Death of Mama Sarah Obama

 

NAIROBI, Kenya -- Sarah Obama, the matriarch of former U.S. President Barack Obama's Kenyan family has died, relatives and officials confirmed Monday. She was at least 99 years old.

Mama Sarah, as the step-grandmother of the former U.S. president was fondly called, promoted education for girls and orphans in her rural Kogelo village. She passed away around 4 a.m. local time while being treated at the Jaramogi Oginga Odinga Teaching and Referral hospital in Kisumu, Kenya's third-largest city in the country's west, according to her daughter Marsat Onyango.

“She died this morning. We are devastated,” Onyango told The Associated Press on a phone call.  "Mama was sick with normal diseases; she did not die of COVID-19,” a family spokesman said, adding that she had tested negative for the disease. He said she had been ill for a week before being taken to the hospital.

President Barack Obama had been informed of the death and has sent his condolences.

She will be buried Tuesday before midday and the funeral will be held under Islamic rites.  “The passing away of Mama Sarah is a big blow to our nation. We’ve lost a strong, virtuous woman, a matriarch who held together the Obama family and was an icon of family values,” President Uhuru Kenyatta said.

She will be remembered for her work to promote education to empower orphans, Kisumu Governor Anyang Nyong’o said while offering his condolences to the people of Kogelo village for losing a matriarch.  “She was a philanthropist who mobilized funds to pay school fees for the orphans,” he said.  Sarah Obama, was the second wife of President Obama’s grandfather and helped raise his father, Barack Obama, Sr. The family is part of Kenya's Luo ethnic group.

President Obama often showed affection toward her and referred to her as “Granny” in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” He described meeting her during his 1988 trip to his father’s homeland and their initial awkwardness as they struggled to communicate, which developed into a warm bond. She attended his first inauguration as president in 2009. Later, Obama spoke about his grandmother again in his September 2014 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

For decades, Sarah Obama has helped orphans, raising some in her home. The Mama Sara Obama Foundation helped provide food and education to children who lost their parents — providing school supplies, uniforms, basic medical needs, and school fees.  In a 2014 interview with Associated Press, she said that even as an adult, letters would arrive but she couldn’t read them. She said she didn’t want her children to be illiterate, so she saw that all her family’s children went to school.

She recalled pedaling the president’s father six miles (nine kilometers) to school on the back of her bicycle every day from the family’s home village of Kogelo to the bigger town of Ngiya **   to make sure he got the education that she never had.      **( Ng'iya, is where we lived when we first arrived in Kenya, and was the home of Joseph Adhiambo, photo on the right)

“I love education,” Sarah Obama said, "because children learn they can be self-sufficient, especially girls who too often had no opportunity to go to school.  If a woman gets an education she will not only educate her family but educate the entire village,” she said.

In recognition of her work to support education, she was honoured by the United Nations in 2014, receiving the inaugural Women’s Entrepreneurship Day Education Pioneer Award.  

(Report from abc News)

Palm Sunday

Continuing from yesterdays thoughts about palm fronds on the track into Eliye Springs, this photo is from todays Mill Hill newsletter, and shows just what I was thinking about yesterday !  People carrying palm branches, walking down from the Mount of Olives and across the Kidron Valley into Jerusalem.    I have twice walked this very steep path, but never at Easter .... 

Lake 'Rudolf' part 2

El-Molo Island & Nyiru Range beyond, from Porr

Having written a little about the Omo River dam and what its effect will be on the people of the Turkana area, I found myself thinking a lot about our expeditions to that area. 

I found the above photo from one of our trips, and by the late 1970's El Molo island was scarcely populated; the El Molo were a dying tribe, being absorbed into other tribes of the area.   Wikipaedia says "historians have noted that there are few "pure" El Molo left. Most group members are today admixed with adjacent Nilotic populations, primarily Samburu, with only a handful of unmixed El Molo believed to exist. Many El Molo speakers have also adopted cultural customs from these communities. In 1994, there were reportedly only eight unmixed El Molo remaining."   I had noted a few days ago that El Molo was one of the Kenyan languages now thought to be extinct.  

"The El Molo are believed to have originally migrated down into the Turkana Basin around 1000 BC from Ethiopia in the more northerly Horn region. Owing to the arid environment in which they entered, they are held to have then abandoned agricultural activities in favour of lakeside fishing"  (Wikipaedia)

We saw a few El Molo people with scrawny cows and couldn't think what the animals could possibly find to eat among all the lava boulders and gravel that covered the area for miles and miles inland from the lake shore .... until we realised that the cows were driven into the shallow lake to eat the water weeds near the shore ... aquatic cows !

It is Palm Sunday tomorrow, and if we could go to church, (covid lock-down still applies to some churches) we would be given palm crosses, to remember the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem .... when people were waving and strewing palm branches, traditionally used as a celebration of victory.   This came to mind when I was remembering our trip to the west side of Rudolf, to Ferguson's Gulf.   The 'road' up the west side of the lake was then just a rough and sandy track, and the sand had been covered (presumably where the sand was deep and hard to drive over) with palm leaves to give grip to vehicles tyres.  Memories !  

~     ~     ~     ~     ~

(Added later:-)

See what I wrote in 2018 .... http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/06/lake-turkana-formerly-lake-rudolf.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/ancient-kenyan-burial-site.html

... and  http://luolaughter.blogspot.com/2018/08/more-on-lothagam-burial-site.html

Lake Rudolf .... sorry, Turkana !

