Joseph Murumbi is known as Kenya's second Vice President. The man is more popular for his political career than for his more memorable and lasting legacy; that of being an art collector of renown.

Who was the man?

Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi was born in Kenya in 1911, from a Goan father and Maasai mother. His father who was a trader by profession and had arrived from India in 1897, just at the time that the railway was passing the area that he was born in.

His mother meanwhile,  was the daughter of Murumbi, the Maasai Laibon for the Uasin Gishu Maasai. Murumbi would spend the first 16 years of his life matriculating in India.

Joseph struggled early on as neither the Indians nor Africans accepted him as one of their own.

Sources: The East African Standard, NY Times, Friends of City Park, The Nation.

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