ALMOST EVERYTHING YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT JOE MURUMBI
I have been downsizing all the bits and pieces in my research troves and came on this excellent research on the the life and times of Joe Murumbi.
(WARNING IT IS QUITE LONG, BUT WORTH THE EFFORT)
This is a repository copy of African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s.
Article:
Milford, Ismay and McCann, Gerard orcid.org/0000-0003-0509-319X (2021) African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s. Journal of Contemporary History. 111–135. ISSN 0022-0094
Corresponding author:
Gerard McCann, University of York, Department of History, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
On 17 March 1953, Joseph Murumbi waited anxiously at
Eastleigh Airport, Nairobi. Following the mass arrest of Kenya’s nationalist
leadership in October 1952, the ‘Kapenguria Six’ trial of Jomo Kenyatta and his
comrades rumbled on. Kenya’s Mau Mau emergency was underway. Murumbi, an
activist in the Kenya African Union and ally of Kenyatta, knew the eyes of the
British colonial state were upon him
as he sat in the departure hall among a crowd of colleagues to bid farewell to
the Nigerian lawyer H.O. Davies – the only African member of Kenyatta’s legal
defence team. Then it happened: in a cloak-and-dagger manoeuvre, organised
with the Indian High Commission, an Air India employee slipped a ticket to
Bombay into Murumbi’s hand. As Davies’ entourage dispersed, Murumbi walked onto
the tarmac and into the aircraft unchallenged. He had escaped Nairobi.1
Murumbi’s departure to independent India became the first leg in a decade
of travel and exile across the global 1950s. This article is about those
journeys: Murumbi’s physical movements across Asia, Europe and Africa, and,
more crucially, his intellectual voyages. The significance of these journeys
is increasingly apparent in light of historiographical calls to advance our
understanding of twentieth-century internationalisms (in the plural) and their
relationship to decolonisation and development, as well as the loosening of
Kenya’s own national his toriography in transnational directions. Refashioning
the image of Joseph Murumbi by analysing his little-studied activities abroad during the 1950s over his more famous post-independence
career, this article recovers a set of internationalist visions
that were less state-centric than dominant models
of the day
 |
1
Anne
Thurston and Alan Donovan, A Path Not
Taken: The Story of Joseph Murumbi, Africa’s Greatest Private Cultural
Collector and Kenya’s Second Vice-President (Nairobi 2015), 63–5. This
volume contains the most thorough
set of recollections by and about Murumbi.
It is comprised mainly of Thurston’s transcribed interviews with
Murumbi towards an ultimately unpublished autobi- ography during her years
working for the Kenya National Archives in the late 1970s. Alan Donovan was Murumbi’s close friend in later life
and, in 1972, co-founder with
Murumbi of the African Heritage art
gallery in Nairobi. A Path Not Taken was
published by the Murumbi Trust, established by Donovan in 2003 to preserve
Murumbi’s cultural legacy.
See also Karen
Rothmyer, Joseph Murumbi. A Legacy of Integrity (Nairobi 2018).
Murumbi, Kenya’s second minister for foreign affairs and second vice-president, has certainly
not been forgotten. In Nairobi, the entire ground floor
of the Kenya National Archives (KNA), as well as the former provincial commissioner’s office, display Murumbi’s vast collection of African art to tourists
and residents. In 2009, the Murumbi Peace Memorial was opened to mark his place
of burial in the capital. The visibility of his cultural collection and his
importance in the foundation of the KNA in
the 1960s explains why his paternal role in the Kenyan heritage sector looms large.2 Moreover,
given Murumbi turned away
from political life following his brief seven-month stint as vice-president
during 1966, it is no surprise that he is
accounted for as a conflict-averse ‘moderate’ against the turbulent backdrop of
postcolonial Kenyan politics.3 The focus on Murumbi’s journeys
related to this article revises
the nature of the contribution
for which he is remembered.
Murumbi’s work confirms the inseparability of internationalism and
nationalism in 1950s Africa and further elucidates East Africa’s position
within a postwar ‘world historical opening’
when ‘a range of solutions to the problem of colonial emancipation’ emerged.4
The history of mid-twentieth-century internationalism as thought and practice
has burgeoned over the past decade. By looking beyond (western-dominated)
international organisations, historians challenge the assumptions that
pipe-dream internationalisms competed along Cold War lines.5 They
explain how transnational connections nourished, rather than opposed,
territorial ‘nationalist’ freedom movements, especially where networks
of cultural actors
 |
2
On
the memorial, see http://friendsofcitypark.org/things-to-do/joseph-murumbi-peace-memorial- garden/
(accessed 24 August
2020). On the significance of his cultural
collection in a broader theoretical framework, see Marian Nur
Goni, ‘La collection de Joseph Murumbi (1911–1990): « un ouvroir d’his- toires (de l’art) potentielles »’, unpublished conference paper (2019).
On Murumbi’s role in the foun- dation of the KNA, see Riley Linebaugh,
‘Locating the Past: Kenya’s National Archives and the World (1963-1980)’,
unpublished seminar paper, GlobalHistoryAfrica@Warwick,
24 February 2021.
3
For
example, the Murumbi episode of Hilary Ng’weno’s television documentary series Makers of a Nation: The Men and Women in
Kenya’s History (NTV Kenya 2010). See also Stephen Mutie, ‘Contesting the
Subaltern Narrative: The Trickster Trope in the Kenyan Political
Autobiography’, Eastern African Literary
and Cultural Studies, 6, 2 (2020) 98–118, which focuses on the post-
independence period in its analysis of Path
Not Taken.
4
Gary
Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude,
Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC 2015), 1. On the
importance of internationalisms to Kenyan nationalisms in a later period, see
Duncan Omanga and Kipkosgei Arap Buigutt, ‘Marx in Campus: Print Cultures,
Nationalism and Student Activism in the Late 1970s Kenya’, Journal of Eastern African Studies, 11, 4 (2017), 571–89. On the
understudied importance of East Africa in this moment, see Ismay Milford,
Gerard McCann, Emma Hunter and Daniel
Branch, ‘Another World?
East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Journal of African History (forthcoming,
2021).
5
Significantly,
Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds), Internationalisms:
A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge 2017); Talbot C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism:
European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford 2017);
Manu Goswami, ‘Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms’, The American Historical Review, 117, 5
(2012), 1461–85.
converged with
those of top-rank politicians.6 Joseph Murumbi is a perfect candidate for such a story. In that sense, this article tells of a ‘mobile
intermediary’ who spent much time outside his country of birth – a category of
individuals increasingly acknowledged as
pivotal to the pragmatic mechanics of the independence struggle as scholars
disassemble nationalist historiographies and write new ‘connected’ histories
of decolonisation.7 However, even though he worked primarily in
English, Murumbi’s life cannot be properly narrated through normative, western
conceptions of mobile urbanity. His worldviews
and activism were also indebted to alternative ‘vernacular’ cosmopolitanisms rooted in his Indian Ocean heritage.8
Murumbi also has a specific contribution to make to our understanding
of development thinking within this evolving picture of internationalism. The
study of ideas about development is slowly taking heed of
advances in the disaggregation of ‘third
world’ internationalisms, although, as Priya Lal argues, there is still a long way to go in recognising the role of
non-western actors in the history of interna- tional
development.9 This article argues that Murumbi advanced specific
notions of ‘community development’.
This term, encompassing a range of ‘bottom up’ and ‘self-help’ visions, gained
traction in colonial and international parlance from the interwar period and saw its heyday during the
late 1950s and early 1960s. Yet, many of its pioneering thinkers (and
practitioners) did not hail from the apparatus that surrounded the United
Nations or western non-governmental organisations.10 Instead,
Murumbi’s engagement with community development responded to his own journeys,
meetings and observations across his 1950s, which themselves arose
from the context of the Kenyan freedom struggle: his internationalist
convictions and pursuit of community development solutions drove one another.
Murumbi was exceptional as a thinker and activist in ways which will become clear.
He was also exceptional as an archivist and benefactor. His extensive
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6
Su
Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, ‘Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in
the Early Cold War’, Journal of World
History, 30, 1 (2019), 1–19; Ljubica Spaskovska, ‘Constructing the “City of
International Solidarity”: Non-Aligned Internationalism, the United Nations and
Visions of Development, Modernism and Solidarity, 1955–1975’, Journal of World History, 31, 1 (2020),
137– 63; Rachel Leow, ‘A Missing
Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional
Making of Third World Internationalism’, Journal
of World History, 30, 1 (2019), 21–53.
7
Afro-Asian
Networks Research Collective, ‘Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia
and Africa’, Radical History Review,
131 (2018), 176–82; Ismay Milford, ‘Harnessing the Wind: East and Central
African Activists and Anticolonial Cultures in a Decolonising World, 1952-64’,
PhD thesis, European University Institute (2019).
8
On
‘vernacular’ understandings of cosmopolitanism, see Nile Green, ‘The Waves of
Heterotopia: Toward a Vernacular Intellectual History of the Indian Ocean’, American Historical Review, 123 (2018), 846–74. Also Sugata Bose,
‘Different Universalisms, Colorful Cosmopolitanisms: The Global Imagination of the Colonized’, in Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (New
York NY 2010), 97.
