FORMER PRESIDENT’S STEPGRANDMOTHER WAS PHILANTHROPIST, ADVOCATE IN KENYA
Sarah Onyango Obama, the stepgrandmother of former President Barack Obama who grew up without formal education in remote, rural Kenya and devoted many years of her life to philanthropic efforts to help younger people secure places in school, died Monday at a hospital in Kenya. She was 99.
Her death was confirmed in a statement published by the Kenyan presidency, which said that Onyango Obama died while receiving treatment for an unspecified illness at a hospital in Kisumu, a city in western Kenya.
“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,” the former president posted on Twitter, with a photo of the two together. “We will miss her dearly, but we’ll celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.”
Known widely among Kenyans as Mama Sarah, Onyango Obama was seen as the matriarch of Obama’s sprawling extended family in Africa.
She was born in 1920 or 1921, in an era when British colonial records were, at best, patchy. She had said that she did not know the date or place of her birth.
She was the second or third wife of Obama’s grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, who traced his polygamy to his ancestry and Muslim faith.
He served during World War II as a British officer’s cook and was deployed to Burma, as Myanmar was then called.
Hussein Onyango Obama had initially adopted Roman Catholicism but converted to Islam when he married an earlier wife from the largely Muslim island of Zanzibar. His son, Barack Obama Sr., the president’s father, was raised as a Christian and spent his early years under Sarah Onyango Obama’s tutelage.
Before the 2008 election that catapaulted Obama to the White House, journalists f locked to the small village of Kogelo in western Kenya, where she lived. Some of them noted that she did not have running water or electricity, although she seemed better off than most: Her home had a tin roof, rather than thatch, and she had a cellphone that she charged with a solar panel.
She traveled to Washington in early 2009 to attend his inauguration as America’s first Black president, but the two were separated not only by geography but also by divergent lives, ways and eras.
At the inauguration, for instance, she presented him with an oxtail fly whisk, an emblem of power in Kenya. She spoke Luo, the tongue of her ethnic group, and some Swahili, and used an interpreter to translate her thoughts into English for the president.
A year after the inauguration she created her own foundation — the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation — to raise funds for a project to build an educational campus in her home village.