Former United States President, Barrack Obama, has lost his grandmother, Sarah Onyango.
Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Marsat Obama, who disclosed her mother passed on at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital, Kisumu in the early hours of Monday, Nairobi News reports.
Late Onyango was admitted to the hospital on Sunday morning.
According to family sources, plans are underway to bury her today (Monday) at the Muslim Cemetery in Kisumu.
“We are trying to see whether we shall be able to bury her today and if not, we shall bury her tomorrow,” a relative said.
Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., was born in Kogelo, a rural village in western Kenya. He left for studies on a scholarship in the United States where he met a white woman, Ann Dunham, at the University of Hawaii. The couple got married but divorced when the younger Obama was two years old. His father returned to Kenya where he died in a car crash in Nairobi in 1982.
Mr Obama never really knew his father, whom he met only once when he was 10, but he felt a connection that eventually took him to Kenya in 1987 in search of his roots, the StraitTimes reports.