Barack Obama Pens Heartfelt Tribute To ‘Beloved Grandmother’ Who Died At 99

Barack Obama and his family are mourning the loss of his step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, who has just passed away in Kenya at 99.

She passed away on Monday at a local hospital in Kisumu, Kenya, her daughter Marsat Onyango confirmed to the Associate Press in a phone call, “She died this morning. We are devastated.”

The former president penned a heartfelt tribute to her on Twitter and shared a photo of them together.

“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 wrote. “We will miss her dearly, but we’ll celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.”

 

“Mama was sick with normal diseases she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman Sheik Musa Ismail told multiple publications in Kenya. Adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

“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,” President Uhuru Kenyatta wrote on Twitter.

 

Sarah Obama was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The 44th President had a loving relationship with his step-grandmother and called her “granny” in his memoir “Dreams From My Father.” She also attended his first inauguration as President in 2009.

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