9
Priya
Lal, ‘Decolonization and the Gendered Politics of Developmental Labor in
Southeastern Africa’, in Stephen J. Macekura and Erez Manela (eds), The Development Century: A Global History (Cambridge
2018), 173–93.
10
Corinna
R. Unger, International Development: A
Postwar History (London 2018), 103–9; Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small: The United States and the
Lure of Community Development (Cambridge, MA 2015); Subir Sinha, ‘Lineages
of the Developmentalist State: Transnationality and Village India, 1900-1965’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,
50, 1 (2008), 57–90.
personal
papers (he was an avid letter-writer and document collector) are publicly
consultable in his country of birth rather than stored in the archives of a
Western institution or family ‘tin trunk’.11 Murumbi’s capacious
archive is an important part of
Kenya’s contemporary cultural inheritance. Its content should be placed more
centrally in modern Kenyan histories; a means to decentre Mau Mau in narratives
of Kenyan decolonisation and further insert Kenya into contemporary
international history writing.
Following a brief assessment of Murumbi’s life before he departs from Kenya, this article
explores his interaction with three internationalist spaces during the 1950s. First, in the framework
of Afro-Asianism, we track Murumbi to
New Delhi and Cairo, where he conceived his vision for community development and the practical coordination of internationalism. Second, while Murumbi spent
much of the decade in London, we follow in the vein of Priyamvada Gopal’s intervention on the ‘reverse tutelage’ of black
and Asian anticolonial actors in shaping British public and private spheres, to
argue that Murumbi guided – and ultimately
became disillusioned with the failures of – the Socialist International and its
British subscribers.12 Third, Murumbi leads us to spaces often
overlooked in histories of later
1950s non-aligned internationalism,
African decolonisation and models for educational and community development:
Scandinavia and Israel. We leave Murumbi in the early 1960s, as a statesman in the pan-African world, preaching his ‘bottom-up’ development philosophies honed
during a decade of action in Asia and Europe;
one potential path for Kenya’s
postcolonialism.
Joseph Anthony Zuzarte Murumbi was born in Eldama Ravine, Kenya, in June
1911 to Peter Zuzarte, a Goan clerk-turned-shop trader, who arrived in Kenya
via Aden and Zanzibar in 1897, and Murumbi, the daughter of the Maasai laibon (spiritual leader) of Uasin Gishu.13 As the imperial
frontier advanced in the
early twentieth century, the presence of pioneering Goan administrators and
traders in rural East Africa is well-documented.14 Shortly after
his birth, the family moved to Londiani where Peter set up shop. In 1918,
Murumbi was sent to India for
education at the Anglo-Indian Jesuit schools of St. Joseph’s, Bangalore, and
St. Pancras Boys High, Bellary, remaining in India on graduation to work as a
clerk for the Burma Shell company. Murumbi
returned to Kenya in 1933, by which time
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11
Murumbi
Africana Collection (MAC) at the KNA. For example, the papers of Eridadi M.K. Mulira, one of Uganda’s pioneering
political thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, are archived at Cambridge
University. On ‘tin trunk’ archives, see Karin Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self (Bloomington,
IN 2006).
12
Priyamvada
Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonialism
and the Making of British Dissent (London 2019), 8.
13
In
Thurston’s lengthy interviews with Murumbi on his childhood he refers to his
mother only as ‘Murumbi’, the family name that he retained.
Thurston and Donovan,
A
Path Not Taken, 14–17.
14
Mervyn
Maciel, Bwana Karani (Braunton 1985);
Cynthia Salvadori, We Came in Dhows (Nairobi
1996); Vivek Menezes, The In-between
World of the African Goans, https://www.livemint.com/mint-
lounge/features/the-in-between-world-of-the-african-goans-1555659088733.html (accessed 1 September 2020);
Lawrence Mbogoni, Miscegenation, Identity
and Status in Colonial Africa: Intimate Colonial Encounters (Abingdon
2018).
his parents
had separated and he began to negotiate the personal and professional tensions
of his South Asian and African ancestry.15
In later life, Murumbi maintained that his Indian and Roman Catholic
educa- tion remained an ‘anchor in my life’.
He praised the financial and spiritual support he received from the St. Pancras
principal, Father Callenberg, when Peter’s shop was burned down and during
Murumbi’s nine months’ famine relief work in south India after graduation.
‘That was the beginning of my political conscience’, he recalled.16
His youthful experiences serving in poor Indian villages, and in a decade of clerical work thereafter, would have a lasting legacy
at the centre of this
article: his attentiveness to community development and education as routes to better futures.
Peter Zuzarte died in 1935 and, given his clerical experience in India,
Murumbi secured a clerking job in the Kenya Medical Department in Nairobi. In
1941, he enlisted as clerk, soon Chief Clerk, in the Somalia Gendarmerie in
Mogadishu where he met his first wife. In 1948, he became a clerk in the trade
department of the British Military Administration in Somalia. He was promoted
to Controller of Imports and Exports, a position he held until his return to
Kenya in 1952. In Nairobi, he settled for a senior clerkship in a transport
firm having rebuffed a secretive work offer from the Kenya Police Criminal
Investigation Department, which was impressed by his administrative competency.
Back in Nairobi, Murumbi attended meetings of the East African Indian National Congress (EAINC), where he was
patronised by the Kenyan Asian lawyer and Nehruvian N.S. Mangat and the radical
Kenyan Goan trade unionist-cum-journalist, Pio Pinto. Pinto soon recruited
Murumbi into the Kenya African Union (KAU) ‘Study
Circle’, where the newly arrived Murumbi cut a relatively junior figure, largely peripheral to KAU’s competing
factions.17 It
 |
15
Anne
Thurston, ‘Emergence of a Nationalist: An Interview with Joseph Murumbi, Part
II’, Kenya Past & Present, 11
(1979), 1. For a detailed personal history, as well as extensive lists of his
correspon- dence and associates, see
Part I of the ‘Murumbi Africana Collection’ handbooks in the KNA. Also The UK
National Archives (TNA) FCO 141/6887 ‘Personalities: Joseph Murumbi’, released
after the 2011 ‘Hanslope Disclosure’ of previously suppressed secret Colonial
Office files. On Hanslope, see David Anderson, ‘Mau Mau in the High Court and
the “Lost” British Empire Archives: Colonial Conspiracy or Bureaucratic Bungle?’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 39, 5 (2011), 699–716.
16
Anne
Thurston, ‘The Formation of a Character: An Interview with Joseph Murumbi’, Kenya Past
& Present, 10 (1979), 5.
17
For
the most informative description of Murumbi’s time in KAU, see Anne Thurston,
‘Emergence of a Nationalist’, 3. In his authoritative account of KAU, John
Spencer briefly notes how its leaders were
impressed with Murumbi’s political speeches at meetings in 1952 and mentions
the audacious departure to Bombay but gives little finessed detail of Murumbi’s
KAU activities. John Spencer, KAU: The Kenya African Union (London 1985), 251,
253–4. John Lonsdale in ‘KAU’s Cultures: Imaginations of Community and Constructions of Leadership in Kenya after the Second World
War’, Journal of African Cultural Studies,
13, 1 (2000) cites an unpublished typescript of Murumbi’s autobiography, held
by Murumbi’s wife Sheila, but does not comment on Murumbi’s activities specif-
ically. We have not found this manuscript. Eric Masinde Aseka refers to Murumbi
as KAU’s ‘liaison officer’ to Kenyatta’s multiracial legal team at Kapenguria
in Jomo Kenyatta: A Biography (Nairobi
1992), 56. See also the memoirs Bildad Kaggia, Roots of Freedom, 1921–1963: The Autobiography of Bildad Kaggia (Nairobi
1975), 78–102; Fenner Brockway, Towards
Tomorrow: The Autobiography of Fenner Brockway (London 1977), 177–91.
was here that
Murumbi made the acquaintance of Kenyatta. Amidst the quickfire detention of
KAU’s primary Kikuyu leadership under emergency regulations, Murumbi was quickly thrust into the spotlight. In November 1952, he hosted the visiting anticolonial British
MPs Fenner Brockway and Leslie Hale with whom, as we shall see, he would work in London through the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism (COPAI) and
Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF). Murumbi soon found himself acting
secretary-general of the decimated KAU on his way to India to represent Kenya’s
anti-imperial struggle to the world. Such mobility emerged from historical
Indo-African ties, within Kenya and across the Indian Ocean, in advance of his
better-documented liaisons with the British Left.
The young Murumbi lived a not entirely untypical early twentieth-century Indian Ocean life. These were, however, origins
far removed from the central and western Kenyan ethnic patriotisms of founding fathers
Kenyatta and Oginga Odinga, or
the multi-ethnic African urbanity of Tom Mboya, his more famous colleagues in
the first independent Kenyan government. In Kenya’s political pantheon, Murumbi, a mixed-race
first-generation immigrant, was an idiosyncrasy.
