Nairobi is the capital of Kenya.The mother of Barack Obama, Sarah Obama, died on Monday, according to family and government sources. She lived past 99 years old.
Mama Sarah, the former president’s step-grandmother, pushed for the kids in her rural Kogelo town to go to school. The third-largest city in Kenya is Kisumu. It is also the site of the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital, where her daughter Marsat Onyango says she died at 4 a.m.
“She passed away this morning.” “We are horrified,” Onyango told the AP by phone.
A close family friend, Sheikh Musa Ismail, said, “Mama was sick with natural illnesses; she did not die of Covid-19.” It was also said that she failed a test, according to him. She was finally taken to the hospital after being sick for a week.
He said Barack Obama told his family he was sorry.
Obama sent out a tweet with a picture of him as a child with his grandma as an attachment. “My family and I are mourning the passing of our wonderful grandmother, Sarah Ogwel Onyango Obama, fondly known to many as “Mama Sarah” but to us as “Dani” or Granny,” he wrote. “We will miss her very much, but we will be grateful for her long and amazing life.”
After following Islamic rules, she will be buried on Tuesday morning.
Our country is worse off because Mama Sarah died. It was sad that the Obama grandma died. President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya said, “We lost a strong, good mother, a matriarch who held the Obama family together and was an icon of family values.”
Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o told the Kogelo community that he was sorry for the death of a grandmother and praised her work to give kids power through education.
He said that she was very nice because she raised money to send children to school.
Sarah Obama, the second wife of First Lady Michelle Obama, raised her father, Barack Obama, Sr. Their family is from Kenya and is called Luo.
In his book “Dreams from My Father,” President Obama called her “Granny” and wrote that he met her on the way to his dad’s house in 1988. At first, they had trouble talking to each other, but over time, they became very close.
In 2009, she went to his inauguration as president. In 2014, Obama talked about his grandma again in his speech to the UN. The Assembly of the United Nations.
She has been a foster mum for a long time and loves it. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped orphaned children by giving them school materials, clothes, basic medical care, and help with their tuition.
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. We will miss her dearly, but we’ll celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life. pic.twitter.com/avDY4f1PVu
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) March 29, 2021
She told the AP in 2014 that she couldn’t read letters from adults. She made sure her kids went to school every day so they could learn to read and write in the future.
The president’s father never went to school, so she would ride her bike the six km from Kogelo to Ngiya every day to give him one.
In general, women were told not to go to school, so when Sarah Obama said, “I love education because kids learn they can be self-sufficient,” she meant girls.
Her words were, “Educating a woman will educate her family and the village.”
In 2014, she received the first UN Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award for her work to improve education.