Joseph Murumbi

Joseph Anthony Zuzarte Murumbi was born on the eighteenth of June 1911 in Eldama Ravine, Kenya, the son of a Goan trader, Peter Nicholas Zuzarte, who had come to East Africa around the time the railway was reaching the region, and a Maasai mother, the daughter of a laibon (a Maasai spiritual and political leader). From two worlds at once, he would carry the name of his mother's people all his life.

Around the age of six he was sent to India, where he was educated at Anglo-Indian Jesuit schools in Bangalore and Bellary and spent much of his youth before returning to Kenya as a young man. He entered the independence struggle through the Kenya African Union, worked abroad in the anti-colonial cause, and after 1963 helped shape the new nation's course. He served as Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1964 to 1966 and, in 1966, as the second Vice-President of Kenya, before withdrawing from public office.

Away from politics, Murumbi became one of the greatest private collectors of African heritage the continent has known. Over a lifetime he gathered more than fifty thousand books, rare manuscripts, stamps, textiles, and works of art spanning many African nations. Rather than sell to foreign bidders, he entrusted his library and archive to Kenya, and with Alan Donovan co-founded African Heritage, a landmark pan-African gallery.

He died in Nairobi on the twenty-second of June 1990. Joseph Murumbi gathered the memory of a continent and gave it back to his people, that Africa might keep its own inheritance. May his name endure among the honored.