Keith Kyle noted that his imperfect knowledge of Kiswahili and other Kenyan languages left him estranged
from certain inner circles of the ruling party, Kenya African National Union
(KANU).18 This ‘outsider’ position is reflected in his role as only
a minor character in the legend of Kenya’s freedom struggle and Mau Mau, which
dominates historiography of the country’s decolonisation. Kenya’s foremost
historian, Bethwell Ogot, mentioned Murumbi in passing as a peripatetic activist who ‘preferred to discuss the Kenya problem
in a global context’; someone difficult to place in the story of
Kenya’s 1950s. ‘What is to be done with the likes of Murumbi?’, pondered Ogot.19
Murumbi may not have spoken fluent Kiswahili, but he did speak Portuguese, Italian, Hindi and English, a marker of his existence
across colonial structures. It was precisely his liminal and shifting position
between overlapping worlds – Kenyan, Goan, Indian, European, pan-African – that
enabled him to traverse postwar internationalist networks with such skill to
enrich and fortify Kenya’s independence struggle. There is much to be done with Murumbi.
Murumbi’s time in India over 1953 sprang, like many anticolonial tours of
the 1950s, from relationships between what Sugata Bose terms the ‘expatriate
patriots’ of the imperial Indian Ocean, those mobile anticolonial activists who
attempted to accommodate ethnic and spatial differences to resist empire
‘through an interplay of nationalism
and universalism in their normative thought and political practice’.20 In 1952, Pinto
introduced Murumbi to Apa Pant, Jawaharlal Nehru’s
High
18 Keith Kyle, The Politics of the Independence of Kenya (Basingstoke 1999), 238.
19
Bethwell A. Ogot, ‘Mau Mau and Nationhood: the Untold Story’,
in E.S. Atieno Odhiambo and John
Lonsdale (eds) Mau Mau and Nationhood: Arms,
Authority and Narration (Oxford 2003), 23–4.
20
Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons:
The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA 2009), 151.
Commissioner
to East Africa since 1948. Given febrile colonial anxieties about Pant’s
solidarity with Kenya’s nationalist leadership during Mau Mau, Murumbi’s trip
was initially publicised as a ‘non-political’ endeavour to study community
development in India, where Nehru had launched a Community Development Program
with Gandhian rhetoric a year previously.21
Following his clandestine departure from Nairobi
and safe in India, Murumbi made a series of well-attended
public appearances at Indian National Congress (INC) and Goan National Congress
events alongside his host Chaman Lall, a veteran Indian barrister and
parliamentarian, who had been sent to Kenya to serve
on Kenyatta’s defence team at Kapenguria. In New Delhi, Murumbi met Nehru and
ran into the then relative stranger, Odinga, who Murumbi would replace as
Kenya’s vice-president in 1966. Odinga was on his own Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) sponsored
tour.22 Before the Indian parliament,
Murumbi decried Britain’s violent suppression of Mau Mau, a cause celebre in
India as Kenyatta was finally convicted to seven years hard labour in April
1953.23 Murumbi’s well-reported tour generated Indian public
awareness and sympathy for Kenya’s plight.
Equally, Murumbi argued, African liberation movements offered much to South Asian
agitation. In Bombay, he called for more forthright Goan resistance to Portuguese imperialism from his kinsmen.
‘Goa must be made politically conscious’, resisting ‘religious propaganda’ which
aimed to keep colonial
subjects pliant. He argued Kenya provided one model of such resistance.24 In a speech
before the Indian Council for Cultural Freedom, Murumbi advocated closer Indo-African cultural ties to anchor
the ‘brotherhood’ necessary to realise anticolonial victories. His own Afro-Asian heritage
was not lost in his rhetoric and its reception.25
Such exhortations on Mau Mau and Goan nationalism were not, however,
his
only concerns.
The community developmental rationale of his trip was no mere window-dressing
to assuage nervous British onlookers. In Delhi, Murumbi called for a bespoke
East African scholarship scheme at Indian institutions, building on the ICCR programme for African students
active since 1947.26 He specifically cited the
expulsion of striking
students at Uganda’s Makerere College
in June 1952 as a
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21
‘Trip
Sponsored by Kenya Union’, Times of India
(20 April 1953); Apa Pant, A Moment
in Time (London 1974), Ch. 4; Sinha, ‘Lineages of the Developmentalist
State’; Gerard McCann, ‘From Diaspora to Third Worldism: India and the Politics
of Decolonising Africa’, Past &
Present, 218, Supplement 8 (2013), 258–80.
22
A. Oginga Odinga, Two Months in India (Nairobi 1966).
23
‘Mr.
Joseph Murumbi’, Times of India (12
April 1953). Murumbi recalled how Nehru spoke with ‘vehemence and disgust’ about
Kenya on hearing
Murumbi’s ‘emotional’ speech
and, as a result, lodged protest about Kenyatta’s trial
with the British High Commissioner in Delhi. Thurston and Donovan, A Path Not Taken, 67.
24
KNA MAC/KEN/81/1 Handwritten speech for address
to Goan National Union, 1 July
1953.
25
‘Indo-African relations.
Plans for closer ties’, Times of India (23 June 1953).
26
Gerard
McCann, ‘The Trumpets and Travails of “South-South Cooperation”: African
students in India since the 1940s’, in Kenneth King and Meera Venkatachalam
(eds) India’s Development Diplomacy and
Soft Power in Africa (forthcoming).
critical sign
of growing colonial repression in the region.27 As we shall see
below, the significance of education as a pragmatic tool of African
anticolonialism was a key facet of Murumbi’s internationalism.
What he witnessed in over four months in India in 1953 also instilled in
Murumbi deep faith in ‘experimental’ cooperative movements, particularly in rural arenas. He judged that ‘the problem
in Kenya is not only Mau Mau. It is also
economic. The former “effect” is the product
of the economic “cause”’. India’s progress in cooperative rural
‘self-help’ schemes made a great impression on Murumbi, ‘point[ing] the way to a new world for the millions in Kenya in need
of help’.28 In a letter to Pinto in January 1953, Brockway noted
Murumbi’s insistence that cooperative development in education was a Kenyan
priority; in turn, Murumbi asked the Fabian Colonial Bureau to pass on details
of successful community development
programmes in eastern Nigeria for study.29 Chaman Lall and Murumbi
talked at length about the transformative importance of progressive policies of land reform for India’s citizenry,
something they agreed could not be replicated
in Kenya until the ‘White Highlands’ were redistributed to African farmers. They disagreed on the zeal and
rapidity with which these ‘self-help’ schemes could be enacted in Kenya.
Murumbi was ‘careful not to take the extreme line’,
both on violent land expropriation that would aggravate colonial vengeance in the short term and in refusing to
coerce rural Kenyan leaders in adopting new development programmes. Success
required the careful cultivation of a new ‘psy- psychological frame of mind’.30
However, it was clear that cooperative solutions to African problems
preoccupied Murumbi and, as we argue, would be a recurring theme as his
theoretical interests pivoted towards Scandinavian and Israeli socialist
experiments in the late-1950s.
In August 1953, Murumbi moved onto Cairo, funded by the Indian parliamentary ‘India-Africa Council’ onto which Murumbi was co-opted thanks to his cordial relationships with INC
officials. In Delhi, Murumbi had also befriended Tayeb
Slim of the Tunisian Neo-Destour Party, a temporary refugee in India, delegate to the 1953 Asian Socialist
Conference in Burma and later the first
Tunisian High Commissioner in London.
Slim made arrangements for Murumbi’s arrival in Egypt where Murumbi stayed for a month,
developing contacts with Gamal
Abdel Nasser and other Arab leaders.31 Such acquaintances of
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27
National Archives
of India: 6(217)-GI/49, Apa Pant to B.N. Nanda,
7 January 1953. On links between the strike and wider
politics, see Milford, ‘Harnessing the Wind’, 39.
28
KNA
MAC/KEN/81/1 Murumbi’s report to KAU of his visit to India 1953, 1; ‘Developing
rural craft in East Africa’, Times of India (28 September 1953).
29
KNA MAC/KEN/71/3 Brockway to Pinto, 28 January 1953; KNA MAC/KEN/82/1 Margery Nicholson to Murumbi, 25 September
1953.
30
KNA AHC/8/14
V.C. Martin, ‘Agrarian
reform in Kenya’,
22 June 1953; KNA MAC/KEN/81/1 Murumbi’s report to KAU of
his visit to India 1953, 1.
31
For memories
of the acquaintances and affiliations that facilitated Murumbi’s trips to India and
Egypt over 1953, see Thurston
and Donovan, A Path Not Taken, 65–74.
the early
1950s would bear fruit during Murumbi’s tenure as Kenyan foreign minister at
the Organisation of African Unity in the 1960s.
Murumbi’s Cairo sojourn was always to be time-limited, one leg of an
interna- tional tour on expanding airline routes across the ‘Bandung era’.32
Generating publicity in North Africa was Murumbi’s main goal as Cairo, like New
Delhi, emerged as an anticolonial hub.33 At Egypt’s expense, a small
Kenya office in Cairo was established to produce press releases on sub-Saharan
affairs for local audiences and broadcast
anticolonial programming for consumption in East
Africa through Radio Cairo. These were the first shoots of Nasser’s
full- throated support for African
liberation movements that culminated in the Afro- Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Organisation in 1957.
