16 Facts About Joseph Murumbi

Joseph Murumbi was the illegitimate son of a Goan trader, Peter Nicholas Zuzarte, by the daughter of a Maasai medicine man.

Joseph Murumbi's parents broke up when he was a toddler.

Joseph Murumbi's father married a Goan widow named Ezalda Clara Albuquerque, who already had nine children.

Joseph Murumbi was then sent away to India for his schooling at the age of six.

Joseph Murumbi went to Good Shepherd Convent School and then St Joseph's High School, both in Bangalore.

Joseph Murumbi completed his schooling at St Pancras European Boys High School in Bellary.

Joseph Murumbi played a key role in securing legal counsel for the detainees arrested in the emergency crackdown, and, together with Pio Gama Pinto, raised objections to the continuance of British Imperial dominion in Kenya through Indian newspapers such as the Chronicle.

In March 1953 Joseph Murumbi was forced to flee the country to avoid arrest by the British authorities.

Joseph Murumbi spent much of this period working with sympathetic nationalists in the Indian Government, which allowed him to write extensively in the Indian press and broadcast on All India Radio.

Joseph Murumbi subsequently served as the Republic's Vice President in a government led by Jomo Kenyatta in 1966 for nine months.

However, around this time Joseph Murumbi became uneasy with what he perceived as Kenyatta's increasing authoritarianism in dealing with political opponents, and the increasing corruption that he witnessed rapidly developing within the new Kenyan government order, and subsequently his concerns were borne out when Kenyatta began to use government power to engage in land grabbing in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Joseph Murumbi became further alienated from the new Kenyan governing order when Pio Gama Pinto, a close personal friend and key political philosophical mentor of Joseph Murumbi's, was murdered in April 1965 after he had become a public critic of it.

Joseph Murumbi's feeling, evidently, was that these were not the principles for which so many had suffered, and his departure was only a matter of time.

Joseph Murumbi died on 22 June 1990 in his 79th year.

Joseph Murumbi married Sheila, a librarian whom he met whilst he was a political exile from Kenya in England in the late 1950s.

Joseph Murumbi was an avid art collector, and during his life acquired over 50,000 books and sheaves of official correspondence.