Obama’s Kenyan granny ‘Mama Sarah’ dies at 99

Sarah Onyango Obama, the grandmother of previous US President Barack Obama, on Monday, died aged 99 in western Kenya, disclosed by her relatives.

“It is true she has gone to be with the Lord,” declared an emotional Marsat Onyango, her daughter, “she passed on this morning.” Sarah Obama, prominently known as Mama Sarah, had been admitted to the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu.

Formerly a simple nation woman, Sarah Obama was for quite a while, most popular for the hot porridge and doughnuts she served at a neighbourhood school.

However, she rose to world popularity with the 2008 election of her step-grandson Barack as the first black US president.

Previously a nationwide superstar after the previous Illinois senator Barack Obama visited Kenya in 2006; Sarah’s humble estate turned into a tourist attraction with Obama’s November 2008 election success.

Brought into the world in 1922 out of a town on the shores of the sparkling waters of Lake Victoria, Sarah was the third spouse of Hussein Onyango Obama, President Obama’s grandfather, an herbalist and a village elder who battled for the British in Burma, presently called Myanmar.

Onyango Obama, who passed on in 1975, is stated to be the first man to exchange goatskin clothing for trousers in his town. He got back from the war in Burma with a record player and a photograph of a white woman he professed to have married.

Albeit not a blood relative, President Obama frequently referred to Sarah as his grandma, calling her “granny”.

On his journey back to Kenya as US president, he met with her, among other relatives in Nairobi.

Subsequently, leaving office, he went back to her home in the town of Kogelo in 2018, kidding, he had not been able to do so in 2015 as his jet was too enormous to land in Kisumu.

Obama is related to his Kenyan family through his father, Barack senior, a pipe-smoking economist who Obama has confessed he “never truly” knew.

He met the mother of Barack Obama, Ann Dunham, in Hawaii. Be that as it may, he left when Obama was only two and passed on in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982, aged 46.

Obama senior had worked in the government of Jomo Kenyatta, who led Kenya at independence from Britain until his demise 14 years later in 1978.

The two men were not on good terms, with Kenyatta — the father of Kenya’s present President Uhuru Kenyatta firing, Obama senior, and blackballing him for additional government occupations, a punishment that helped stimulate alcohol addiction.