Murumbi was cast headlong into Cairo’s radical
environment. In August 1953,
two articles praising the ‘gallant resistance’ of Kenya’s forest fighters and
lauding Murumbi as ‘a delegate
of Mau Mau’ appeared in the Egyptian
daily, Al-Tahrir, edited by Anwar Sadat (later Egypt’s third president,
who Murumbi met on the trip). This provoked remonstrations from the British
Embassy in Cairo to the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Mahmoud Fawzi, who simply
affirmed Egypt’s unyielding commitment to the self-determination
of all peoples.34 The British protested
Murumbi’s liaisons with Ugandan students at Al-Azhar University and the
public transcription of anti-British conversations
– about affairs
‘internal’ to the British empire
– in the North African
and syndicated world press.35 London kept a close eye on Murumbi
in India and Egypt and attempted to use the British
High Commission in Delhi to forge an ‘information policy’ to deny Murumbi’s
claims about the situation in Kenya. Murumbi later recalled seeing a file on
his activities ‘nearly two or three inches thick’ in the Colonial Office.36 Such surveil-
lance stemmed not only from the deepening of Indo-Kenyan relations through Apa
Pant, India’s High Commissioner in Nairobi, the Kenyan-Goan political organiser
Pio Pinto and the many African students resident in India in the mid- 1950s. It
also reflected growing colonial anxiety at the collaboration of a wider array of African nationalists, particularly led
by Nkrumah’s Gold Coast/Ghana,
|
32
Su
Lin Lewis, ‘Skies that Bind; Air Travel in the Bandung Era’, in Stephen Legg,
Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder and Benjamin Thorpe (eds) Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of
the Modern World (London 2021), p. 312.
33
Reem
Abou-El-Fadl, ‘Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity
and the 1957 Cairo Conference’, Journal of World History, 30, 1 (2019),
157–92; James R. Brennan, ‘Radio
Cairo and the Decolonization
of East Africa, 1953-64’, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.) Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment
and Its Political
Afterlives (Athens, OH 2010), 173–96;
Ismay Milford, ‘“Shining vistas” and false passports: Recipes for an anticolonial hub’, Afro-Asian
Visions (2016), at https://
medium.com/afro-asian-visions/shining-vistas-and-false-passports-recipes-for-an-anticolonial-hub- f631e19b1046 (accessed 20 August 2020).
34 ‘British Complain to Egypt’, The Times (29 August 1953).
35 TNA FO/371/102721 Telegram
from Cairo to Foreign Office, 27 August 1953.
36
KNA AHC/8/14
Confidential report on High Commission information policy in New Delhi, 12
August 1953. Thurston and Donovan, A Path Not Taken, 66.
with newly
independent Asian statesmen through organisations such as the Asian Socialist
Conference (ASC) as the pace of decolonisation quickened.37
Founded in 1953, the ASC, based in the newly independent socialist state
of Burma, provided a new arena for Asian socialists to debate the nature of
post-colonialism within and beyond the strictures of the Cold War. It was
also, crucially, a forum to support ongoing freedom struggles across Africa
and Asia. Murumbi’s time in Asia coincided
with this rapid institutional expansion. He read the ASC journal Socialist
Asia and corresponded with leading Southeast Asian politicians such as Indonesia’s Wijono.38 In
the same fashion as his seren- dipitous ascent in KAU, Murumbi was soon in a
leadership role. In 1954, he was recruited
onto the Coordinating Committee of the new ASC ‘Anti-Colonial Bureau’ alongside Nnamdi Azikiwe, later
the first president of Nigeria, Ram Mahohar Lohia, of the Indian Praja
Socialist Party and first head of the Indian National
Congress foreign department in the 1930s, and Reuven Barkatt of the Israeli
Mapai party.
Murumbi attended
the second ASC gathering in Bombay in November 1956
where he spoke
in an ‘emotional tone’ of Kenya’s travails, his comradeship with Tunisia’s Tayeb Slim and his revulsion at
French brutality in Algeria.39 He met with Heinz Putzrath of the German Social Democratic Party and
two representa- tives of Israel’s Mapai:
David Hacohen, who had spent the previous two years as the Israeli envoy in
Burma, and Menahem Bargil, who was also representing the International Union of Socialist
Youth (IUSY), a youth international under mainly Scandinavian leadership which, in the 1950s, publicised its ostensibly
non-aligned socialism in the decolonising world.40 These networks
would become formative to Murumbi’s thinking over the coming years.
Murumbi also formed a point of contact between these European and Afro-Asian
networks: in 1957, for instance, Murumbi encouraged a Swedish cooperative
trading organisa- tion to reach out to Slim to proffer advice on improving
Tunisia’s economic competitiveness.41
Through the ASC, Murumbi encountered the Socialist International (estab-
lished in 1951
in Frankfurt) whose commitment to decolonisation was quickly critiqued by Asian and African socialists. The Gold Coast-born head of the
|
37
Gerard
McCann, ‘Where was the Afro in
Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s “Bandung Moment” in 1950s Asia’,
Journal of World History, 30, 1 (2019),
Part II; M´elanie Torrent,
‘A “New” Commonwealth for Britain? Negotiating
Ghana’s Pan-African and Asian Connections at the End of Empire (1951–8)’, The International History Review, 38, 3
(2016), 573–613.
38
KNA
MAC/KEN/83/2 Correspondence with the Asian Socialist Conference. On the ASC,
see Su Lin Lewis, ‘Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of
Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952–1956’, Journal
of World History, 30, 1 (2019), 55–88.
39
Alijah Gordon, On Becoming Alijah: From the American Revolutionary War through Burma, 1957
(Kuala Lumpur 2003), 275–7.
40
Ismay
Milford, ‘More than a Cold War Scholarship: East-Central African Anticolonial
Activists, the International Union of
Socialist Youth, and the Evasion of the Colonial State (1955-65)’, Stichproben – Vienna Journal of African
Studies, 34 (2018), 19–43.
41
KNA MAC/KEN/82/3 J.W. Ames to T. Slim, 24 May 1957.
ASC
Anti-Colonial Bureau, Jim Markham, derided the Socialist International’s weak
approach to anti-imperialism relative to its Cold War commitment to anti-
communism: ‘It is only in an independent country that democratic socialism can
take shape to combat the evils of communism [.. .] dependent
peoples have nothing to safeguard or defend against the
evils that tend to further enslave them because they are already enslaved.’42
As we shall see, Murumbi also came to bemoan the timidity and eurocentrism of
the Socialist International. Murumbi’s early interna- tionalist forays across
Afro-Asia facilitated and shaped the intellectual and polit- ical labour
in Europe that would occupy
him for most of the 1950s. Contrary
to the thrust of much Kenyan and British historiography, Murumbi was no
‘moderate’, despite his performances to British officials: he was a man
demanding action, not just rhetoric, across a diverse array of (often
conflicting) internationalist circles.
When Murumbi landed in London in September 1953 his
intention was to stay for six weeks, before continuing to Gold Coast/Ghana,
Nigeria and the USA before returning to Kenya. His arrival turned out to be
the beginning of a nine-year period
of exile. Yet, despite making London a temporary home with his second wife Sheila, Murumbi’s
internationalist and development convictions were not derivative
of the concerns of the British Left. If anything,
a closer look at Murumbi’s London years shows that British activists
looked to him for ideas, while his own thinking evolved as he looked beyond
London, increasingly disillusioned with the possibilities of British
internationalism.
Murumbi arrived in London at a moment of transformation in the
relationship between internationalism, socialism and British anticolonialism.
The British Left was turning away from explicitly internationalist forms of
anticolonial activism through COPAI and the Socialist
International, towards parliamentary lobbying on the back of the mass British membership of MCF,
founded in 1954 under Fenner Brockway. Meanwhile, Mau Mau, the exile
of the Kabaka of
Buganda and the campaign against the Central African Federation (in
which Murumbi had been involved from Nairobi) all brought East and Central
Africa into the British press spotlight.43 Murumbi’s publicity work
in India and Egypt attracted negative British coverage and he was repeatedly
forced to correct misreporting to insist his visits had been to seek technical
aid and scholarships. Specifically, he repudiated the statements attributed to
him in Al-Tahrir, and threatened
libel action against The Times, which had described Murumbi as an ‘emissary of Mau Mau’.44
|
42 James Markham, ‘The Heart of the Matter’, Socialist Asia, 3, 9/10 (1955), 11–13.
43
On
Kenyan opposition to the Central African Federation, see Ismay Milford, ‘Federation,
Partnership, and the Chronologies of Space in East and Central Africa’, The Historical Journal, 63, 5 (2020),
1325–1348. On the British press and decolonisation, see Rosalind Coffey, ‘“Does
the Daily Paper Rule Britannia”: The British Press, British Public Opinion, and
the End of Empire in Africa, 1957-60’,
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (2015).
