Former US President Barack Obama mourned his late grandmother Mama Sarah Obama.
The late was affectionately known to many as “Mama Sarah” but known to the family as “Dani” or Granny.
Born in the first quarter of the last century, in Nyanza Province, on the shores of Lake Victoria, she had no formal schooling, and in the ways of her tribe, she was married off to a much older man while only a teen. She would spend the rest of her life in the tiny village of Alego, in a small home built of mud-and thatch brick and without electricity or indoor plumbing.
The former President says, there, her granny raised eight children, tended to her goats and chickens, grew an assortment of crops, and took what the family didn’t use to sell at the local open-air market.
“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.”
The former President says when their family had difficulties, Mama Sarah’s homestead was a refuge for her children and grandchildren, and her presence was a constant, stabilizing force.
“When I first travelled to Kenya to learn more about my heritage and father, who had passed away by then, it was Granny who served as a bridge to the past, and it was her stories that helped fill a void in my heart,” President Obama says.
During her life, the late would witness epochal changes taking place around the globe; world war, liberation movements, moon landings, and the advent of the computer age. “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 humour—never changed.”
Obama says he will miss her dearly, but celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.
By Frank Akunga
Comment here