Murumbi’s Legacy Part One:
From Eldama Ravine to London
Jun. 20, 2018, 12:45 am
By KAREN ROTHMYER @thestarkenya
Today, Murumbi stands as a symbol of what Kenya could have
become, and still could be. As the son of a Goan father and a Maasai mother, he
disdained prejudice of any kind. As someone plucked from relative obscurity by
Jomo Kenyatta thanks to his hard work and talents as an organizer, he was
dismissive of those who depended on family or ethnic connections. And as a
strong advocate of embracing and preserving African culture, he was a champion
of African artists and their works.
What follows, starting today, are three adaptations of chapters
from Joseph Murumbi: A Legacy of Integrity, to be
launched on Friday, 22 June. The origin of the book was a series of interviews
Murumbi did in the late 1970s. The transcripts of those interviews have been
edited, combined with other material, and provided with background by Karen
Rothmyer, a former Star public editor.
BACKGROUND
Joseph Murumbi’s father, Peter Zuzarte, came from an old landed
family in Goa, now part of India, but after emigrating to Kenya became a
trader. His mother, the daughter of Murumbi, the leader of the Uasin Gishu
Maasai, was a remarkable linguist who spoke a dozen languages including
English. The two met in Eldama Ravine, where Murumbi was born in 1911. The
couple eventually separated, by which time Murumbi was studying in a Jesuit-run
school in India. He returned to Kenya as a young man in 1933.
At the urging of his father, who said the African people needed
his skills more than the Asian people, Murumbi renounced his Asian identity and
became identified as a Maasai. His mixed background never seems to have caused
him political problems; he was elected to Parliament in 1963 from a mixed-race
constituency in Nairobi.
Murumbi’s father also encouraged him to read about colonialism
in both India and Kenya, which led him to appreciate the injustices of British
rule. Over the next fifteen years or so, however, he paid little attention to
politics, working as a clerk in Nairobi and then for the British Army in
Somalia. In 1952, already past 40, he decided to return to Kenya.
Following the imposition of a State of Emergency in October of
that year, Murumbi became Acting Secretary of the Kenya African Union and
assisted in the defence of Jomo Kenyatta at his trial in Kapenguria on charges
of masterminding the Mau Mau insurgency. Before the trial ended, Kenyatta
instructed Murumbi to take Kenya’s case to the outside world. The KAU was banned
soon afterward, meaning that Murumbi would be subject to immediate arrest if he
were to return home. This led to his spending nine years in exile in England.
There, Murumbi worked to further the goal of Kenyan
independence. During this time he was spied on and harassed by British
intelligence, while learning how to petition Parliament, engage in public
debates, and become comfortable in front of a news microphone.
Muthoni Likimani, the Kenyan author and broadcaster, lived in
London in the mid-50s and recalls how Murumbi organised meetings between MPs
and visiting Kenyan leaders. ‘He was cool-headed and quite an effective
person,’ she says. ‘He was a man of action, not a man of talking too much.’
IN MURUMBI’S WORDS
The atmosphere in Kenya when I returned from Somalia in 1952 was
different, people were more conscious of their rights and more conscious of the
need for change. They wanted a legislature in their hands, the elimination of
the colour bar, more land, and more money spent on education and agriculture.
When I first came back I stayed with a friend who took me over
to a meeting where I asked some questions. When the meeting was over, a young
Asian, Pio Pinto, came up to me and asked who I was. Then he told me, ‘You must
meet all the boys—Bildad Kaggia, Achieng Oneko, and the others in the Kenya
African Union.’ Gradually I got involved with a group of about twenty KAU
members which we called the Kenya Study Circle.
The only activity we organised was a conference on the economic
problems of East Africa, which we held in Ngai’s office on River Road. Mzee
Kenyatta came to this meeting and afterward Mzee, who was meeting me for the
first time, asked me who I was and whether I was a member of the Kenya African
Union. I said that I was not, but that I would become a member, and he told
me—I remember these words: ‘You must play an active role in the Party.’
On the day the Emergency was declared, when I read that Mzee had
been arrested I went straight to KAU headquarters. I asked whether there was
anything I could do to help. They told me to come back in the afternoon; they
had to elect a new committee. At the meeting, Muinga Chokwe 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.
About a week later, I was at the airport to help receive Fenner
Brockway and Leslie Hale, British MPs who were visiting Kenya at KAU’s
invitation, when Chokwe suddenly turned up. Immediately the police saw him they
arrested him, and he just had time to give me the keys to the office before he
was taken away. As I was on the list as the Acting Secretary General, I was
left ‘holding the baby’, and that’s how I entered politics—not by design, but
by accident.