44
‘British complaint to Egypt’, The Times (29 August
1953); ‘Mr. Joseph Murumbi’, The Times
(21 November
1953); ‘Mr. Murumbi’s Plans For Kenya’,
The Times (26 September
1953); TNA
In this context, Murumbi found
himself at the centre of British efforts
to co-or dinate anticolonial
activism and thus in a strong position to shape the priorities of British
anticolonial lobbyists. During
the autumn of 1953, through
Brockway and existing pan-African organisations in London such as the
West African Students Union (who briefly hosted him), Murumbi addressed
meetings of trade unions,
cooperatives and Labour Party branches in Sheffield and Manchester.45
He was often accompanied by other resident East Africans or those passing
through Britain, such as Abu Mayanja, co-founder of the Uganda National
Congress and one of those expelled from Makerere following the 1952 student strike to which Murumbi had alerted his Indian patrons.
When MCF formed in 1954, Murumbi
became its first Joint Secretary, one of the organisation’s two full-time
staff. The other was Douglas Rogers, who, in a case of ‘reverse tutelage’,
wrote at length to Murumbi in the early 1960s. Rogers recalled
Murumbi’s enthusiasm for community development and repeat- edly requested
to work with him in Kenya, a request which eventually bore fruit
when Rogers later edited the Kenyan weekly Pan
Africa under Murumbi’s chairmanship.46
MCF
benefitted from Murumbi’s
practical approach to internationalism and his
contacts with Asian socialists, but Murumbi himself was aware of the dynamics
that pervaded MCF’s formation. He read through the proceedings of the 1948
Congress of the Peoples of Europe, Asia and Africa at Puteaux, France, which
neither he nor any other East African leader attended.47 This was
the occasion of COPAI’s founding and, Anne-Isabelle Richard argues, the final
meaningful collision of internationalism, socialism and anticolonialism in
Europe.48 Foreshadowing the dynamics between
the Socialist International and the ASC, the
meeting failed to find agreement
of approach between
European delegates and those
from the colonial world (who were vastly outnumbered): the latter prioritised”
the latter prioritised political independence over international economic
cooperation and feared that the anti-Soviet stance of the western European
delegates would commit them to Cold War factionalism.
|
FO/371/102721 British
Embassy, Cairo, to Foreign Office, 28 September 1953; KNA MAC/KEN/87/3 ‘Libel
action, 1953’.
45
On
WASU, see Hakim Adi ‘Pan-Africanism and West African Nationalism in Britain’, African Studies Review, 43, 1 (2000),
69–82; Hakim Adi, ‘African Political Thinkers, Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile, c.1850–1970’, Immigrants & Minorities, 30, 2–3 (2012), 263–91. On Murumbi’s
London activities, see TNA FCO 141/6887
‘Joseph Murumbi’.
46
KNA
MAC/KEN/75/7 Douglas Rogers to Murumbi, 31 October 1961. This folder also
contains lengthy correspondence. On Murumbi in MCF, see minutes of a meeting of
the MCF East and Central African Committee, 2 September 1954, School of Oriental and African Studies
(SOAS), Personal Papers of Thomas Fox-Pitt, PP MS 6/05/03.
On Rogers, see June Milne, ‘Douglas Rogers (1919–2002)’, West Africa, 4351 (2002).
47
The full proceedings can be found in KNA MAC/CON/197/1.
48
Anne-Isabelle
Richard, ‘The Limits of Solidarity: Europeanism, Anti-Colonialism and Socialism
at the Congress of the Peoples of
Europe, Asia and Africa in Puteaux, 1948’, European Review
of History: Revue Europe´enne d’histoire, 21, 4 (2014),
519–37.
MCF was partly a response to COPAI’s failed internationalism: despite
main- taining broadly internationalist values, MCF was geared towards support
among the British public and the
forging of contacts with nationalist political parties across the colonial
world.49 However, by 1955, as MCF grew and COPAI seemed unable to coordinate its various branches,
Murumbi was among the
voices calling to revive or replace COPAI and resolve the broader tensions sur-
rounding the commitment to decolonisation on the western European Left. In an
attempt to revive links with French socialists, especially in the context of
mounting tensions in Algeria, Murumbi called for a conference to be held in
France, because French socialists were ‘doing little to help North Africans’.
The immediacy of the North African question was clear to Murumbi given the
contacts he formed with Tunisian exiles in Delhi and Cairo, and increasingly so
after the global media profile of the Asian-African Conference at Bandung in
April 1955. However, Murumbi found COPAI’s
French contact, Jean Rous, ‘awkward
and obstinate’ and the conference had to be relocated to Britain.50
To this World Conference for Colonial Liberation in Margate, 5–7 November 1955, 40 delegates attended, representing over 30 organisations, including the ASC, IUSY, nationalist parties from across colonial territories and European anticolonial protest groups. Murumbi supported the formation of a World Council for Colonial Liberation (WCCL), conceived to coordinate the work of nationalist liberation groups and anticolonial organisations on a global scale. He was elected with the highest number of votes onto its General Council, along with U Thwin (ASC) and Hedi Baccouche (Tunisian Neo-Destour). In keeping with this internationalist ethos, the conference also founded an International Council for Economic and Social Co-operation, which would be nominally ‘non-political’ and thus able to gain consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council. This was an internationalist vision that co-existed with the more state-centric appa- ratus of the UN but was not encompassed by it. These new organisations were not to overshadow Murumbi’s community development ambitions: he dedicated his speech to the question of education, arguing that in Kenya, where the colonial government spent almost 20 times more per head for ‘European’ children compared to ‘African’ children, low literacy rates were used to deny ‘readiness’ for political independence despite Kenyans’ longstanding calls for investment in education.51
However, the published Margate proceedings obscure the political tensions that ran through the conference, with Murumbi serving as a representative of the ASC and the MCF, as well as the newly formed WCCL. Murumbi was at the centre of efforts to find common ground between the Socialist International (who declined an invitation to co-sponsor Margate) and the ASC. In mid-1956, executive
 |
49 Stephen Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics:
The Left and the End of Empire,
1918-1964
(Oxford 1993), 182–83;
231–33.
50 KNA MAC/COPAI/156/11 Murumbi
to Douglas Rogers,
29 March 1955.
51
International Institute
of Socialist History,
Amsterdam (IISH) International Meetings and
Organisations files IMO159, ‘Report of the Conference’ (1955).
members of the
ASC Anti-Colonial Bureau, including Murumbi, were asked to comment on a
‘Memorandum on a concrete and time-bound programme for the Freedom of
Colonies’, drawn up by Labour Commonwealth Secretary John Hatch under ASC
pressure.52 Like the writings of Jim Markham, the Gold Coast-born
secretary of the ASC Anti-Colonial Bureau, Murumbi’s annotations of the mem-
orandum suggest his frustrations with the paternalism of European socialists.
Murumbi criticised the absence of plans for education and land redistribution and, where the Belgian
socialist party advocated political systems in postcolonial states that were
‘inspired by Western democracy’, Murumbi crossed this out and replaced it with
simply ‘democratic’, adding ‘Why Western?’ in the margin.53
As the limitations of the British-dominated Socialist International became clear
to Murumbi, so did
those of MCF. In May 1957, he resigned as Joint Secretary. While his resignation has been
attributed to MCF’s insufficiently radical stance towards the Suez crisis, there is evidence of a
much wider frustration, notably relating to the WCCL.54 Murumbi
organised the WCCL from Britain almost single-handedly since Douglas Rogers
had moved to Accra in early 1956, invited
by Kwame Nkrumah to help set up a press for the Convention People’s
Party (a role previously inhabited
in embryonic form by Markham
before his despatch
to the ASC in 1953).55 From Accra, Rogers saw even more clearly the importance of an explicitly internationalist stance against
colonialism. He advised Murumbi that ‘[t]he
work of the World Council must be kept quite separate from that of the MCF. Do
not let Fenner persuade you to part from this’. For the WCCL to succeed, Rogers
believed, it must ‘not appear to be dominated by the British’.56
Murumbi was all too aware of this. By mid-1957, he declared himself
‘rather suspicious’ of the activities of the British Labour Party when it came
to organising an internationalist response to colonial policy.57 He
found his efforts to coordinate the WCCL hampered by what he perceived as
European prioritisation of the Cold War conflict over decolonisation, especially after the Soviet
invasion of Hungary
in November 1956. For example, following the ASC Bombay meeting, Murumbi
travelled to Athens to discuss holding an international anticolonial conference
together with the Greek Anti-Colonial League. The League envisaged a conference
under the auspices of Murumbi’s WCCL to
include anticolonial groups across both sides of the Iron Curtain, as well as nationalist liberation groups from
|
52 Imlay, The Practice
of Socialist Internationalism, 422–33.
53
KNA
MAC/CON/205/4 Annotated copy of the ‘Memorandum on concrete and time-bound pro-
gramme for the Freedom of Colonies’, nd [1956]. The first draft of the memo dates from October 1955.
54
Stephen
Howe attributes Murumbi’s resignation to the Suez Crisis, but does not account
for the delay, see MCF Central Council minutes, 2 May 1957, quoted in Howe, Anticolonialism, 245.
Murumbi refers to his resignation, without reference to Suez or any specific
factor in Thurston and Donovan, A Path
Not Taken, 79. MI5 reported that Murumbi was less active from 1955: TNA KV
2/2552. MCF’s archive at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
lacks full meeting minutes for much of the
1950s.
