Sarah Obama, grandmother of former US President Barack Obama, has died at the age of 99 in western Kenya, her daughter told Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Monday.
“It is true that she has gone to be with the Lord,” said an emotional Marsat Onyango, her daughter, “she went on this morning.”
Sarah Obama, popularly known as Mama Sarah, had been admitted to Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu.
Once a simple country woman, Sarah Obama was for a long time best known for the hot porridge and donuts she served at a local school.
But she became world famous with the 2008 election of her stepson Barack as the first black American president.
Already a national celebrity after former Illinois Senator Barack Obama visited Kenya in 2006, Sarah’s modest house became a tourist attraction with Obama’s election triumph in November 2008.
Born in 1922 in a village on the shores of the sparkling waters of Lake Victoria, Sarah was the third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, Barack Obama’s grandfather, an herbalist and a village elder who fought for the British in Burma, now called Myanmar.
Onyango Obama, who died in 1975, is said to be the first man to change goatskin clothes into trousers in his village. He returned from the war in Burma with a gramophone and a picture of a white woman he claimed to have married.
Although it was not a blood relationship, Barack Obama often referred to Sarah as his grandmother and called her “grandmother”.
On his trip back to Kenya as President of the United States, he met her among other family members in Nairobi.
After leaving the office, he traveled to his home in the village of Kogelo in 2018 and joked that he had not been able to do so in 2015 because his jet plane was too large to land in Kisumu.
Obama is connected to his Kenyan family through his father Barack senior, a pipe-smoking economist whom Obama has admitted he “never really” knew.
He met Barack Obama’s mother Ann Dunham in Hawaii. But he left when Obama was just two and died in a car accident in Nairobi in 1982, aged 46.
Obama senior had served in Jomo Kenyatta’s government, which led Kenya to independence from Britain until his death 14 years later in 1978.
The two men did not do well, with Kenyatta – the father of Kenya’s current president Uhuru Kenyatta – firing Obama senior and blackballing him for additional government jobs, an exclusion that would help drive alcoholism.
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