SARAH OBAMA
'Sparkling, laughing eyes'
She's really his step-grandmother, but Barack Obama calls her "Granny."
Sarah Hussein Onyango Obama's face was "smooth and big-boned, with sparkling, laughing eyes," Obama wrote in Dreams From My Father of his first visit with her. "She hugged Auma and Roy as if she were going to wrestle them to the ground, then turned to me and grabbed my hand in a hearty handshake."
Sarah Obama was the third wife of Obama's paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama.
(Courtesy)
(AP file)
Sarah Obama was just 16 when she married Obama's grandfather, an older man who was her father's friend. Arranged marriages and obedience to husbands -- enforced by beatings, if necessary -- were the plight of Kenyan women of her generation, she explained in Obama's book.
" 'Our women have carried a heavy load,' " she says in the book. " 'If one is a fish, one does not try to fly -- one swims with other fish. One only knows what one knows. Perhaps if I was young today, I would not have accepted these things. Perhaps I would only care about my feelings, and falling in love. But that's not the world I was raised in. I only know what I have seen. What I have not seen doesn't make my heart heavy.' "