55 Milne, ‘Douglas Rogers
(1919-2002)’; Howe, Anticolonialism, 245.
56 KNA MAC/COPAI/156/11 Rogers
to Murumbi, 31 July 1956.
57 KNA MAC/KEN/82/7 Murumbi
to Bargil, 27 May 1957.
Africa and
Asia. But Murumbi refused to let them use the WCCL name, telling the organisers
that inviting communist organisations did nothing to help the anti-colonial cause. He claimed that the communists involved in the Greek League were not
really interested in the colonial problem at all, refusing to understand the
conflict on their doorstep in Cyprus as one of colonialism.58 This echoed the anti-Soviet elements of Murumbi’s
annotations on the Hatch memorandum mentioned above: with reference to Poland
and Hungary, Murumbi noted the necessity of talking about Soviet imperialism in
the same framework as European colonialism.59
These convictions about the relationship between Cold War Europe and meaningful anticolonial solidarity make clear
that ‘radical’ in Murumbi’s understanding of anticolonialism simply did not
map onto ‘radical’ within the European Left.
Conveniently, this enabled him to cast his politics as ‘moderate’ for the ears of the British press.60
Indeed, by 1957, alternatives for
internationalist coordination of anticolonial- ism
were on the horizon. As Murumbi told the Greek League, African delegates would
prefer to attend a conference on ‘African soil’.61 This was becoming
an increasingly realistic prospect. In mid-1956, Rogers relayed to Murumbi that
the Ghanaians ‘dare not, for diplomatic reasons, take any general initiative in
the fight for colonial liberation’, in the
same vein as Nkrumah turned down his personal invitation to Bandung in 1955,
sending instead a small observer delegation including Markham.62
The Suez crisis, symbolically at least, shifted the possibilities of
anticolonial solidarity, as did
Sudanese independence in January 1956 and Ghana’s own independence in March
1957. Subsequent successes in organising large-scale pan-African and Afro-Asian
conferences are well-documented – and Murumbi was heavily involved.63
After attending the Conference of Independent African States and the first
All-African Peoples Conference (AAPC) in Accra (April and December 1958 respectively), Murumbi
was a primary organiser of the second AAPC in Tunis,
January 1960, utilising connections made in Cairo
and pursued while working at the Moroccan
Embassy in London
from 1960 to
|
58
KNA MAC/KEN/79/4 Report on visit
to Athens, January
1957; KNA MAC/KEN/82/7 Murumbi to Bargil, 27 May 1957.
59
KNA MAC/CON/205/4 Annotated copy of
the Memorandum on concrete and time-bound pro- gramme for the Freedom of Colonies.
60
The
Labour-aligned New Statesman described
Murumbi as ‘moderate’ in 1953, see TNA FCO 141/ 6887. See also ‘Towards
permanent peace in Kenya: A moderate’s plan’, Manchester
Guardian, 26 September 1953, 7.
61
KNA MAC/KEN/79/4 Report on visit to Athens, January 1957.
62
KNA
MAC/COPAI/156/11 Rogers to Murumbi, 31 July 1956. On Nkrumah’s difficulties in
organising West African conferences prior to independence, see Marika Sherwood,
‘Pan-African Conferences, 1900–1953: What Did “Pan-Africanism” Mean?’, The Journal of Pan African
Studies,
4 (2012). On Nkrumah
and Bandung, see McCann, ‘Where was the Afro?’;
Robert Vitalis, ‘The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung
(Ban-Doong)’, Humanity: An International
Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 4, 2 (2013),
261–88.
63
For example,
Vijay Prashad, The Darker
Nations: A People’s
History of the Third World (New York NY 2008); Hakim Adi, Pan-Africanism: A History (London 2018).
1961.64
Around the same time, George Padmore, Nkrumah’s African Affairs advisor in Accra, invited
Murumbi to work at the Bureau of African Affairs.65
During the mid-1950s, when British anticolonialism appeared introverted,
Murumbi insisted on the necessity of an explicitly internationalist, socialist,
anti-colonial front that was not beholden to early Cold War alliances. He
thus disrupts the claim that Puteaux in 1948 was the last meeting of these
ideals, at least among anticolonial thinkers. Murumbi’s dogged pursuit of this
vision (perhaps misguided given that by 1957 both the WCCL and ASC were
fizzling out) was certainly not inspired by his work with MCF and the British
Left. If anything, it was a response to the tendency of European
anticolonialism to function within the constraints of the Cold War and the
inability of the Western European Left to act
on the priorities of their contacts
in the decolonising world. Murumbi may not have experienced unbridled success, but there
was little sense, as colonial intelligence
reported in 1961, that he was ‘resigned to his quiet, comfortable life in London’.66
Murumbi’s networks had of course never been confined to those around his
London base. As we have seen, the ASC put Murumbi in touch with people outside of a typical map of anticolonial networks in the late colonial world,
namely in Israel and Scandinavia. Existing work on the relationship of both
these regions with sub-Saharan Africa
focuses mainly on state-sponsored
projects of the 1960s.67 For Murumbi in the late 1950s, both regions
appeared as places that had built ‘developed’ democracies from agricultural
bases, not only on a faster timescale than
much of the ‘West’ but with explicitly socialist principles, pioneering rural
cooperatives and community-led education. Israeli foreign policy in the Middle
East in the mid-1960s, which would see many third-world leaders eschew Israeli
aid, was not predictable a decade before. In 1958, an Afro-Asian Institute
opened in Tel Aviv to offer
(subsequently well-attended) courses in cooperative development to students
from decolonising nations. In critical dialogue with these contacts, Murumbi
arrived at a socialist, anticolonial worldview that hinged upon practical but
critical community development policies, especially relating to education.
|
64
Richard Cox, Pan-Africanism
in Practice; an East African Study: PAFMECSA 1958-1964 (London 1964), 34.
65
Thurston
and Donovan, A Path Not Taken, 76–7.
Murumbi had been invited to Ghanaian inde- pendence celebrations in 1957.
66
TNA FCO 141/6887, secret note from Kenya Director
of Intelligence and Security, 27 June 1961.
67
Karl Bruno,
‘An Experiment in Ethiopia’: The Chilalo
Agricultural Development Unit and
Swedish Development Aid to Haile Selassie’s Ethiopia,
1964–1974’, Comparativ, 27 (2017),
54–74; Tor Sellstro€m, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa.
Vol. 1, Formation of a Popular Opinion
(1950–1970) (Uppsala 1999); Tore Linn´e
Eriksen, Norway and National Liberation
in Southern Africa (Uppsala 2000); Christopher M Morgenstierne, Denmark and National Liberation in Southern
Africa (Uppsala 2003). Yotam Gidron, Israel
in Africa: Security, Migration, Interstate Politics (London 2020); Zach
Levey, ‘The Rise and Decline of a Special Relationship: Israel and Ghana,
1957-1966’, African Studies Review,
46 (2003). Older literature on Israel and African includes Bernard Reich,
‘Israel’s Policy in Africa’, Middle East
Journal, 18, 1 (1964), 14–26.
Murumbi’s interest in educational advocacy stretched back to his Indian sojourn when he vowed to secure scholarship opportunities for East Africans. In Britain, he pursued this task
at the Loughborough Cooperative College in particular. By 1963, Murumbi had
such a reputation in Kenya for being able to secure scholarships abroad that he
was receiving a constant stream of letters from young people who hoped to study
in Sweden, Egypt or Israel.68 Murumbi thus played a pivotal role in
facilitating the higher education opportunities that in part constituted
networks of global decolonisation – which extended far beyond scholarships in
colonial metropoles.69 But, in the late 1950s, long before the
timetable for Kenyan independence was
secured, he began to think about the relationship between education and
decolonisation in completely different terms, turning his attention towards
basic education within Kenya and the
question of the translatability of pedagogical practices across cultures and
continents. Like his internationalism more broadly, this specific attention
to educational diplomacy is almost entirely unexplored in analyses of Murumbi as a Kenyan
leader.
In 1957, following the Bombay ASC meeting, Murumbi
visited Denmark to
study
Scandinavian approaches to education and rural development, and to secure scholarships. He left impressed by Danish ‘Folk
High Schools’, which had been introduced in the mid-nineteenth century with the
objective of mass popular education along
Christian and nationalist lines for rural communities. By the mid- twentieth
century, they existed in various forms across Scandinavia, serving as centres
for adult education too, especially with technical and agricultural empha- ses.
Murumbi understood this model within the same political project as scholar-
ships, writing enthusiastically to Tom Mboya, who would soon organise his own
famous ‘Airlift’ of Kenyan students to the US. Mboya was tasked with recruiting
Kenyan students for scholarships at the Danish Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke (Association for International
Co-operation), making clear to recipients, half of which should be girls, that
they were expected to be ‘useful’ on their return.70 This was in
line with what Murumbi told his contact in Denmark, that the intention was not
to train a small elite, but to produce ‘trained workers who will go back home
and train others’.71 Indeed, with their focus on democracy over
competition, Murumbi imagined Folk Schools within Kenya
too. As he told Mboya, ‘I need not stress the implications on
political education that could subtly be given in such schools’.72
Thinking now beyond scholarships abroad, Murumbi formulated ideas about the politically transformative potential of education
in contexts of colonial
|
68 See extensive examples
from 1963 in KNA MAC/KEN/78/1.
