Obama wrote about the meeting in his bestseller Dreaming of my father. Communicating with Sarah was difficult, because she didn’t speak English and he didn’t speak Luo. When he explained to her that he was too busy to learn that language, her answer was that “a man should never be too busy getting to know his own people.”
Sarah left an important mark on the life of Obama’s father, Barack Sr. When he was a child, she cycled him six miles to school every day. “That’s how I knew he was going to get the education I never had.” Without that investment, Obama’s father would never have met the American woman who would become his mother on an exchange.
Sarah Obama remained committed to educating girls and children who had lost their parents in the AIDS epidemic. She raised money to send them to school and to buy supplies and food.
“I love education because it teaches children to be self-reliant,” she once explained. “Especially when a girl goes to school: not only her own family learns from this, but her entire village.”
Spear for Obama
When Obama took a shot at the White House in 2008, international journalists flooded the village of Kogelo where Sarah still lived without running water or electricity. After her step-grandson’s election victory, the government quickly connected her to the grid. Security guards also came to manage the hundreds of visitors who sometimes passed by.
A few months later, she was flown to Washington for Obama’s inauguration for security protocol without the spear she’d been willing to offer him. She was impressed by the five-star hotel where she was staying under security, but found the climate in the American capital too harsh: amused, she noticed that the cold meant she had to put on pants for the first time in her life.
Powerful matriarch
She informed the new president through an interpreter that she had no urgent assignment for him. “He knows he has to work for peace and development for Kogelo and the rest of the world.” She had previously said that, like his father, he was a man with a big heart, “someone who cannot see others suffer.”
Obama’s Kenyan family says they are deeply mourning the death. The former president has also conveyed his condolences.
President Kenyatta calls ‘Mama Sarah’ an exemplary woman and an icon. Former Kenyan Prime Minister Odinga praises her as a powerful matriarch who managed to keep the family going on her own after the death of her husband.
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