Bob epitomised success, but he was also the very essence of humility

In the grim earlier days of uncertainty, a torturous period of hoping he didn’t have cancer while knowing in his bones that he probably did, Bob Collymore cried a few times.

“I don’t think I cried because I thought I was going to die,” he told me in an interview in August last year.

“I think I cried because I started to realise how much everybody else cared.” Now Bob Collymore is gone.

He died Monday morning in his home from Acute Myeloid Leukaemia.

MANY CARED

And, if the outpouring of condolences is anything to go by, many people cared for Bob Collymore.

You have to wonder about Bob Collymore, though.

How a Guyana-born, British raised boy finally ended up at the shores of an East African country running a successful blue chip juggernaut that turns over Sh64 billion in profit, a behemoth that builds schools, hospitals, digs boreholes, schools needy children, starts its own academy, connects people to water, makes the environment better and taps into the cultural heart of a people.

PROFESSIONAL JOURNEY

You have to wonder about his professional journey from UK, Japan and South Africa and finally here, the land where he found love in a people and in a woman, and the place where eventually his soul departed from.

You have to wonder what it took for him, a foreigner, to take after a man with massive shoes — Michael Joseph — and walk through his eight year journey in his own stride, in his own shoes and to his own music.

I had the privilege to interview Bob three times; once at his home after coming from treatment in the UK, and twice in his big-view windowed office at Safaricom House.

Our last interview for a magazine happened three weeks ago and unbeknownst to me or him, that would become his final face-to-face press interview.

DAPPER-MAN

Always a dapper-man, he had on blue denim on denim, brown-tan lace shoes and his matching beige wry wit.

Even though his pale face bore the signs of the tiresome battle that cancer subjects one to, his voice was unbowed both in timbre and in conviction.

Over the years these interviews have shown a trajectory of introspection, of increasing confidence and of an almost unclothed revelation of self.

In some unspoken personal level we always approached those interactions more as conversations that interviews, because his very poise and energy dictated that you follow him as he sunk below the surface to a depth he seemed most comfortable in.

Through the course of those years we have talked a lot about purpose and his responses, never wandering far from his true north, seem to have always been polished up with each passing year.

HIS PURPOSE

Six years ago, in our first interview he reduced his purpose as an “intention and a commitment to things that don’t feed into one’s own selfish satisfactions.”

To illustrate this purpose he would then launch on a narrative of Safaricom's projects in health or education and tie them with his illuminating experiences in the hinterlands of the country where Safaricom Foundation has footprints.

When I revisited this purpose conversation a few years later his shift had moved to advocacy. “ … my purpose is to help as many people as I do the right thing.” He said.

“I have talked about cancer children at KNH on palliative care, children who know they will die and not dying in the best circumstances. My question is; can I sway people or the government to do the right thing? How can I do more to encourage transparency and stem corruption?”

INJUSTICES OF THE WORLD

As a young man, he told me a few weeks ago, he felt the injustices of the world and to help bend the proverbial arc of the universe towards justice, he often volunteered in shelter homes for the homeless in London because he felt that he could reach out and help on a granular level.

However, sitting at the head of the table of a big corporate, he said, has helped him tackle the bigger issues like climate change, corruption and human rights.

“My success has never been to look at how much profit we made …” he said.

“Obviously you want the business to make money, but quickly I found my purpose and my idea of success running in tandem and success here for me has always been the difference I make in people’s lives. If I make a difference, then I’m successful.”

NO INSECURITIES

I asked him about his greatest insecurity as a man as he serves his final term as CEO while also dealing with the looming implication of his bothersome cancer.

A selfish question, asked it because Bob felt like the man who had climbed a hill and when I sat with him I sat less as a writer but a seeker of wisdom.

“I have no insecurities now,'' he said. When I asked him when he stopped being insecure he talked about a transformation that came after starting to read the works of the Dalai Lama.

