U.S Former President Barack Obama’ Kenyan grandmother dies, aged 99.

Barack Obama’s step-grandmother, Sarah Obama, died on Monday at a hospital in Kenya at the age of 99.

Sarah Obama was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and she helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The former president has previously said he shared a warm bond with the family’s matriarch and referred to her as “Granny” in his book, “Dreams from My Father.” The former president first met his grandmother in 1988 during a trip to Kenya and she attended his first presidential inauguration in 2009. In 2018, after leaving office, he visited her home in the village of Kogelo and joked that he had been unable to do so in the previous years as the presidential jet was too big to land in Kisumu.

Sarah Obama had for decades helped raise orphans at her home and later ran the Mama Sarah Obama Foundation which helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents.

On Facebook, the former U.S president wrote a tribute to his late grandmother.

The tribute read that “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. 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, stabilizing force. When I first traveled 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.

During the course of her life, Granny 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 humor—never changed.

We will miss her dearly, but celebrate with gratitude her long and remarkable life.”