Skip to main content

John Noronha, in sport, music and life!

 

JOHN NORONHA

A keeper of memories




Canadian visitors John and his wife Gladys with their Sydney host Myrtle Coutinho and that other chap at Circular Quay.






OKAY on this particular occasion, being the Season of Christmas et al, I am treating myself to a little bit of bias. I only came to know John Noronha just a few years ago. However, during my years in East Africa, his name was often mentioned with some respect, not only for his tenure at Makerere University in Kampala but also as a budding musician and cricketer and a dabbler in hockey and all the other club sports that one tried one’s hand at least once or twice or more. Make no mistake, they did not say he was a sports star in the making but one of the guys.

What they did not know until much later was that our Man from Makerere was a super sleuth. No not a spy but a seeker of truths, especially sports truths. As the years rolled by, he accumulated heaps and heaps of pages with notes of this game or that bout or the emerging profiles and records of the leading athletes in East Africa. To this day, he still has one of the best newspaper and magazine collections about Seraphino Antao, the Kenyan Goan British sprinter, the first to win a set of double gold sprint medals in the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth Australia.

I guess his biggest gift is the instant-recall memory he has been blessed with all his life. Anyway, there is always heaps and heaps of clippings and his personal notes about particular events to fall back. He has often been described as a one-man, talking, writing library.

More than that I have always enjoyed his writings. He dedicated to the principle of journalist ethics, which is quickly disappearing from around the world, where the truth is often raped by social media and so-called journalists themselves continue to erode the sanctity of truth.

Hence, John Noronha will always serve the truth and nothing but the truth.

Stay strong, John. The world needs you.

I will publish a much fuller bio as soon as I get a copy.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

MORE photos of cricketers in Kenya added

More cricket photos added! Asians v Europeans, v Tanganyika, v Uganda, v East Africa, Rhodesia, etc some names missing! Photo Gallery of Kenya Cricket 23 photos: CM Gracias, Blaise d'Cunha Johnny Lobo! Ramanbhai Patel, Mehboob Ali, Basharat Hassan and hundreds others.  

Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands

  BOOK REVIEW   Pinto: Blood on Western and Kenyan hands   Review by Cyprian Fernandes     Pio Gama Pinto, Kenya’s Unsung Martyr 1927-1965 Edited by Shiraz Durrani [Vita Books, Kenya, 2018, 392 pp.   Pbk, £30, ISBN 978-9966-1890-0-4; distributed worldwide by African Books Collective, www.africanbookscollective.com ]   Less than two years after independence from the British, on 24 February 1965, the Kenyan nationalist Pio Gama Pinto was gunned down in the driveway of his Nairobi home.   His young daughter watched helplessly in the back seat of the family car.   Pinto, a Member of Parliament at the time, was Kenya’s first political martyr.   One man was wrongly accused of his death, served several years in prison and was later released and compensated.   Since then no one has been charged with the murder.   Now the long-awaited book on Pio Gama Pinto is finally here, launched in Nairobi on 16 October 2018....

The sanctuaries trying to save birds of prey from extinction in Kenya

  The sanctuaries trying to save birds of prey from extinction in Kenya (Courtesy of Al Jazeera) Poison, deforestation and power lines have pushed the African raptor population to a 90 per cent decline in the last 40 years. Raptor technician John Kyalo Mwanzia rehabilitates a juvenile fish eagle to flight after it was treated for grounding injuries sustained in a territorial fight at the Lake Naivasha habitat, at Soysambu Raptor Centre. [Tony Karumba/AFP] Simon Thomsett tentatively removes a pink bandage from the wing of an injured bateleur, a short-tailed eagle from the African savannah, where birds of prey are increasingly at risk of extinction. “There is still a long way to go before healing,” Thomsett explains as he lifts up the bird’s dark feathers and examines the injury. “It was injured in the Maasai Mara national park, but we don’t know how,” says the 62-year-old vet who runs the Soysambu Raptor Centre in central Kenya. The 18-month-old eagle, with a dist...