Mrs Christobel Ouko is a woman unbowed. She doesn’t look pitiful. She breaks into hearty laughter when sharing jokes with her children, now all grown-up, especially when they discuss how tech-savvy she is and how she catches up with them on email from her fourth-floor apartment in Kilimani.
It has been two decades since she weathered a national storm of betrayal, murder and deceit of which her family was the epicentre. She lost a husband in such a grisly manner that an entire nation was thrown into mourning, and the world was shocked. But she didn’t give up. She had a full life ahead of her and seven children to put through school.
Her eyes twinkle with delight and a warm smile spreads across her face when she talks about Dr Robert John Ouko. Yet a fighting spirit appears to take hold of her when she talks about one of Kenya’s most compelling murder mysteries. “I’d like justice done. I want justice, but not just for us, but for the many families who have lost their loved ones in such brutal ways and who are not as prominent as my husband was.”
She sighs with relief that she’s been able to put her children through university as her husband would have wished. She has weathered a storm only few could. The bolt from the blue struck on an undetermined date nearly 20 years ago when assassins murdered her husband, who was then President Daniel arap Moi’s Foreign minister.
Mrs Ouko is studious in her defiance of those who might have broken her spirit in committing such a heinous crime. She has said that she has forgiven them but would still like to know who they were and why they killed her husband. The mystery has persisted — along with those surrounding the murders of Tom Mboya, Pio Gama Pinto and J.M. Kariuki — one of the darkest blots in Kenya’s history.
Mrs Ouko has pondered for years how best to remember her slain husband. Should it be a mausoleum? No, she decided, it would be a library and community centre in honour of the love for books that Dr Ouko kept to his dying day. “When he left the house that night, he had an open book on his desk,” Mrs Ouko said. “It was a world chronicle or an almanac. He read anything and everything.”
His love of books was something he developed in childhood. He did well enough in primary school to be invited to join St Mary’s School Yala. But there was a hitch. He was not of the Catholic faith, and it mattered a lot at that time, especially for students who were joining institutions established by missionaries.
“His parents, who were of the Africa Inland Mission Church, didn’t know much else, and they told him to turn to teaching,” Mrs Ouko recalls. He did teach, but he would not give up his passion for reading.
Dr Ouko did not attend secondary school. He taught himself the curriculum and earned his Cambridge School Certificate (O Levels), opening the door to pursue his university education and professional training and career, the family said in a statement posted on the Internet.
His children appear to have inherited his love of books. The first born, Kenneth, is a pilot, a chemical engineer and a computer consultant in Nairobi. Susan is an IT consultant in Atlanta, USA, Lilian is a research scientist at Kemri, Carol is a risk manager in the property industry and Charles is a mechanical engineer with a State corporation.
The family is now leading a funds drive that begins on Wednesday at Hotel InterContinental to build the Dr Ouko Communal Memorial Library on a piece of land the family has donated to keep the love of reading and seeking knowledge alive.
Mrs Ouko says the project will cost Sh45 million. The Kenya National Library Services will provide some of the staff while Koru community project committee members will hire the rest. Dr Ouko’s youngest son Andrew was just 12 when his father disappeared, but he still remembers vividly the question his father would often ask: “What are you reading now?”
Now, the applied sciences graduate from the University of North Carolina in the United States has turned out to be a chip off the old block. He has gone on to educate himself in designing websites and has made a career of it.
The planned library will have books but will have a big computer-based component as well, said Winnie Ouko Ogutu, the former minister’s third born daughter. She has vivid memories of her father’s insistence that the family library be kept neat and everyone had to be reading something all the time.
Most memorably, she recalls telling her mother while in Form Three that she had given up on studying mathematics because “people who pass in math are mad”. The mother suggested that she repeat that story to Dr Ouko. “I went to see him and told him the same,” recalls Winnie. “I don’t remember what he told me, but from then on, I became an A student in math. He believed that you could succeed in whatever you put your mind to.”
Today, Mrs Ogutu is a consultant in finance and strategy after earning a master’s degree in the same from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. The idea of a library is appealing to the family because they want to pass this reading culture on to the Koru community and change the image of Got Alila that Kenyans have known these 20 years.
“We would want justice yes, but not just for our father, who was a prominent Kenyan, but for all those ordinary people who died in such circumstances, and no one bothers because they are ordinary,” said Mrs Ogutu. Even though Dr Ouko was not the first prominent Kenyan to die under mysterious circumstances, his murder remains intriguing just as his disappearance from his Koru home on February 12, 1990.
His charred body was found on Got Alila hill four days later. If the disappearance of a senior Cabinet minister was dramatic, so was the manner is which the news of his disappearance was aired on February 15, 1990 at 7 p.m. by the then Voice of Kenya, the only broadcaster at the time.
The brief news item said the minister was missing and had last been seen on the morning of February 13, 1990. The news item went on to appeal to Dr Ouko to contact his family or the nearest police station.
But for many Kenyans who had a keen interest in current affairs, it was the BBC that broke the news of the missing minister. At the time, the struggle for multipartyism was gaining momentum, and most Kenyans distrusted VoK, widely seen as a government propaganda tool.
It is for this reason that many would tune into foreign media to get an idea of what was happening on the local political front. The BBC was equally dramatic in its delivery. The newscaster paused mid-sentence to tell listeners that he could hear reporter Tido Mhando on the line from Nairobi. “Tido, what do you have?” The news was then broken.
Dr Robert John Ouko was born on March 31, 1931.
