Sarah Obama, philanthropist and step-grandmother of Barack Obama – obituary

Sarah Obama, who has died aged 99, was the Kenyan step-grandmother of the former US president Barack Obama and a philanthropist dedicated to educating orphaned children.

For decades she lived in obscurity, best known for the hot porridge and doughnuts she sold outside a local school. She shot to national prominence when Barack Obama, then a senator from Illinois, visited Kenya in 2006. Although not a blood relation, he knew her affectionately as “Granny”.

Her profile increased further during her step-grandson’s 2008 presidential campaign, as Western journalists flocked to her village in western Kenya to quiz her about conspiracy theories labelling Barack Obama a Muslim and questioning whether he had been born in the United States.

She denounced the theories as “untruths”, telling a reporter from the Associated Press: “Bringing such pictures that are trying to imply that not only is he a foreigner, but he is also a Muslim, is wrong, because that is not what he is.”

After Barack Obama won the presidency, Sarah attended his inauguration in Washington and became an international celebrity, dubbed “perhaps the world’s most famous grandmother” and invited to Fourth of July celebrations at the US embassy in Nairobi.

Keen to capitalise on President Obama’s Kenyan roots, the government set about making improvements to Sarah Obama’s village, connecting it to the national grid and building a police station. Her home became a tourist attraction and a regular fixture for visiting journalists, whom she would receive under the mango tree outside her home, surrounded by rabbits and chickens.

Warm, charitable, and exuding a maternal sense of authority, she often proffered views that shocked the sensibilities of her Western visitors. When asked by a Guardian journalist about an initiative launched by President Obama to combat domestic violence, she replied: “The disobedient wives should be beaten.”

A Muslim and a member of the Luo ethnic group, Sarah Obama was born in the Western Kenyan village of Kogelo, near Lake Victoria, in 1922. She was the third wife of Barack Obama’s grandfather, Hussein, a convert from Islam to Roman Catholicism.

She did not attend school and was unable to read or write, which strengthened her dedication to providing her children and stepchildren with an education. Barack Obama recalled that she would pedal his father six miles to school every day from their village to the nearby town of Ngiya.

“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,” Obama wrote.

Barack Obama had a troubled relationship with his father, a pipe-smoking economist who had met Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, in Hawaii and had walked out on the family when Barack was two. He died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982.

None the less, the former president retained a close sense of connection to his extended Kenyan family. In his memoir Dreams of My Father he described meeting his step-grandmother for the first time in 1988, recalling that they formed a strong bond despite initial awkwardness as they communicated through an interpreter.

He returned to his step-grandmother’s village in 2018, after he left the presidency, joking that he had been unable to visit earlier because the runway of the local airport was too small to accommodate Air Force One.

For decades, Sarah Obama ran a foundation dedicated to educating orphans and other vulnerable children. She also built homes for impoverished neighbours. With her celebrity came access to funds from Western donors, and with these she built her village’s first nursery school.

She was particularly dedicated to providing schooling for girls. In 2015 she told the BBC: “If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village.”

Sarah Obama married Hussein Onyango Obama in 1941.

Sarah Obama, born 1922, died March 29 2021