Sarah Obama, the grandmother of Ex-US President Barack Obama, has died aged 99. Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Marsat Onyango, who revealed that her mother died at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital, Kisumu at 4.45am on Monday, March 29.
Family spokesman Sheikh Musa Ismail said she had been unwell for a week but had tested negative for COVID-19. Born in 1922 in a village on the shores of Lake Victoria, Sarah was the third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, President Obama’s grandfather, a herbalist and a village elder who fought for the British in Burma, now called Myanmar.
Obama is linked to his Kenyan family via his father Barack senior, a pipe-smoking economist who Obama has admitted he “never truly” knew. He met Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Dunham, in Hawaii. But he walked out when Obama was just two and died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982, aged 46.
Mama Sarah will be buried Tuesday at her home, in line with Islamic traditions, said Ismail.