Joseph Anthony Zurzate Murumbi

Does the name Joseph Zurzate Murumbi ring a bell? Perhaps not. Save for his position as the second vice-president of Kenya after independence,  not many are aware of his legacy as the custodian of Kenya’s pre-independence political machinations and its post-colonial cultural heritage. Even “Kenya’s foremost historian, Bethwell Ogot, mentioned Murumbi in passing as a peripatetic activist who ‘preferred to discuss the Kenya problem in a global context’; someone difficult to place in the story of Kenya’s 1950s. ‘What is to be done with the likes of Murumbi?’, pondered Ogot.”

 

But as you visit the Kenya National Archives or ponder about key actors in events leading up to and immediately following Kenya’s becoming an independent state, his name ought to be at the back of your mind. 

Childhood and Early Years

Joseph Murumbi was born in Eldama Ravine, Kenya in June 1911 to Peter Zurzate and Murumbi – the daughter of Murumbi, the Uasin Gishu Maasai Laibon (Medicine man/ritual leader). His father was a Goan (person from the Goa State of Southern India)-turned shop-trader who had arrived in Kenya via Aden and Zanzibar in 1897.

In circa 1917, at seven years old and despite his mother’s protests, Murumbi was taken to India by his father where he began school. He attended the  Anglo-Indian Jesuit Schools of St. Joseph’s, Bangalore for his primary education and later, St. Pancras Boys High for his high school education. He would work, briefly, as Clerk in India for a garage and later the Burma Shell Company before returning to Kenya in 1933.

Murumbi’s parents had separated by the time he was coming back to Kenya. His father would advise Murumbi to purchase land and live among his mother’s (Maa) people instead of looking for a formal job. Not being Afrikan under colonial law, the provincial commissioner turned down his attempt at purchasing land.

“When I applied for the land, the government officials were very suspicious. They thought I might disturb the Maasai. The Provincia I Commissioner, Mr. Hodge, said, “Look here, you’re not a Maasai, you’re an Asian”. And in that respect he was right, one takes the nationality of one’s father.”

While his Asian identity afforded him comparatively superior rights to Afrikans, it also denied him the ownership of land in Kenya. And yet Murumbi was a man who deeply cherished his mother and looked forward to living among her maternal ancestors. He weighed his options then drew lots to decide which one between India and Kenya would henceforth host his heritage and identity. Kenya won out. 

So, he would renounce his Asian nationality instead choosing to be an Afrikan of Kenyan citizenship by adopting his grandfather’s name: Murumbi. Indeed, few stories were as probable as Murumbi’s change of nationality from the upwardly mobile Indian nationality to Kenyan. In the book, The Path not Take; The Story of Joseph Murumbi by Anne Thurston and published by Alan Donovan, Murumbi is quoted saying:

“…’but I don’t want to be known as an Asian. I’m willing to renounce my Asian nationality’. He tried to dissuade me, but l was adamant. Then he referred my case to the Attorney-General, and the Attorney-General ruled that I had the option either to stick to my Asian nationality and give up any rights as an African, and vice versa.

In support of this decision was his recollection of the experience he had while studying in India – how the Anglo-Asian students had discriminated against him on the basis of his Indo-African heritage.  Whether he was accepted as Kenyan particularly, among the Kenyan political class is another matter as we shall see.

Given his clerical experience in India, Murumbi secured a clerking job in the Medical Department of the old KAR hospital in Nairobi in 1935 by which time his father had passed on. 

In 1941, he would be off to Somalia where he enlisted as a clerk, soon Chief clerk, in the Somalia Grandamarie in Mogadishu. It’s here where he met his first wife, Cecilia, and is said to have fathered a son by the name Jo Jo. Next, Murumbi worked, in 1948, as a clerk in the trade department of the British Military Administration in Somalia, a position he held for four years before returning to Nairobi in 1952.

In Kenya, he would rebuff a secretive work offer from the Kenya Police Criminal Investigation Department – a position he was offered thanks to his multilingual ability (he could speak, Hindu, English, Portuguese, Italian and some Kiswahili). He chose instead to work as a senior clerk for a transport firm by the name Overseas Transport Motors.

While in Nairobi, Murumbi also attended the East African Indian National Congress (EANIC) which was patronised by the Goan trade unionist-cum-journalist, Pio Gama Pinto and N.S. Mangat, the Kenyan Asian lawyer. Here, he became friends with Pinto who would soon introduce him to the Kenya African Union’s (KAU) study circle.

