British aid worker Emma McCune married Sudanese warlord Riek Machar

Emma McCune was born in Assam, India, in 1964 to British expatriates Julian and Maggie McCune. She was the oldest of four children, and the family moved to Yorkshire, England, when she was 2 years old in 1966. After attending the Convent of the Assumption in Richmond, Emma studied art and art history at Oxford Polytechnic from 1984 to 1986, where she developed a fascination for Africa. She later attended SOAS University of London and even flew to Australia and back in a single-engined light aircraft in 1985.

In 1987, she traveled to war-torn Sudan to teach for the British organization Volunteer Services Overseas. After returning to England in 1988, she returned to Sudan in 1989 to work for the UNICEF-funded Canadian organization Street Kids International. The organization founded or re-opened more than 100 village schools in the south, where McCune spent much of the late 1980s amidst war and famine.

In 1989, she met Riek Machar, a senior commander in the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. They were instantly attracted to one another despite Machar already having a Sudanese wife, Angela, who was living in England with their three children. In June 1991, they were married in Nasir, Sudan, amid quarreling between Machar, SPLA chairman John Garang, and other leaders. Garang accused Emma of being a British spy and of using her influence over her husband to orchestrate a coup against him, accusations she dismissed as ridiculous in an interview with journalist Richard Ellis.

Street Kids International fired McCune to preserve its neutrality following the marriage. She then lived with Machar as war intensified and he split his faction away from the larger movement, at one point fleeing a machine-gun attack. In 1993, after becoming pregnant, she moved to Nairobi; she and her unborn child were killed when hit by a matatu in Kenya. Her mother, Maggie McCune, published her story in Till the Sun Grows Cold, while journalist Deborah Scroggins wrote an unauthorized biography titled Emma's War.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons