By Barack Obama, KALORAMA
US
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.
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| A young Barack Obama with his grandmother, Mama Sarah Obama, during a trip to Kenya. |
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.
There
she 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.
When
our family had difficulties, her homestead was a refuge for her children and
grandchildren, and her presence was a constant, stabilising force. -
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