Obama’s Kenyan grandmother to attend inauguration
There will be hundreds of thousands of revelers in Washington to celebrate Barack Obama‘s inauguration, but only one person whom the president-elect calls “Granny.”
Sarah Obama, 86, will fly from her native Kenya to attend the inaugural festivities, the Kenyan government announced on Tuesday.
Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama isn’t actually related to the next president by blood — she was the third wife of Barack Obama’s paternal grandfather. The two must speak through an interpreter as she knows only a few words of English.
But they formed a close bond when he first visited Kenya in 1988.
Her face was “smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes,” Obama wrote in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
Sarah Obama will attend a pan-African celebration the night of the inauguration. It’s not the first time she’s been to Washington: she came in 2004 to celebrate her step-grandson’s inauguration into the U.S. Senate.
Obama saw a lot more of his other grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, when he was growing up in Hawaii. She died on Nov. 3, the day before he was elected president.
Amy’s comments contain a lot of bitterness(?). Well, its not an accident that events led to the Sr. Obama not taking responsibility for his side of the American family, (though regretably sad that he proved himself irresponsible). Otherwise, who knows whether the president would’ve chosen Kenya and wasted there a nonentity or mediocre when his destiny lied here in USA. I believe that God, in His infinite wisdom, allowed the Sr. Obama to cross an ocean to meet the president’s mother – knowing that their union was going to produce a special child that will lead America in these trying times. On the other hand, the President himself wrote in his book, “Dreams from My Father” that his crisis of identity were only fully resolved when he discovered his inheritance and came to terms with it. He only did so when he forgave his father and wept at his grave. Mama Sarah deserves “granny” because she took care of the Sr. Obama like her own. There is nothing like inheritance.
Delano