It’s in KAU that he first met and subsequently became known to Jomo Kenyatta. “You must play an active part in the Party”, Kenyatta once told him. Coincidentally, Kenyatta used to service his car at the very transport firm where Murumbi worked as a clerk. Murumbi never missed a chance to pass his regards to the KAU leader whenever he visited. And it’s those small but effecting moments that grew their friendship.

Leaving Kenya

In the face of a fast-increasing anticolonial Kenyan sentiment particularly the Mau Mau uprising, KAU’s primary Kikuyu leadership was arrested in 1952. Known as the Kapenguria six, one of whom included Mzee Jomo Kenyatta, their trial rumbled on. It’s at this time that Murumbi was thrust into the spotlight as KAU’s new secretary general (as a proxy) – procuring legal counsel for the Kapenguria six and voicing Afrikan anticolonial concerns through the media and other political forums.

“Chokwe, who was Chairman of the Mombasa Branch of KAU, was elected as the Acting Secretary. However, as he was wanted by the police, it was suggested that my name be put forward as the Acting Secretary, merely as a cover for Chokwe, which I accepted.”

This spotlight made him somewhat of a marked man under the colonial government. When he visited Jomo Kenyatta in prison, Mzee had one piece of advice/request for him; that he should leave Kenya and create international awareness of Kenya’s anticolonial struggle. 

It would be on March 17, 1953 when an Air India employee slipped a ticket (organised by the Indian High Commission) to Bombay in his hands. He had just seen off H.O. Davies – the only African lawyer on Jomo Kenyatta’s legal defence team. Publicised as a ‘non-political’ endeavour to study community development in India, Murumbi toured across India in 1953 – addressing various social and political forums thus generating India’s awareness and sympathy for Kenya’s plight.

On different occasions in 1953, he addressed the Indian National Congress, the Goan National Congress, the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) where he met Jaramogi Oginga Odinga and the Indian Council for Cultural Freedom:

“Before the Indian parliament, Murumbi decried Britain’s violent suppression of Mau Mau, a cause celebre in India as Kenyatta was finally convicted to seven years hard labour in April 1953…

In a speech before the Indian Council for Cultural Freedom, Murumbi advocated closer Indo-African cultural ties to anchor the ‘brotherhood’ necessary to realise anticolonial victories…

In Delhi, Murumbi called for a bespoke East African scholarship scheme at Indian institutions, building on the ICCR programme for African students active since 1947.”

Then in August 1953, Murumbi left for Cairo, Egypt funded by the Indian parliamentary ‘India-Africa council.’ Like in India, Murumbi continued publicizing Afrika’s independence struggle without a dint of hesitance. He made acquaintances with the likes of …who would prove beneficial to his position as first Independent Kenya’s foreign minister.   

Moves to Britain

When Murumbi arrived in London in September of 1953, what he intended to be a six-week stay became 9 years in exile. He intended to proceed with his Afrikan anticolonial struggle publicity campaigns across the West Afrikan states of Ghana and Nigeria then the USA before returning to Kenya. He would be denied a visa halting his international campaigns. 

In London, he found friendship with British anticolonial lobbyists especially since his prior work on Afrikan decolonisation in India and Egypt had attracted negative British media coverage.

Crucially, it’s in Britain where the first inkling of Murumbi’s art-collecting future arrived in what one might think of as an unusual manner – at a dance party at Mbiu Koinange’s house in London. Mbiu Koinange was the Minister of State in the Office of the President in post-independent Kenya and a close associate of Mzee Kenyatta. At the party, Murumbi spotted an exquisite beauty in attendance. He was fast to inquire who she was and was told she was a librarian 

This led him, legend goes, to invite the dazzling librarian to catalogue his books. 

“It may be a question of the spider saying to the fly. ‘Come to my parlour’ but anyway she catalogued my library (600 books) and we developed a very keen friendship,” Murumbi is quoted saying in the book, The Path not Take; The Story of Joseph Murumbi by Anne Thurston. 

Sooner, the pair would start visiting art establishments in London to collect various items of artistic nature. This budding relationship between the two passionate collectors served as a precursor for a subsequent capacious post-colonial art collection, the growth of which continued unabated between the 1960s and 1980s. 

And yet it’s Sheila who got  Joe Murumbi started on collecting art as Alan Donovan once revealed: “Few people know it, but Sheila actually got Joe started on collecting African art and artefacts.

“He was working for the Moroccan Embassy at the time, making 10 Euros a week. But he wanted to buy an ivory horn from Congo, so he began paying for it in installments. The shopkeeper was so impressed that Joe wanted to take it back ‘home’ to Africa that he eventually gave it to him as a gift.” 

