When I was working in the advertising industry in Delhi more than 20 years ago, I used to frequent book shops – of which Delhi has many good ones – and buy and read books voraciously. However, I always had a pile of unread ones waiting to be read since there was my work in the advertising agency and plenty else to read all the time. And so it was with the books that I bought at the Goa Arts and Literature Festival in 2018, held at the International Centre, Goa. I had written about the festival that I attended on my blog, but the books remained to be read. I wrote about Shashi Deshpande’s and Shanta Gokhale’s books a year later on my blog.
The last of the books that I bought at the GALF 2018 struck me as weird and so I saved it for the last, though this book too was the subject of a discussion at GALF which I attended and wrote about years ago. Sita Valles: A Revolutionary Until Death by Leonor Figueiredo and translated by DA Smith is a slim book of 180 pages published by Goa 1556 in association with Golden Heart Emporium about the life of a young Goan lady doctor in Angola who fought for Angola’s liberation from Portuguese rule, but was caught in the violent civil war that broke soon after independence and was killed by the political organisation that she worked for. I don’t recall the author of the book – described as a journalist who was born in Portugal and grew up in Angola in the book – at the GALF discussion but the publisher from Goa and the translator from the US were there.
Most of the book is about Sita Valles, the daughter of Goan emigrés Lucia Aida Florinda Dias and Edgar Francisco da Purificaçao Valles, growing up in Luanda, Angola and studying medicine there and in Lisbon. There are descriptions of how she got involved with leftist political groups engaged in the liberation struggle for Angola only to be accused later of having masterminded the putsch of May 27, 1977.
The author Leonor Figueiredo writes:
“Sita Valles died in Angola, where she was born, but Angola was not her parents’ native land. They came from Goa, India, migrants from another piece of the Portuguese empire. They were one of the few Goan families who settled in Angola. Their lives blended with those of thousands of Portuguese who, after the end of the Second World War, tried to make new lives for themselves in the African colony, and who benefitted from the “30 golden years” of unmatched economic growth provided by a series of favourable circumstances.”
Nowhere in the book is there anything about the 30 golden years of economic growth in Angola, nor indeed its freedom struggle. In fact, the book suffers from a serious lack of attention to Angola’s history – both before and after Portuguese rule – which would have provided the much-needed context for writing about Sita Valles’ life. This historical context is essential as not many people would know of Angola’s history, let alone its liberation struggle. From reading the book you would think that the liberation struggle in Angola was mainly led by leftist groups – of which there are a bewildering array of abbreviations – from FAPLA and FNLA, MPLA, MRPP, PCP, OCA and UNITA… to DOM (Department of Organisation of the Masses).
In Chapter 1 of the book itself, the author writes:
“Sita Maria Dias Valles, who obtained her last Portuguese identity card (#83306) from the Luanda registry in 1971, remains, for all intents and purposes, missing. Her body was never returned to her family. She was about to turn 26 when she was executed.”
Please note the mischief with numbers – it did not escape my notice – by unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses who are the ones who have been mucking around with people’s identities, as I should know.
The events described in the book – mainly her and her brother’s disappearance and their subsequent killings are sensational; a 26-year-old doctor, Sita Valles being shot by the government forces even though she spent her life fighting for Angola’s freedom. The events leading up to Angola’s freedom, the civil war and the putsch are not dealt with in any detail, and so we have Sita Valles’ involvement with leftist groups as episodic narrations sans the historical background.
In fact, some of the descriptions of Sita Valles’ involvement with leftist political groups are sensationalized to the extent of her even developing deeper interactions with Soviet party officials in Lisbon, where she briefly relocates to complete her medical education. The book mentions Cuban and Soviet involvement with Angola’s freedom struggle, and it appears that Sita Valles becomes a full-fledged “Commie”! The facts mentioned in the book though never rise above student-level politics, with the main events in her life being expelled from the MPLA by another student political leader, Nito Alves, most likely and her involvement in a relationship with José Van-Dunem, who becomes her partner and father to her children, one of whom is named Ché, after Ché Guevara. They were supposed to be the “fraccionistas” according to the MPLA (People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola), as they subscribed to Marxist-Leninist theory and Sita Valles was criticised for having joined the PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) while in Lisbon.
Sita Valles is described as young, intelligent, beautiful and even seductive! The image of her on the book’s cover is a glimpse of that, I suppose. The author’s description of her in the very first chapter of the book reads:
“Sita was tall compared to most Portuguese women at the time standing 1.69 metres. She had the build of someone who had been a swimmer. She didn’t drink coffee, nor did she regularly smoke; only rarely did she light up a cigarette. She stood out. Many who knew her use the word “seductive”. Set in a dusky face framed by black hair, her big, dark eyes, with their long lashes, attracted attention.”
A close friend of Sita Valles’ Zita Seabra describes Sita thus:
“She had a lot of what I’d have liked to have: she studied medicine, she was beautiful, seductive and well-spoken…
She was a romantic, an adventurer, a revolutionary… She was very coquettish and seductive. Feminine. She liked to dress well… she had a beautiful voice… She managed to steal little things from the supermarket, like sweets or ballpoint pens, and brought them to give to me at meetings.”
Yet another friend, Ludovina Gloria, known as Tatá remembers Sita Valles as someone who had skill but lacked resilience. They were swimming companions who were close in childhood, from the ages of six to fourteen.
In the end, the book falls flat since it is neither a biography nor a book about Angola’s freedom struggle. Like I said, the politics of Angola never rises above the level of student party politics. Piecing together the life of someone from talking to those who knew her, including members of her family, was always going to be tough and unconvincing. Especially, when it is entirely made up and a figment of unprofessional PR agency idiot bosses’ imagination, as I suspect. I shared a post on LinkedIn recently about the Perfect Relations scoundrels crashing my computer screen, having guessed that I was reading this book, a day before I actually reached the particular section about the screening of films. This section in the book is itself mischief from guessing or reading an old email exchange between me and my former Ogilvy Delhi colleague, Sarada, as I wrote in the LinkedIn post.
Sita Valles herself is probably a figment of these unprofessional PR idiot bosses’ imaginations. Knowing their penchant for mucking around with people’s names and identities, and being a victim of it myself, I suspect Valles to have been inspired by Valerie Pinto, COO at Perfect Relations based in Mumbai, who as I have said before, is the dumbest person I have ever met in my life. They are also obsessed with doctors and nurses, and I might mention that our family doctor at SMRC Hospital in Chicalim, Goa is Dr. Carmen Varela, through whom also the idiots meddle. Varela, Valerie and Valles… all interchangeable in their toxic and unprofessional minds.
Peripatetic Perch 