69
Eric
Burton, ‘Decolonization, the Cold War, and Africans’ Routes to Higher Education
Overseas, 1957–65’, Journal of Global
History, 15, 1 (2020), 169–91.
70
KNA MAC/KEN/78/1 Murumbi to Mboya, 13 June 1957. On the problems
of returning students in independent Kenya, see Daniel
Branch, ‘Political Traffic: Kenyan Students in Eastern and Central Europe,
1958–69’, Journal of Contemporary History,
53, 4 (2018), 811–31.
71
KNA MAC/KEN/78/1 Murumbi to Aage Rosendal Nielsen
(The Scandinavian Seminar), 22 April 1957.
72
KNA MAC/KEN/78/1 Murumbi to Mboya, 13 June 1957.
oppression, in
ways that foreshadow the theories of pedagogical thinkers like Paulo Freire.73
Murumbi’s intensifying practical efforts in education planning were also
a response to the seeming inaction
of the committee-creating and speech-making of European anticolonial
work. At the ‘Conference on Africa’ at New College, Oxford, in 1960, Murumbi
insisted on the need to be ‘more practical’, given that ‘the task of liberating
the continent of Africa cannot be done merely by passing resolutions’.74
He pointed in particular to the lack of trained staff to run cooperatives,
the same problem considered earlier when he voiced ideas about training
‘trainers’ in Denmark. This emphasis on practical steps forward resurfaced in
the aftermath of a meeting
on ‘Europe in the World’
organised by the World
Assembly of Youth (WAY) in Brussels in
February 1961. Writing to WAY Secretary General, David Wirmark,
Murumbi noted ‘a great deal of interest
among youth in Europe on the problems of Africa but they
are at a loss as to how to be of practical
assistance. Murumbi suggested that, rather than making more speeches, a
practical committee be set up to circulate information and organise cooperative
training in agriculture, manufacturing and retail, financed by firms with
business interests in Africa. In this way, the ‘great fund of latent goodwill’
among the European youth could be
‘canalize[d] towards some constructive effort’.75 The details about where funds would come from and
the broadening scope of cooperative courses coconfirmurumbi’s increasing
concern with integrating a socialist ‘third way’ into the realities of a
(post)colonial African economy. He wrote that Africa’s ‘social revolution’ must
follow not the ‘violent’ route of Soviet collective farms but the ‘democratic’
route visible in Scandinavia.76
Murumbi was well aware that, as an educated and charismatic East African,
he was also a source of ‘inspiration’ for his Scandinavian contacts.77
Returning to Scandinavia in October 1961, he became involved in a project to
build an ‘Inter-African High School’ along Folk School lines, to be called the Hammarskjold Memorial School.78
The death of Hammarskjold ld, Swedish UN Secretary-General, in a plane crash in Zambia en route to the Congo in September 1961,
raised mutual awareness of Scandinavia and East-Central Africa across a wider
public in both regions, providing impetus for fundraising.79
Scandinavian funders envisaged the school in the context of a decolonising world order. Norwegian
|
73
Paulo
Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (New York NY 1970). Similar ideas appear in Frantz
Fanon, Les damne´s
de la terre (Paris 1961).
74
KNA MAC/KEN/80/1 Programme and speeches
for ‘Conference on Africa’,
New College, Oxford,
2–3 July 1960.
75
KNA MAC/KEN/79/1 Murumbi
to David Wirmark, 18 April 1961.
76
KNA MAC/KEN/81/6 Handwritten notes from Murumbi’s Scandinavia trip, October 1961.
77
On
inspiration and the Third World idea in Europe, see Robert Gildea, James Mark,
and Niek Pas, ‘European Radicals and the “Third
World”’, Cultural and Social
History, 8, 4 (2011), 449–71;
Christoph Kalter, ‘From Global to Local and Back: The “Third World”
Concept and the New Radical Left in France’, Journal of Global History, 12, 1 (2017), 115–36.
78
KNA MAC/KEN/81/4 Cato Aall to Frene Ginwala, 24 October 1961.
79
Sellstro€m, Sweden and National Liberation, 52.
contact for
the project, Cato Aall, described this to Frene Ginwala, South African exile in
Dar es Salaam: first, potential donors would want clear evidence that the
school was ‘wanted by Africans themselves [.. .] not
what someone else thinks is best for them’; second, it had to be built in
Tanganyika (where full independence was timetabled for December of that year)
because ‘one is not willing to invest the money in a country under British
sovereignty’ such as Kenya; third, UNESCO should not be involved in providing
funds, because it would mean the project would
have less ‘political appeal’ among East Africans. This script for what sol-
idarity projects should look like was based on visions that Murumbi helped to foster – another case of ‘reverse
tutelage’. Aall concluded that ‘in this country [Norway] everyone is so well off that time does not mean very much, because very little of importance can
happen here’.80
At the same time as harnessing the enthusiasm of fundraisers, Murumbi
increas- ingly reflected on how applicable foreign models of education were to
Kenyan contexts. He had always made clear in public speeches that the answer
was not ‘to borrow an
ideology, or to copy an ideology from Europe’.81 He grappled with the
implications of this in the notes taken during his 1961 Scandinavia trip,
during which he met political party representatives (including Swedish Prime
Minister Tage Erlander) and non-governmental organisations like the
Scandinavian Seminar. Murumbi jotted down an ‘outline for a
village development plan for Kenya’, which was to accompany scholarships abroad
and the expansion of the Nairobi Royal Technical College, created in 1955. In
this plan, ‘model villages’ could be used not only to teach people how to use
land and livestock, but also to teach farmers ‘the rudiments of politics’ to
enable them to understand their ‘impact on their community’, specifically in a
‘pan-African’ and ‘world’ context.82 This also constituted an
implicit rejection of colonial ‘new village’ programmes in Kenya, just as Julius
Nyerere’s village development
schemes would in independent Tanzania.83
African contexts had of course long defined Murumbi’s worldview. Writing
to his Israeli contact Menahem Bargil in 1957, he concluded that ‘it is only as
Socialists that African
politicians will be able to develop a broader vision
– that of internationalism
both within the continent of Africa and of Africa in the context of the world
today’. He lamented that few African leaders were really socialists, precisely
because of the ‘heady influence of nationalism’.84 With his trip to
Scandinavia, however, Murumbi thought in increasing detail about the practical
aspects for community development planning at home. For example,
he noted that
80 KNA MAC/KEN/81/4 Cato Aall to Frene Ginwala,
24 October 1961.
81
KNA MAC/KEN/80/1 Programme and speeches
for ‘Conference on Africa’,
New College, Oxford,
2–3 July 1960.
82
KNA MAC/KEN/81/6 Handwritten notes from Murumbi’s Scandinavia trip, October 1961.
83
Moritz
Feichtinger, ‘“A Great Reformatory”: Social Planning and Strategic Resettlement
in Late Colonial Kenya and Algeria, Journal of Contemporary History, 1952-63’, 52, 1 (2017), 45–72;
Priya Lal, African Socialism in Postcolonial Tanzania:
Between the Village and the World (Cambridge 2015).
84
KNA MAC/KEN/82/7 Murumbi to Bargil, 27 May
1957.
while he saw parallels in the rural
development patterns of Denmark and Kenya,
education had to be tailored to a
specific environment. He wrote down the name of Jørgen Carl la Cour, the
nineteenth-century Danish agronomist who pressed for an agricultural focus in Folk
Schools, but then noted that low literacy rates in rural
Kenya were an obstacle to transplanting Danish models. As such, Murumbi
emphasised the need for not just rural libraries, but also radios and clubs for
listening or for reading newspapers aloud.85
In dialogue
with contacts in Scandinavia and Israel during the years prior to his return to
Kenya in 1962, Murumbi came to espouse practical action above all. The claim that he had left Nairobi for India in 1952 to study community
development might not have been the full story, but was never a mere mask. It assumed
increas- ing importance in his anticolonial philosophy over the decade.
Certainly, his mis- givings about resolution-passing and speech-making were not without
their own contradictions and limitations. But, in that,
he was part of a moment of decolo- nisation
in which anticolonial thinkers, conscious of the untranslatability of devel- opment models in other parts
of the world and all too aware
of the constraints of
manpower and finance they faced,
were determined not to let their own projects
become subsumed by Cold War frictions
between European sympathisers. Even if Scandinavia’s ‘third way’ had its fair share of
inconsistencies, Murumbi proac- tively forged links
which allowed him to locate education and community devel- opment as the cornerstone of
socialist internationalism for Kenya.