In a nutshell, until the 1960s, Murumbi’s 1950s in London and across Europe prima facie remained a pursuit that advanced the momentum for Independence. Ultimately, his travels emphasised the importance of bottom-up development policies for Afrikans, community development, and the tailoring of education to the Afrikan context.

Murumbi’s 1960s  

It was in 1963 – the birth of an ‘independent’ Kenya that Murumbi’s colonial ban on  him was lifted. Murumbi left London for Kenya at the behest of the founding president along with all the books he had collected. “When the constitutional talks were over,” he revealed, “I packed up thirty cases of books (‘about three thousand books’), and I came back to take part in a new era.” In Kenya, he was appointed, by Jomo Kenyatta, as his Personal Assistant. Later that year he became KANU’s treasurer and was involved in formulating its manifesto for the upcoming elections. 

He would contest for a parliamentary seat as member for Nairobi South and win. Subsequently, Murumbi was appointed as Kenya’s first foreign minister- helping set up various Kenyan embassies across Africa and Europe and attending “conferences on behalf of Mzee, such as the OAU Heads of State Meeting, the’ Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference, and the Non-Alignment Conference.”

Away from politics, he continued pursuing his other hobbies as an archivist, letter writer and art, crafts and document collector. His first major contribution to the artworld and Kenya’s cultural heritage was in 1965 when he sponsored a bill to parliament that set in motion the establishment the current Kenya National Archives and Documentation Service. Known as The Public Archives Act of 1965, section 3 (1) of the bill stated:

“There shall be established, constituted and maintained a public department to be know known as the Public Archives Service for which there shall be appointed a Chief Archivist, and such other staff as may be necessary for the purposes of this Act.”

One would be suffused with an unaccustomed sense of pride in common citizenship with the man Murumbi was. He’s a man that had a tenderness for the brave fellows of Kenya. A little-known story goes; an old acquaintance of Murumbi showed up at his Foreign Affairs office looking awful and in bad shape. He was fresh from detention. Instructed to help the man get a paying job, Murumbi’s undersecretary questioned the man about what sort of job he would like – a line of questioning that deeply offended Murumbi. “Don’t ask this man what kind of job he can do. What have you done during this emergency?” Murumbi reproached his undersecretary.

He was also a man whom the harsh lot of the working class remained close to his heart. Firstly, he could not stomach the Western capitalist ideology – an ideology which the Jomo Kenyatta and most of Murumbi’s Cabinet colleagues and other senior civil servants had wholly embraced. Secondly, on one occasion, he’s said to have questioned Jomo Kenyatta about his awareness of the run-away corruption rampant in his cabinet. Thirdly, in his papers, included by Anne Thurston in A Path Not Taken: The Story of Joseph Murumbi, published by Donovan that Murumbi writes:

Kenyatta“had no political will to direct the Settler Fund Transfer (SFT) to the benefit of millions of landless African as had been stated in the Kanu manifesto at independence.

The STF “had been hijacked by a few African elites who were loaning themselves money meant for the landless and were acquiring huge tracts of land at the expense of the poor.”

Overall, Murumbi’s criticisms of capitalist direction that the Kenyatta regime adopted were made in private. Publicly, and especially as the foreign minister, he supported that very ideology. Amidst all this, the founding president still trusted his counsel and kept him close. This made him a target for slander and hatred from Kenyatta’s mono-ethnic inner circle. Always considered an ‘outsider,’ Murumbi ran into definite trouble with Kenyatta’s inner circle when the president appointed him, in May, 1966, as the second Vice President of Kenya. It would appear, nervous Cabinet colleagues found his appointment inconveniencing in their implicit ambition of one day succeeding president Kenyatta.

And since he disdained prejudice of any kind, pursuing the interests of common citizens required persistent irritability, a constant willingness to bite the hand that feeds. It may not have counted as much in the larger scheme of things but Murumbi’s defiance was a touchstone of a visionary’s  always provisional capacity to sustain a hope and appetite for a great Kenyan future.

Deeply paranoid about his safety around his fellow politicians, he officially resigned from his position as vice-president on November 6, 1966. “It was made clear to him by several people in government that he was not welcome and should get out,” admitted his friend and African Gallery cofounder, Alan Donovan.

The assassination of his friend and mentor Pio Gama Pinto in 1965 and whose death he never stopped grieving had something to do with Murumbi’s resignation. It’s said that he would wail every time his good friend was mentioned. “He was quick to react to injustice. If such were the qualities of this patriot and he was branded a communist for his actions,” Murumbi euologised, “then I must say to his accusers that their perception of political dogma is, indeed, distorted.” But he explained to Kenyatta that a concern about his health was the reason for his resignation.