“All of insecurities come from our attachment to feelings, and how we define ourselves to them,” he said.

BEAUTY OF PRESENT

“We tend to want to hang onto the familiar while limiting our ability to experience the beauty of the present. We hang onto our shoes, our clothes, our jobs, our status, our relationships even when they are not working and are not healthy for us because we fear losing them when we have always defined ourselves by them. It’s only once you have learned to let go of these things will you find happiness.” That echoed deeply in me.

“So would that be your best lesson from a 61-year old man” I asked jokingly and he said with a cheeky grin, “That, and also don’t ignore your pension plan.”

He would do that; drag you into that rabbit hole of depth and then quickly bring you up for air with his spat of humour which you’d miss because it always came fast and it came without moisture. We spoke about dreams, especially the dreams he had as a 30-year old.

SAXOPHONE

“My only dream was to play the saxophone very well. I’ve gotten better over the years. But I also discovered that my beautiful wife hates the saxophone! Can you believe that?” he chuckled.

“I spent 30 years of my life learning to play this instrument and now I ended up here with the right wife but with the wrong instrument.”

Bob occasionally painted and collected artwork, he said.

His house was adorned with canvas. He loved jazz.

He mentioned that he would see himself “in a rocking chair, painting or playing the saxophone.”

When I asked him if all these- the big job at Safaricom, the charmed artsy life outside it, the beautiful wife, the children he adored, the joy of blowing through his sax — has surprised him he grimaced.

“What has surprised me was that I got all the jobs I got, even without going to university.” It was tough to know if he was pulling my leg.

Then he added contemplatively.

DECENT JOB

“Look, are there people who are better equipped to do this job better than me? Absolutely! And I can mention three names, just from Kenya. But I’m here and I’ve done a pretty decent job of it, having the right attitude is important because it keeps you on your toes.

The minute your think you’ve made it you will have failed because you’re no longer looking for things to improve. This refers back to the point the Dalai Lama made about you’re holding on when you should be embracing transience.”

The only other word filthier than “cancer” is “regret.”

And like cancer, regrets also have a way of eating one from the inside. And because we instinctively want men at the top of the food chain to be mortal, to have flaws, to be human, we want to stand briefly on their regrets.

CHILDREN

When I asked Bob what he regretted the most in his life he paused briefly and held his gaze at a silver antique across the room before mumbling, “Not spending enough time with my children.”

We then got into a discussion about what “enough time” even meant in the grand landscape of fatherhood, and if time and sacrifice can share a bed without necessarily being strange bedfellows. However, being in a second marriage, he reiterated, had given him “another chance to practise parenting properly.”

As the hour hand of the clock on his wall neared 1pm I asked him what soundtrack was playing in his life then had his life been a movie.

That question creased numerous deep furrows across his brow. “Samuel Barber — Adagio For Strings,” he said eventually.

LIVE

Of course I’d never heard of neither the song nor the artist, but I wrote it down on my notepad in capital letters and as the clock chimed 1pm — fifteen minutes over our allocated interview time of one hour — I asked him what he planned to do between now and the time he leaves office next year and he said poignantly, “live”.

Days later, as I pecked this interview on my keyboard, I decided to YouTube Samuel Barber’s ''Adagio For Strings'' as background music. It turned out to be a harrowing, dirge-like composition consisting of falling and rising thin violin sounds that cut right through your shirt and into your core.

The angsty comment section of this song, life’s biggest and deepest questions played out earnestly. Someone wrote, “ … was this [song] composed to relieve pain or transcend it?”

It’s very easy and naturally to want Bob Collymore to have transcended his pain. Because although a Guyana he became a Kenyan, not only through marriage but through the body of his work in a company that continues to carry our pride on its shoulders.

When a prominent man like Bob dies, the world around him confronts and questions his death, but the world also probes its own truth and the meaning of its continued existence.

It makes us hope that when our own death finally comes, we hope it finds us alive. Like it must have found Bob Collymore.