I saw Mzee almost every day of the trial, but the only thing he
said to me, and this is something which may damn the Old Man if I say this, but
he said to me, ‘Please go and tell these people to stop this fighting. This
will take us nowhere.’ I said, ‘How can we do it? It’s reached a stage now that
if we tried to say anything the people would butcher us.’
The trial was just a sham. The defence lawyers were not lacking
in any respect. But the British Government had to justify the oppression and
the exploitation of people here, they had to find a scapegoat.
Kenyatta felt that I should go out of the country and speak to people in India,
in Cairo, Britain, North America and West Africa about the situation.
When I arrived in London, The Congress of Peoples Against
Imperialism had arranged a program of meetings for me right throughout the
country. But as I was late in coming they had to reorganise the program and
this took some time. So I spent the first month in London going about to see
the museums and art galleries, which I found very interesting. And, with the
little money I had, I started buying books.
I also made contact with some of the foreign students who were
there in London, and contacted some Quaker friends, who arranged for me to have
a meeting with the Colonial Secretary. I was supposed to be the KAU
representative in London. When we arrived, we were told that I couldn’t see the
Colonial Secretary but that a Mr Barton would see me.
When Mr Barton came in he shook hands with the two Quakers and
ignored me. He sat down and said in a very rough voice: ‘Murumbi, I’d like you
to understand I’ve been in Kenya for twenty years.’ I looked at him and said,
‘That is perfectly obvious.’ He asked me what I meant by this. I pointed out
what he had done and said, ‘That is the attitude of the European in Kenya, who
does not shake hands with an African.’
I had prepared a short note of the points I wanted to discuss,
which were mainly concerned with the release of Jomo Kenyatta and talks with
him and other African leaders about ending the State of Emergency. All my
suggestions were of no avail.
After the interview I asked Mr Barton where he had been
stationed. He replied that he had been a District Commissioner and mentioned a
number of places including Eldama Ravine. I told him I’d been born there and
asked if he knew the reason for the nine-foot stone wall around the DC’s house.
He didn’t know, but he remembered the wall. So I told him, ‘The reason for that
wall was that my grandfather disliked the British and attacked the District
Commissioner’s house and nearly killed him.’
In 1954 we formed the Movement for Colonial Freedom. The
movement was sponsored by nearly a hundred and twenty Labour MPs and many other
distinguished individuals. I was appointed Assistant Secretary.
We worked with committees which covered the whole of the
colonial world. We met regularly in the House of Commons, in rooms that were
just below the main debating room. I liken our activities to termites who
operate underground.
Whilst I was in the MCF we made contact with most of the
colonial leaders and that made my later task as Foreign Minister much easier
because I knew them on a personal level. I also met a lot of leaders at the first
All-African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958. It was such an enlightening,
inspiring conference that it gave the political parties the extra energy to
struggle even harder for independence.
I met Sheila [an Englishwoman whom he later married in a Maasai
ceremony] at a dance at Mbiyu Koinange’s house, in London. I had heard that she
was a librarian and I wanted to get my library catalogued. Sheila volunteered
to do it. It may be a question of the spider saying to the fly, ‘Come to my
parlour,’ but anyway she catalogued my library and we developed a very keen
friendship from then onwards.
When Mzee came to London [for the second Lancaster House
independence talks in 1962] I managed all the delegation’s appointments, did
all the typing work for them, arranged meetings for them and so on.
Odinga is very generous with money. I remember in London he came
to us after Mzee was released and said, ‘Look here, Mzee, I’ve got £10,000, you
must have some of this money because you’ve got no money.’ He gave the Old Man
about £2,000 or £3,000. Odinga never hid the fact of where he got the money.
But as far as I know Odinga is not a communist.
I worked very closely with Tom Mboya during the London
conferences, and he was the only one who actually worked. While other people
were having a good time, Mboya was working. And one must accept that, whether
you like him or not, he played his part.
On the night before Mzee left for Nairobi, he asked me to have
dinner with him. He told me, ‘Joe, now you’ve got permission to come back to
Kenya, what are you going to do when you go back?’ And I said, ‘Mzee you know
I’ve been away for nine years, and I’ve got to go back to see my people and
friends and then look for a job.’ So, he said, ‘Now supposing I make a
proposition to you to work for me.’ I said, ‘Mzee, I’ll work anywhere.’ When
the Constitutional talks were over, I packed up my books and everything and I
came back.
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