Bob Collymore: A Short Impactful Life (?) - Paperback

by Washington M. Osiro (Author)

This book is as much about Robert William Collymore, the man many Kenyans fell in love with, as it is about a Kenyan society that seemingly saw only what was good about him.

"Bob Collymore: A Short Impactful Life(?)" is the dichotomy between the ten years that shaped the national narrative about a man - who lived for sixty-one years. It is evidence of a phenomenon Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst Hermann Rorschach created back in the early 1900s. The phenomenon or test is based on Klecksography, Rorschach's favorite game as a child. It is a projective tool used in psychoanalysis. Using inkblots or "klecks" (in German), therapists seek to understand their patients' thinking based on how they interpret respective inkblots.

In Collymore's life and death, Kenyans projected what they THOUGHT of the man's ENTIRE life onto the last ten years of his life - at the helm of Safaricom and going by the media coverage after his death, Kenyans THOUGHT very highly of Robert William Collymore - even though they only knew of him and about him for a mere one-sixth of his life.

It is why the subtitle of the book "A Short Impactful Life (?)" has a question mark i.e. (?):

The country's reaction to Collymore' death belied the totality of the man's six-decade-long life - and underscores a disconnect I am trying to reconcile - thus far without success.