Former President Barack Obama’s stepgrandmother died on Monday at the age of 99.
Sarah Onyango Obama, described as the matriarch of the Obama family, lived in Kenya and was the second or third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, Barack Obama’s grandfather, who practiced polygamy as a person of Muslim faith, according to the New York Times.
“The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman. A matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said in a statement.
The cause of her death was not specified, but a representative said that it was not due to COVID-19.
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In a statement issued on Monday, the former president said he would “miss her dearly.”
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
“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,” he said. “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.”
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“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,” Obama added. “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.”
