Nairobi, Oct. 29 -- "You have to listen to your body," says Manoj K. Shah. "Sometimes it says it's enough, but we always feel that we have to push on." Last year, the founder of Osho Chemical Industries suffered a stroke that paralysed his left side. He seems to be out of the woods now.

He started Osho in 1993, at 28, in Nairobi's Industrial Area, selling chemicals to textile mills with a staff of six. Today the company employs over 500 people, whom it calls 'Osholites', and sells crop protection, animal health, public health and industrial chemicals in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Malawi. When desert locusts swept the region a few years ago, Osho supplied the chemicals to fight them in Ethiopia, Djibouti, Yemen, Tanzania, Uganda...