Mama Sarah: An icon of education and family values

From the time America's 44th President Barack Obama saw his grandmother, he knew there was something extraordinary about her.

It was not her height. It wasn’t her educational background. It was not even the languages she spoke. It was something else. Something that lay within her humanness.

President Obama often showed affection towards her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1987 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond.

Mama Sarah would later in 2009 attended his first inauguration as president. Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the UN General Assembly.

With a famous grandson, Mama Sarah would have chosen an easier path after Obama became President in 2009. She could have easily sought favours, relocated and enjoyed her remaining years within the comforts of Washington or later on Chicago.

She, however, chose different. Sarah chose to continue with her life away from the ever burning spotlight of her son's presidency and get on with her simple life and her dignified roles of mother to many of the orphans she took under her wings in Kogelo village.

Found belonging 

For the former president, Mama Sarah represented an important link between his past and future. She was the bridge that President Obama used to journey back into his past, and which eventually helped him make sense of his present and defined his future.

For the Obama, his grandmother held the keys to understanding his family, something that the young Barack set out to do when he made a trip to Kenya in 1987. 

Understanding his Kenyan heritage was something that troubled him and despite there being no biological connection between the two – she was his grandfather Onyango Obama’s third wife – Barack saw in her a vein into his father and grandfather’s history. 

When he visited her home, he saw flashes of a life lived before him, by the people he desperately sought a connection with. And it is through her actions, her history and her explanation of the broader Obama lineage that Barack found belonging. 

On her grandmother’s wall was his father’s Harvard certificate, and some pictures of Obama Senior, as well as his grandfather Onyango, who she had married at 16. 

For Sarah, life was all about the simple things. About a son knowing where his home was. About a man knowing the language of his forefathers. About a mother empowering those who came after her by being there for her daughters and granddaughters.

“Just lost the most important person in my life – my gran, Mama Sarah. My heart is broken! But as I write, not able to stop the tears from pouring, I know I was blessed to have her for so long! My inspiration, my rock, my comfort zone, my safe space,” Dr Auma Obama said of her.

From his book Dreams From My Father, Auma was a constant in the former president’s trip to rural Kenya to discover himself. It is during this trip that Mama Sarah made the young Obama question himself even louder about belonging.

An excerpt from the book reads: “… After a long pause, Granny looked at me and smiled.

“Halo!” she said.

“Musawa!” I said.

"Our mutual vocabulary exhausted, we stared ruefully down at the dirt until Auma finally returned. And granny then turned to Auma and said, in a tone I could understand, that it pained her not to be able to speak to the son of her son.

“Tell her I’d like to learn Luo, but it is hard to find time in the States,” I said. Tell her how busy I am.”

“She understands that,” Auma said. “But she also says that a man can never be too busy to know his own people.”

For Mama Sarah, it wasn’t just enough to know the people. In her 99 years – 83 of which were spent in Kogelo – she more than knew the people. She was a source of hope for dozens of orphans that went through her hands. She was a source of strength for the dozens of widows she supported and counselled in a hugely patriarchal society. For these groups, the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation provided respite and a sense of security.

Honored by the UN

In a 2014 interview with AP, she spoke of some of the things that drove her. A key passion was access to education for the children in her village. She told the American wire service that at the time, even as an adult she would receive letters but was unable to read them.

She said she didn’t want her children to be illiterate, so she saw that all her family’s children went to school.

“I love education,” she told AP, because children “learn they can be self-sufficient,” especially girls who too often had no opportunity.

“If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village,” she said.

In recognition of her work to support education, she was honored by the United Nations in 2014, receiving the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award. Three years later, she received a state honour, that of Elder of the Order of the Burning Spear, for her dedicated service to the poor.

“In the passing of Mama Sarah Obama, we have lost a matriarch who lived ahead of her time. She single-handedly kept the family going long after the husband departed,” ODM leader Raila Odinga said on learning of her death.

“The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation of Kenya. 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 said.

Today Kogelo residents wake up for the first time in many years in the knowledge that they will never see Mama Sarah again, nor will not see her smile again. That they will no longer be treated to the tremours of her dancing shoulders whenever the works descended on the village like in July 2018, when she busted a move with her grandson at the launch of Auma Obama’s Sauti Kuu Foundation, rolling back the years to happier times.

Today, the larger Obama family may be in pain, but it might help to know that their grief is shared and that the weight of their collective loss is borne not just by them, not just by Kogelo, not just by the country, but with millions around the world.