NAIROBI: Sarah Obama, the grandmother of former US President Barack Obama, has died aged 99 in western Kenya, her daughter told AFP Monday.

“It is true she has gone to be with the Lord, she passed on this morning,” said an emotional Marsat Onyango, her daughter.

Sarah Obama, popularly known as Mama Sarah, had been admitted to the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral Hospital in Kisumu.

Already a national celebrity after the former Illinois senator Barack Obama visited Kenya in 2006, Sarah’s modest homestead became a tourist attraction with Obama’s November 2008 election triumph.

Born in 1922 in a village on the shores of Lake Victoria, Sarah was the third wife of Hussein Onyango Obama, President Obama’s grandfather, a herbalist and a village elder who fought for the British in Burma, now called Myanmar.

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