Murumbi’s internationalist and community development convictions persisted
on this return
to East Africa as Kenya won independence in 1963. He attended the February 1963
Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation conference in Moshi, Tanganyika, a
meeting whose analysis then and now is dominated by the question of Sino-Soviet
competition over the Third World and the resultant demise of Afro- Asian
coordination.86 During the conference, Murumbi took more interest in
the new, local Kilimanjaro Native Cooperative Union than in Cold War
grandstand- ing or the Sino-Indian
conflict on which his old friend Chaman Lall, the head of the Indian delegation and host of
Murumbi’s 1953 trip to India, passionately agitated.87 At Moshi,
Murumbi affirmed above all the need in Kenya for ‘the extensive reorganisation
of the economy along socialist lines’ and pan-African cooperation to resist the ‘neocolonial menace’
of western capitalism.88 These
devel- opmental priorities continued in his work as a Kenyan minister.
In December 1963, Murumbi
sat on Kenya’s first delegation to the United Nations, a trip
where more time was spent securing development opportunities in the historically
 |
85 KNA MAC/KEN/81/6 Handwritten notes from Murumbi’s
Scandinavia trip, October
1961.
86
Permanent
Secretariat of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, The Third Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity
Conference: Moshi, Tanganyika, February, 4–11, 1963 (Cairo 1963); Jeremy
Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The
Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World (Chapel Hill, NC 2015), 97–9.
87
KNA
MAC/CON/195/4 Kilimanjaro Publicity Committee Invitation to Moshi Town Council
(undated); TNA FCO/168/977 Controlled News Agency coverage
of A.A.P.S.O, 4 February 1963, 2–3.
88
J.
Murumbi, ‘Kenya’s Economic Problems: Need for Establishing New Contacts’, Afro-Asian Bulletin 5, 5–8 (1963), 5–9.
black colleges
of Georgia and industrial plants of Michigan than in the diplomatic corridors
of Washington.89 As vice-president in 1966, Murumbi lauded the
‘living monument’ of Israel’s commitment to Kenya’s education, the Machakos
School of Social Workers, during an official reception for Prime Minister Levi
Eshkol.90 The weight of his internationalist experience in the 1950s
generated reams of carefully preserved correspondence with old friends in his
role as a Kenyan diplomat and into
retirement.
This article is about journeys. First, it outlines in rare detail the
physical jour- neys of a mobile African activist across Afro-Asian, European
socialist and pan- African worlds of the 1950s. Murumbi’s mobility provided
breathing room to network and amass resources, but also ‘to imagine freedom at
an abstract level and, in the same
thought, plan the Africanist specificities of its content’.91
Second, in this regard, it charts the specific intellectual journey of Murumbi
himself on the relationship between
community development, internationalism and decolonisa- tion arising from his
travels among the ‘expatriate patriots’ of the Indian Ocean, left-leaning Brits, fellow mobile African and
Asian activists, and towards the socialist experiments of Israel and Scandinavia, the latter almost
entirely absent in assessments of Africa’s 1950s. Third, as
coda, it hints at the grander political journey
of Kenya itself across the decolonising 1950s and 1960s.
Disillusioned with the authoritarian direction of the Kenyattan regime
and grieving the assassination in 1965 of his friend Pio Pinto, ‘Murumbi
resigned the vice-presidency and turned away from public life in late 1966’ to
become an exec- utive for Rothman’s cigarette company. It is easy to
romanticise the nature of the break. As a senior Kenyan statesman since 1963,
Murumbi had tolerated the darker aspects of the KANU machine
without public protest. As foreign minister he
officially supported the capitalist direction of Kenyatta’s state, for instance
reassuring New York investors that Kenya was open for business and profit on his 1963 US visit.92 In
private, he confessed his frustrations to the British Labour MP Leslie Hale,
who he hosted in Nairobi in 1952 and with whom he worked in London, lamenting
that ‘we have thrown overboard all our socialist principles and we will have to
pay dearly for this in the long run’.93 Murumbi’s was the ‘path not
taken’, in the words of his biographers, as he retired to the prodigious
collection of African material culture for which he is best remembered today.
89
KNA MAC/KEN/88/13 Itineraries of Kenya’s
first delegation on the United Nations,
December 1963.
90
KNA MAC/KEN/93/4 Speech by the Vice-President in honour of his Excellency, Levi Eshkol, June
1966.
91 McCann, ‘Where was the Afro?’, 120.
92 Daniel Branch,
Kenya: Between Hope and Despair, 1963–2011 (New Haven, CT 2011), 37–8.
93 KNA MAC/KEN/75/13 Murumbi
to Leslie Hale, 31 January
1967.
Celebrating Murumbi’s contribution to the Kenyan heritage sector is
justified, but the museums that house his collection were only one part of the
visions he espoused surrounding education and community development in the
1950s, with other projects, like a Pan-African Centre for African Studies,
falling by the way- side.94 Moreover, to focus on the paths not
taken in the 1960s occludes the impor- tance of the paths that were taken with such zest in the 1950s
to help secure and define Kenya’s freedom when its attainment was no sure
thing.95 Below the high- politics of KANU, Murumbi’s legacies lived
on into independence, for example through the lives of the many students
educated at the Tel Aviv Afro-Asian Institute, Loughborough Cooperative College
or Danish Folk Schools thanks to Murumbi’s internationalism and belief in the
transformative power of mass edu- cation. In
postcolonial Kenya more widely, as Kara Moskowitz has shown, ideas about development were central to the
negotiation of citizenship.96 When thinking about the open-endedness
of African decolonisation, Murumbi’s case is thus instructive for moving beyond questions of
territorial configurations towards a fuller understanding of anticolonial state-making as a quest to transform
lives.
But this article is, as importantly,
an intervention about how African citizens participated in, and defined,
international society to their own ends in ways pre- viously obscured by the
statist and western weight of Cold War and development scholarship.97 Murumbi’s nuanced
work was defined neither by Cold War rivalries nor Third Worldism, even as his
endeavours were inextricable from both sets of dynamics. Murumbi’s decisive
turn to community development and educational programmes for Kenya – away from
uncritical statements of conference solidarity
– is best understood not as a response to foreign or universal
theoretical frame- works, but as a dialogue with his journeys and
conversations. Over the 1950s, he imbibed the experiments of socialist Asia,
and observed first-hand the deficiencies and lethargy of British socialism as
he saw new pastures in Scandinavia, Israel and the pan-African world.
Murumbi understood Kenyan development and international co-operation in
concert, but with an increasingly pointed and pragmatic internal monologue
about the translatability of international development models to Kenya’s
specific needs into the 1960s. This understanding, and his own skilled
activism, enabled a certain ‘reverse tutelage’ elaborated by Gopal.98
Murumbi knew his engagement with socialist institutions for African application affected the manner in which leftist
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94 Thanks to Marian Nur Goni for drawing our attention
to the Centre project.
95
The
extent of continuity in calls for social reform and social justice between Mau
Mau and Kenyan activism since is explored in Nicholas Githuku,
Mau Mau Crucible of War: Statehood, National Identity,
and Politics in Postcolonial Kenya (Lanham, MD 2016).
96
Kara
Moskowitz, Seeing Like a Citizen:
Decolonization, Development, and the Making of Kenya, 1945–1980 (Athens, OH
2019).
97
On
the historiographical genealogies, lexicographical debates and methodological
challenges of ‘international society’ as a category, especially as pertains to
contextualising understandings of the ‘state’, see Erez Manela, ‘International
Society as a Historical Subject’, Diplomatic
History, 44, 2 (2020), 184–209.
98
Gopal, Insurgent Empire, 8.
Scandinavians
or Britons attempted to comprehend a rapidly changing decolonis- ing order. To
borrow Daniel Immerwahr’s term on US development campaigns – another context of
feedback from third world to first – the internationalist Murumbi
excelled in ‘thinking
small’ about Kenya’s
big questions in the
1950s.99 To Murumbi’s
great disappointment, Kenyatta’s government of the 1960s did not listen to his answers.
Acknowledgements
The production of this
article has been supported by the Leverhulme Trust grant (RPG- 2018-241):
Another World? East Africa and the Global 1960s. We would especially like to
thank the staff of the Kenya National Archives for their work to support and
form our research. It’s been a pleasure to have conversations with Daniel
Branch, Emma Hunter, Marian Nur Goni, Simon Stevens, Su Lin Lewis, Carolien
Stolte and the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective in thinking through
the worlds of this period.
We would also like to thank
the participants at the panel ‘Celebrating, Canonizing, Interrogating African and Africana Diaspora
Thought and Thinkers
II’ at the conference of the
African Studies Association of Africa, United States International University,
Nairobi, 24–26 October 2019, at which
portions of this article were presented. Finally, the razor- sharp criticisms
of the three reviewers were generous and highly constructive, for which we are grateful.
ORCID iD
Gerard McCann 
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0509-319X
Ismay Milford
and Gerard McCann are members of the Leverhulme Trust-funded project ‘Another
World? East Africa and the Global 1960s’. Details of the project can be found
at https://globaleastafrica.org and in the article: Ismay Milford, Gerard McCann, Emma Hunter and Daniel Branch,
‘Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the
Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century’, Journal of African History (forthcoming 2021).
Ismay Milford
is a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her first monograph,
exploring the anticolonial culture and transnational work of East and Central
African activists in the 1950s-60s, is currently under preparation. Research
relating to this book project has appeared in The Historical Journal and Stichproben
– Vienna Journal of Africa Studies. She is also currently researching the politics
of information training
in the Global Cold War.
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