The Class Four girl Mwalimu Robert Ouko fell in love with

Robert Ouko with his wife

 

• Christabel dropped out of university to marry Ouko
• The relationship was so deep that I was willing to pay any price to defend my territory – The late Mrs Ouko

It is a measure of the respect Robert Ouko commanded in diplomatic circles that when he died, the influential American weekly, Time magazine, eulogised him, noting that, “A kind man meets an unkind end.”

If fate was fair, his widow, Christabel, whose quiet strength touched Kenyans in the wake of her husband’s brutal murder, should have passed on quietly in her sleep. But she left in a car crash at the relatively young age of 76, ending one of the most painful political chapters in Kenyan history.