I have known Yusuf Kodwavwala since 1978 when I joined the Rotary Club of Nairobi, where he was already a member. By coincidence, soon after Yusuf passed away I came across a write-up of a meeting of our Rotary Club in March 2001, where our then president – who happened to be my wife Evelyn Mungai – invited me to pay tribute to Yusuf as he celebrated having been a Rotarian for 44 years. He became our club’s president in 1981, five years before me.
He went on to become our District Governor, overseeing all the clubs in the region, then including the Indian Ocean islands. Before he took office, he asked me to chair the committee organising his district conference, the highlight of the year. The committee’s work starts long before the conference, and it provided a great opportunity for the two of us to work closely together.
At the end of his year as “DG”, I was one of those who accompanied him to the handing over district conference in Mauritius. I mention this because long after it, Yusuf enjoyed telling the story of the final dinner there, when a couple of the gorgeous dancers who were entertaining us approached the table where we were sitting.
To his dismay, rather than inviting him to dance, I was the one they approached to join them on the floor. “I was wondering why,” Yusuf deadpanned, “and they explained that it was because Mike looked so much like Prince Charles.”
Yusuf has told this story enough times that this is what many Rotarians have been calling me ever since.
What can I say about the 938 Surgeon’s Diary articles that Yusuf has published in the Sunday Nation over 38 years? I was at the Rotary lunch meeting when, with no notice, he was asked to be the speaker on the topic “my job”.
He spoke so well, with such humour and empathy, that another member present, Joe Rodrigues, then the editor of the Nation, asked him to write up what he had said for an article in the paper.
He also persuaded him that this would be the first in what would immediately become a weekly column.
Like so many who have commented since his death that the highlight of their Sunday reading was his Surgeon’s Diary, I too always looked forward to his words of wit and wisdom, with his powerful conclusions: sometimes happy, sometimes less so.
Yusuf also performed surgery on me, operating on my hernia – this when already 80 years old. As with the Mauritius dinner dance, it again gave his sense of humour an opportunity to express itself, for from then he boasted that he knew me “from the inside out”.
He invited me to become a trustee of his MRD Foundation, which supported causes in the health and education sectors, and it was a pleasure for us trustees to see this humble philanthropist happily sharing his wealth with those in need, and it is on no small scale.
As I wrote to his family, his time had come, and he will now rest in peace after an extraordinary life over so many decades in which he touched the lives of so many.
