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He sobbed when his friend Pio Gama Pinto was assassinated in 1965. Joseph Murumbi, Kenya’s Vice President could not stand it.
He became the country’s shortest serving number two, resigning in December 1966.
He dedicated his life to art, creating Kenya’s largest private art collection that has its pride of place at the Kenya National Archives and the Murumbi Gallery at the Old PC’s House along Kenyatta Avenue, Nairobi.
Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi: His immortality rests on the formidable African Heritage, Kenya’s first Pan-Africa Art Gallery co-founded with Alan Donovan in 1972.
In The Path Not Taken, American biographer Anne Thurston writes that Murumbi schooled in India, the land of his Goan father, Peter Zuzarte, but chose to live in Kenya, the land of his Maasai mother where he was born in 1911.
The man who worked with the British administration in Somalia joined the Kenya African Union (KAU) as acting secretary general at the height of the State of Emergency in 1952.
But KAU was banned during his trip to Britain to represent political grievances, making Murumbi a ‘wanted’ person.
He stayed in Britain for nine years working as a clerk at the Moroccan embassy.
He often visited West London’s Portobello Market, where buying a curved ivory tusk from Congo began a collection that is now part of the Murumbi African Heritage Collection comprising art and craft from across Africa, textiles, fashion, jewellery, weaponry, artefacts, stamps, 12,000 books and 50,000 historical documents that were sold to the Kenyan government for Sh4.1 million in 1977.
But dreams to turn his Muthaiga home into the Murumbi Institute of African Studies was never to be.It was grabbed and sold.
Mzee Jomo Kenyatta’s private secretary, Minister of State and Foreign Affairs Minister succumbed to stroke in June 1990 and was buried at the City Park Cemetery where Pinto is also interred.
Sheila Murumbi: Sheila Ann Keine, a librarian, met her future hubby while he was looking for African materials.
The stamp collector and the art collector became inseparable as she went on to own the largest stamp collection in the world, only rivalled by that of the Queen of England!
She once sold one rare stamp issued in the 17th century for Sh4 million.Sheila died in October 2000 and was buried next to her husband.
The Murumbis have no children, although Murumbi is rumoured to have fathered a son when he was stationed in Somalia.
