Joseph Murumbi

Joseph Anthony Zuzarte Murumbi was born in Eldama Ravine, Kenya, on the eighteenth of June 1911, the son of a Goan father (a small trader on the Uganda Railway) and a Maasai mother. He was raised in his mother's Maasai community in Narok district and educated at the Saint Joseph Mission School in Bangalore, India, where he completed his secondary education in 1929.

He returned to Kenya in the 1930s and entered colonial-era African politics through the Kenya African Union in 1952. He fled Kenya in late 1953 — after his arrest and brief detention as a Mau Mau political supporter — and lived in London through the rest of the colonial period as the international representative of KAU and subsequently of KANU. He raised diplomatic and financial support for Kenyan independence from across the Commonwealth and the Eastern bloc through the 1950s.

He returned to Kenya at independence in 1963 and served as the first Foreign Minister of independent Kenya (1964-66) and as the second Vice President of Kenya (May 1966 to August 1966) — a tenure he chose to end voluntarily on his disagreement with President Jomo Kenyatta over the increasing political concentration of executive power.

He spent the next twenty years building one of the largest private collections of African art, books, and political documents assembled in the twentieth century. His library at the time of his death contained approximately fifty thousand books on African political and cultural history, along with major collections of postage stamps, paintings, sculpture, and archival manuscripts.

He donated the entire collection to the Kenyan government in 1976 against modest annuity. The collection now constitutes the foundation of the Murumbi Africana Collection at the Kenya National Archives in Nairobi — the principal Africana research collection of East Africa.

He died in Nairobi on the twenty-second of June 1990, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the Vice President who resigned, and the collector whose library founded East African Africana scholarship.