Joseph Murumbi

In 1982 he seriously injured himself in a fall at his home, and was reliant upon a wheel-chair in his final years. He died on 22 June 1990 in his 79th year. Murumbi's body was buried in Nairobi City Park. The unmarked grave was subject to neglect, vandalism and theft through the late 1990s and early 2000s, and had at one time been threatened with being lost trace of altogether when a building development scheme was considered for the site of the grave, until it was protected by the creation around it of a memorial garden named after him.

After resigning from the office of the Vice-President in November 1966 through what was announced officially at the time to be on account of ill health, Murumbi withdrew from politics.

After Kenya became independent of British imperial rule in 1963, Murumbi participated in the writing of its first governmental constitution, and held the office of its Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1964 to 1966, touring the globe to set up numerous ambassadorial offices in foreign capitals for the newly created nation. He subsequently served as the Republic's Vice-President in a government led by Jomo Kenyatta in 1966 for nine months. However, around this time 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 as when Kenyatta began to use government power to engage in land grabbing in the late 1960s and 1970s. Murumbi also became further alienated from the new Kenyan governing order when Pio Gama Pinto, a close personal friend and key political philosophical mentor of Murumbi's, was murdered in April 1965 after he had become a public critic of it. As Pheroze Nowrojee stated:

After returning to Kenya from England where he had worked as a translator for the Moroccan Embassy in London, Murumbi became a member of the Kenya African Union political party, amidst a political ferment in East Africa caused by the beginning of the withdrawal from the African continent of the British Empire. A declaration of the State of Emergency in Kenya on 20 October 1952 saw the detention of senior figures of the Kenya African Union's leadership, and Murumbi found himself thrust into the center of the party's leadership as its acting Secretary-General. He played a key role in securing legal counsel for the detainees arrested in the emergency crackdown, and, together with Pio Gama Pinto, raised objection to the continuance of British Imperial dominion in Kenya through Indian newspapers such as the Chronicle.

Murumbi married Shelia, a librarian whom he met whilst he was a political exile from Kenya in England in the late 1950s. They lived in Kenya subsequently on an estate in the Muthaiga district. She died in 2000.

Joseph Zuzarte Murumbi (18 June 1911 – 22 June 1990) was a Kenyan politician who was the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Kenya from 1964 to 1966, and its second Vice-President between May and December 1966.