquim Figuerado)

3. Goan Consolidation (1911-1945)

3 Traditionally a ‘kudd’ is a boarding house usually run by Goan women who came from the same village where the new migrant sought initial accommodation upon arrival.

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Joaquim impressed his colonial masters in Zanzibar with his hard work and diligence. He no longer spoke Portuguese and forgot most of his Konkani. He was a passionate reader of English books and used to spend some of his money ordering books from the UK in order to expand his knowledge. He learnt to keep accounts on the job, made easier by his love for Mathematics. The Suez Canal was now opened, and the Union Castle line operated from East Africa to the UK either through the Suez or through the Cape. Joaquim’s boss was kind to him and got permission from the colonial office to send him to the UK for training as an accountant. In London he studied what today might be referred as advanced bookkeeping and he essentially qualified as an accountant. He was away for about two years and returned with a wealth of textbooks- not only novels but also great books on the social debates of the time about socialism, communism and capitalism. He now had a job which entitled him to regular long service trips to Goa on the British India steamships. Steamships cut the time to Goa from three weeks to nine days with port calls in Mombasa and Seychelles.

4. The Goan Blissfulness (1946-1960)

Joaquim was a hard-working civil servant, well-liked by his White masters; although he never became a typical ‘subaltern elite’ in that he never brought his villagers to work for him in the Treasury he had sufficient contacts in the English expatriate community to send his sons to the UK. The eldest did medicine and the second studied law. They obtained some financial support from some endowed sources. Pedro who recorded this story went to a higher school in the UK in 1949 and finally qualified in accountancy after his father’s footsteps. In 1960 he married an English girl – the daughter of the landlady where he lived in London. Unlike his other brothers who settled in the UK, Pedro brought his wife to Zanzibar, and he got a job as a company accountant in one of the few British trading houses in Zanzibar with representative Offices in all the East African mainland capital cities. He therefore held a senior corporate level position with responsibility for East African financial operations of the company headquartered in London.

By 1925, on his third trip back to Goa, word got around of how well this Afrikander was and that he was an eligible bachelor. The village matchmaker spread the word around. Joaquim was married to a Conceicao de Souza. She was from the village of Saligao, where Joaquim’s mother had settled, but her parents originally also came from Parra, the same village where Joaquim had been registered as a zonekar. The story is that Conceicao’s father had acquired a lot of property in Saligao from the lands left by the Hindus who were evicted to Ponda as punishment for refusing to convert to Catholicism. It was a simple matter of the Catholic Goan going to Panjim and lodging a bid for such vacated lands and getting the registered titles for them. Conceicao was one of a number of daughters of the patriarch Poricar – as he was known in Saligao. She was nearly half of Joaquim’s age when he took his young bride to Zanzibar. Conceicao went to a Portuguese speaking school and studied the equivalent of upper primary school. Although she spoke Konkani her written and spoken skills enabled her to become avid reader of Portuguese literature. When she migrated to Africa, she spoke no English or Kiswahili. She learnt English by the simple act of reading the newspapers Joaquim used to bring home from his English bosses.

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They had four children, three boys and a girl. The third son, Pedro Colaco is the one who recounted this family history and is therefore the great-great grandson of Augustino Colaco. Pedro was born in 1932. At a very early age his mother taught all the boys and the girl basic Portuguese, although there was no opportunity to practice the language in Zanzibar. She also brought up her children to be devout Catholics. Every morning they were dispatched to Mass at the Catholic Church before going to school. Zanzibar Stone Town was already a very cosmopolitan community where Catholics were a small minority. But her religious fervour was such that she taught her children that only Catholics would go to heaven, and they were not to marry outside their religion and caste. Pedro went to school in Zanzibar till 1949 after which he left his sheltered upbringing and went to the UK. His father Joaquim now had a good clerical position in the Treasury in Zanzibar and used to take the whole family back to Goa at regular four – five-year intervals as part of his entitlement. It was at one of the trips back to Goa that Joaquim registered his three sons for the zone in the village of Parra. (Information from the diary of Pedro Colaco, the grandson of Moshin Lourdes e Colaco and son of Joaquim Figuerado)

5. Goan Exodus and Expulsion (1961-1975)

The story of the descendants of Augustino Colaco continues. Pedro the great- great-great grandson of Augustino had two sons. One was born in Zanzibar in 1963, was named Desmond Colaco. In 1964 their company relocated Pedro to Nairobi following the revolution in Zanzibar. Another son was born in 1965 in Nairobi who they named Frederick Colaco. In 1968 the British company (that Pedro was representing) relocated to Nairobi but transferred him to the UK just as Kenya was pressing ahead with its Africanisation policy. He had no difficulty migrating to the UK given that his spouse was English. Both Desmond and Frederick went to ‘public’ or private schools in the UK.

In 1961, the British honored Joaquim with an OBE for his long, loyal and exemplary service to the British Government. He also got a Brilliant Star award from the Sultan of Zanzibar for his contribution to the civil service of his majesty’s government. In 1968 just as Pedro (now officially called ‘Peter’) was being transferred back to London, Joaquim and his wife went and settled in Middlesex close to his son Pedro. Joaquim passed away in 1975 – short of his 81st birthday.

