In 1966, after serving first as Kenya’s Foreign Minister and then as Vice-President, Joseph Murumbi resigned from Government. Having concluded that the country had made a wrong turn away from a concern for the poor and the ideals he believed in, Morumbi told an old friend that he could no longer ‘be part of corruption in this country’. Tribalism, too, which was to take Kenya to the brink of disaster years later, had already become firmly entrenched, and he wanted no part of it.

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.