Ruth Khama

Ruth Williams: born London 9 December 1923; married 1948 Seretse Khama (Kt 1966, died 1980; three sons, one daughter); died Gaborone 23 May 2002.

Ruth Williams and Seretse Khama were the protagonists of one of the great love stories of the 20th century.

Her origins were unremarkable – she was born in the staid middle-class enclave of Blackheath in south-east London, the daughter of a retired Indian Army officer. But her liaison with the man who would become the first president of Botswana created a diplomatic and social earthquake. Their marriage sent tremors through his own country, enraged apartheid South Africa next door, and profoundly embarrassed the pusillanimous British government of the day.

Ruth Williams met her future husband in June 1947. She was an independent-minded girl in her early twenties who had been a Waaf ambulance driver during the Second World War, serving at the emergency landing station near Beachy Head. When peace returned, she took a job in the claims department of a Lloyd's underwriters. Ice-skating, music and ballroom dancing were her ways of coping with the shortages and drabness of an overstretched, virtually bankrupt Britain of those years.

Seretse Khama was the heir to the Bangwato throne, the most important chieftainship in what was then the British colonial protectorate of Bechuanaland. At the time, however, he lived in the most unroyal circumstances – lodged in Spartan student digs at a hostel near Marble Arch, having been sent to Britain by his family to study Law – first at Balliol College, Oxford, then at the Inner Temple.

The couple met at a Missionary Society dance, where Williams was introduced to Khama by her sister Muriel. The relationship blossomed, helped by a shared enthusiasm for jazz in general and for the Inkspots in particular. Their decision to get married caused a storm on two continents.

The least of their problems perhaps was racial prejudice on the part of the public in a colonialist Britain still unaccustomed to interracial marriages. In Seretse's native Bechuanaland, however, his Bamangwao people were in uproar. Chief Tshekedi Khama, Seretse's uncle and guardian, tried to prevent the young heir throwing in his lot with a member of the race responsible for the subjugation of their nation. The succession, his uncle believed, was in danger, and Tshekedi was furious. "You have been ruined by others, not by me," he said – and at the time a majority of the Bamangwao undoubtedly agreed.

For the London government, the impending marriage was a nightmare, and one which brought out the worst of British hypocrisy and cynical realpolitik. For the popular press, the liaison might have been a contemporary variant of Desdemona and Othello, "who loved not wisely but too well". A more apposite description however was "A Marriage of Inconvenience" – to borrow the title of Michael Dutfield's 1990 book on the subject – a marriage which boded only ill for British diplomatic interests.

South Africa's new prime minister, Daniel Malan, a prime instigator of apartheid, said the proposed marriage was "disgusting". Desperate to secure South African uranium for its nuclear programme and South African gold for the nourishment of its financial markets, and fearful South Africa might simply annex Bechuanaland, Clement Attlee's Labour government was not about to disagree.

Its spokesmen denied that South Africa made representations, but those assertions were refuted by subsequent memoirs and publication of Cabinet records. Fierce pressure from the Colonial Office forced the Bishop of London to deny permission for a church wedding. Three days later, however, on 29 September 1948 – dressed not in a white but a black dress – Ruth Williams finally married the man she loved in a civil ceremony at Kensington Registry Office. A few days later, her husband returned to face his angry subjects.

Seretse Khama found himself banned from his tribal territory and barred from assuming the chieftainship, and in 1950 the couple were sent into exile. Two years later, the new Conservative prime minister, Winston Churchill, decreed that exile should be "permanent". But, as opposition to racialist South Africa became a diplomatic necessity, Britain permitted Seretse to return.

By then his people had changed their mind about his marriage. In 1963 Seretse was restored to the chieftainship and three years later, as leader of the Bechuanaland Democratic Party, he became the first president of an independent Botswana. Whether out of remorse or forgetfulness, the British government bestowed upon him a knighthood.

But "Lady K", as she became known in a country which took her to its heart, never forgot the slights inflicted upon her. She considered herself thereafter a "Motswana", a native citizen of Botswana – now one of the more successful countries in a generally blighted continent.

Sir Seretse Khama died in his wife's arms at the State House, Gaborone, in 1980. Many expected that Ruth Khama would return to London. But she would have none of it. She became president of the country's Red Cross and was regularly to be seen in the streets of Gaborone, waving and smiling to the throngs who recognised her. At state occasions she was invariably saluted by the army officers who served under her son Ian – who today is Botswana's Vice-President.

"I am completely happy here and have no desire to go anywhere else," she declared. "I have lived here for more than half my life, and my children are here. When I came to this country I became a Motswana."

Ruth Khama will be buried in the family graveyard on the hill at Serowe which overlooks her husband's birthplace.

Rupert Cornwell