Like his father before him, Pedro, (Peter) went periodically to Goa in the late 1970s. On one of his trips with his family he registered his sons in Parra village as ‘zonekars’. Whereas both Pedro’s parents were Goan, Pedro himself came from a line of four generations who were born in Africa. In registering his children for the ‘zone’ in Parra, not only were the male descendants not born in Goa, but they were now of mixed descent – a Goan father and an Englishmother. (InformationfromthediaryofPedroColaco,thegrandsonofMoshinLourdeseColacoand son of Joaquim Figuerado)

6. Goan New Life in the Western World (1976-1999)

Whatever happened to the Augustine Colaco’s descendants? Pedro sent his two boys to English schools.

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In 1984 Desmond graduated from Sussex University and obtained a job in Texas in the mining exploration field. He met a Texan girl and they got married in in 1990 in Dallas.

Because of failing health Pedro and his wife, Elizabeth, moved permanently to Corpus Christi in Texas in 1995. Their first grandson, son to Desmond was born in 1992. He was named Francis Colaco. The opportunity to move to Texas was designed to help Desmond with the need to take after school care of Francis as both his parents were working.

Pedro’s diary describes his younger son as God’s gift to his family. It is apparent that migration, new freedoms in the Western world got Frederick involved in social causes and issues and he took up to drugs immediately after finishing ‘O’ Levels. There is a painful account of how much Pedro and his wife, Elizabeth, had to endure. Frederick had a criminal record because of his drug habits and the parents managed to influence the courts that he should get community service. They were unceasing in their unconditional love for Frederick and never gave up on him even though at times it tested their marriage. It took him three attempts to completely wean off drugs and through rehabilitation he was finally cured in 1992. During this trying ten years Pedro often asked himself where did he go wrong to have had this blight fall on the family? In one of the counselling sessions that they attended the psychologist explained that addiction was genetic. In his annals Pedro ponders the question whether his Grandfather Moshin’s addiction manifested itself in his son’s illness. There is a revealing text in Pedro’s memoirs which he wrote after the ordeal was all over. It reads as follows:

“So, there you are somebody divine is rewarding me for all the trials and tribulations I had to endure. I could not be happier in my present life.

There is still some unfinished business in this story. When the opportunity arises, I want to tell Frederick not to blame himself for the life he led those ten tortuous years. I want to tell him there was a Devine Power, who knew I loved my son very much, and it was He or She that made him do the things he did, to test my resolve. He wanted to see the limits of my pain and see whether I would succumb under the enormous pressure He put me. Then when He was satisfied, He had worked enough on me, He sent Divine Intervention to get me out of my misery.”

In 1992 Frederick having slowly been weaned off drugs went as a mature age student to Heriot-Watts University in Scotland and graduated in Information Technology. During his student days he patented an invention and readily got himself an executive position in a start-up company in Silicone valley in California. Whilst there he proceeded to do a Masters degree at Stanford University and met his partner, Joseph Varghese, a graduate from an Indian Institute of Technology who had moved to the States on a Green card. They were officially ‘married’ under Californian law in 1998 give formal marital rights to gay couples. Desmond and his family as well as Pedro and his wife went to their civil union. In 1999, the pair went to Kerala, the home State of Joseph and filed regular papers and officially adopted a son whom they brought back with them to California. Sanjay Varghese- Colaco was registered with the California State, as a US citizen with two parents and with a birth date of 26 June 1998 two months before his adopted parents were legally married. In December 1999 the local Catholic church in Palo Alto baptized Sanjay and the whole

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extended family witnessed the occasion. (Information from the diary of Pedro Colaco, the grandson of Moshin Lourdes e Colaco and son of Joaquim Figuerado)

7. The Millennial Goans (2000-onwards)

The story of the Augustino Colaco descendants is traced in this century. We left off the last millennium with Pedro settling in Texas. Both their sons had migrated from the UK and settled in America. Desmond Colaco got a son from his American wife, and they named him Francis Colaco in 1992. Desmond’s younger brother, Frederick settled in the Silicone Valley, and he finally got married to a person from Kerala who migrated from India. They adopted a son, Sanjay. The children went to school in the USA. In 2006, Pedro and his extended family went to East Africa – to the Serengeti and then on to Zanzibar. The late John da Silva, the local artist and historian in Zanzibar showed them around the Stone Town. In 2007, Pedro, his wife, his children and their spouses and their grandchildren went to Goa on vacation. This time Pedro made sure his two grandsons were registered in the panchayt for the ‘zone’. (Information derived from an interview with Desmond Colaco)

In 2011 Pedro passed away at the age of 79. His children were ‘half’ Goan. His grandchildren? One, Desmond’s son, is ‘quarter’ Goan but Sanjay is not even a biological son of a Goan. Six generations have passed since Augustine stepped into Africa – none were born in Goa and one not even Goan. But then who is a Goan? Do they not have the right to be Goan anyway, just as the zone gave them the right to belong? To belong to a village. That sense of belonging was most important for Pedro and his forefathers. That is Diaspora. Like their male ancestors they have a right to a village in Goa – in Parra where they are registered zonekars. It does not any more matter that they are not “ethnically” Goan, whether they are white, yellow or black. Goans are what we are in self recognition of being Goan – whatever that now means.

Francis went to high school in Texas and completed his PhD in social anthropology from Cornel University in 2011. Between high school and university, he went to East Africa and volunteered in a project building low-cost housing for slum dwellers outside Nairobi. He now has the custody of his grandfather’s memoirs who entrusted it to him before he passed away.

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