Barack Obama’s step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, has died at a hospital in Kenya at the age of 99.
Affectionately called Granny Sarah by the former president, Mrs Obama defended her grandson during his 2008 presidential campaign, when he was said to be Muslim and not born in the US.
Her home became a tourist attraction when he was elected as the first black US president.
Sarah Obama was the third and youngest wife of Barack Obama’s grandfather.
She died early on Monday at a hospital in the western town of Kisumu, her daughter Marsat Onyango told Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper.
A family spokesman said Mrs Obama had been unwell for a week, but did not have Covid-19.
She will be buried later on Monday.
Barack Obama has taken to his Facebook page and penned down a lengthy emotional post.
Check it out:
“My family and I are mourning the loss of our beloved grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, affectionately known to many as “Mama Sarah” but known to us as “Dani” or Granny. Born in the first quarter of the last century, in Nyanza Province, on the shores of Lake Victoria, she had no formal schooling, and in the ways of her tribe, she was married off to a much older man while only a teen. She would spend the rest of her life in the tiny village of Alego, in a small home built of mud-and thatch brick and without electricity or indoor plumbing. There she raised eight children, tended to her goats and chickens, grew an assortment of crops, and took what the family didn’t use to sell at the local open-air market.
Although not his birth mother, Granny would raise my father as her own, and it was in part thanks to her love and encouragement that he was able to defy the odds and do well enough in school to get a scholarship to attend an American university. When our family had difficulties, her homestead was a refuge for her children and grandchildren, and her presence was a constant, stabilizing force. When I first traveled to Kenya to learn more about my heritage and father, who had passed away by then, it was Granny who served as a bridge to the past, and it was her stories that helped fill a void in my heart.
During the course of her life, Granny would witness epochal changes taking place around the globe: world war, liberation movements, moon landings, and the advent of the computer age. She would live to fly on jets, receive visitors from around the world, and see one of her grandsons get elected to the United States presidency. And yet her essential spirit—strong, proud, hard-working, unimpressed with conventional marks of status and full of common sense and good humor—never changed.
We will miss her dearly, but celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.”
Enock Mugabi aka iWitness is a Journalist, Seasoned Writer and Music Analyst with a passion for sports.
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