Former US President Barack Obama has mourned his late grandmother, Mama Sarah Obama, who died on Monday after a short illness.
Mama Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama died at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu, where she had been taken on Sunday evening for medical attention.
In his post on Twitter on Monday evening, the 44th President of America, who has roots in K’Ogelo village in Siaya County mourned “dani” saying she will be greatly missed. Here is Obama's full tribute as shared on his Facebook page:
“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.
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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.”
Barack Obama and Mama Sarah Obama in 1988. PHOTO/COURTESY
Obama was born to late civil servant Barack Obama Senior, Mama Sarah’s son, and Stanley Ann Dunham on August 4, 1961 before they parted ways when he returned to Kenya.
It was Mama Sarah who welcomed and hosted Obama when he visited K'Ogelo village in 1988 as he traced his Kenyan paternal roots before venturing into politics and was elected Illinois Senator (1996-2002) and later US President for two terms from 2008 to 2016.