 

So much is changing in Africa, and a lot of it not for the better.   What we knew as Lake Rudolf and visited two or three times, was a place for nomadic tribes with their camels and donkeys and goats, living a simple but very hard life.  As I see it, 'development' is rarely for the benefit of the people who live where the development is taking place, and so it would seem in the northern deserts of Kenya/the southern areas of Ethiopia.    There are dams being built across the Omo River in southern Ethiopia, which is the main source of freshwater flowing into Lake Turkana.

"Encompassing swathes of Ethiopia, South Sudan and Kenya, the Omo-Turkana Basin is one of the oldest landscapes in the world that is known to have been inhabited by Homo sapiens and is now one of the world’s most extraordinary examples of ethnic diversity. In the lower Omo Valley alone, a varied history of cross-cultural encounters has played out to produce eight distinct ethnic groups, speaking many languages from Afro-Asiatic to Nilo-Saharan.

In a cattle camp on the bank of the ancient Omo River a Mursi elder implored me to “tell our story so that others might know us before we are all dead in the desert”. Where the river ends in Lake Turkana, this sentiment was echoed by local fishermen: “You will find our bones in the desert.” The story of the Omo-Turkana Basin is now that of the Ethiopian state exploiting its periphery in the name of “development”, trampling on the human rights of its citizens in the process.

Over the past decade, the Ethiopian government has pushed ahead with a huge hydro-electric dam on the Omo, known as Gibe III. Without any meaningful consultation with the communities affected, the state has also appropriated grazing lands and freshwater, threatening their vital resources and local heritage.

All of this has happened despite the area gaining the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1980. As Richard Leakey, the Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist and politician put it, “these happenings are profoundly disturbing”.

The completion of Gibe III, Africa’s tallest dam to date, has eliminated the annual flood and radically reduced the Omo’s flow, which produces 90% of Lake Turkana’s freshwater input. In doing so, it has reduced sediments and nutrients critical for traditional agriculture, riverside pastures and fish habitat.

Over 30% of the lake inflow will be diverted for commercial irrigation projects. The result could be a fall in lake level comparable to that of Central Asia’s Aral Sea, which has shrunk by over two thirds since the 1960s because of irrigation abstractions and which has been called “the world’s worst environmental disaster”. To make way for the commercial plantations planned for the Omo Valley, tens of thousands of hectares of land will be expropriated and thousands of local people displaced.

The need to see “development” as more than a simple matter of an increase in GDP is well established. In his seminal work, Development as Freedom, the Nobel Prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrated that sustainable development must be based on universal access to social and economic necessities as well as political and civil rights. The many communities in the Omo-Turkana Basin have suffered a systematic curtailment of their most basic and essential rights.

International agreements which the Ethiopian government signed up to, such as the 1993 International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights require it to protect and promote the rights of minority cultures and ensure the “right of everyone to take part in cultural life”.

Since 1948, Ethiopia has also been signed up to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II provides against the destruction of “a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide”, famously defined the specific need to protect against the “disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups”.

It is difficult not to conclude that what we are seeing in the Omo is the wholesale disregard of these commitments by the Ethiopian government. Its development policies are not only transforming landscape and heritage but destroying complex systems of sustainable living that have endured for millennia. The huge injustice of all this is that the ecological costs will be borne by local communities while the profits will be enjoyed by central and international corporations.

Meanwhile, centuries of collective wisdom relating to livestock diversification, flood dependant cultivation and customary obligations and mechanisms of livestock exchange, will be made redundant.

This is not to deny, of course, that development, in the sense defined by Sen, is a laudable and necessary enterprise. But we must also recognise that large-scale infrastructure projects are likely to have far reaching consequences for the lifestyles and cultural identities of those they displace.

Projects which set out to increase economic growth without regard for social justice and individual rights are not worthy of the name “development”. Development must benefit locals and for this to happen their voices must not only be heard but also given a central and determining role in any discussions about the future of their lands and livelihoods.

Both cradle and crucible of our species, the Omo-Turkana Basin is unique and precious. Its heritage and history, as well as responsibility for its future, are shared by us all.

(from The Conversation.com)

Is there really no way of moving into the modern world for nomadic peoples without destroying their lives ?   I'm not sure that the invasion of rich tourists is quite the answer, but where lodges and game reserves have been set up by local communities, such as the Samburu, tourists with money to burn have come in droves, and the profits of such ventures benefit the local people, without destroying the ecology and history of an area.   We loved visiting the north of Kenya, and especially the area to the east of Lake Rudolf .... oops !     Turkana !   

It was arid, hot and with no 'facilities' whatsoever, but we took the children there for several days; they splashed around in the shallows of the lake (with an adult in attendance watching for crocodiles !)  They spent the hottest part of the day in shade, catching up with school lessons (I was teaching them myself); they found interesting rocks, and even some fossils !

Lost languages ?

 

(Report from  Anadolu Agency  news)

In the Kenyan capital Nairobi, rap music artist Martin Nderitu, 24, is having trouble laying down lines in his mother tongue for an album expected to drop in early March.  His album is composed in a slang called Sheng – a mix of Swahili, English, and 42 local languages, popular among the urban youth of the East African country.

In modern Kenya, the entertainment industry, politicians, schools, and even places of worship use this slang, which has now developed into a hybrid tongue.Like many other kids in his country, Nderitu grew up speaking a foreign language, a practice which has become a status symbol for many.

“My lines are very deep, they speak about society and our day-to-day life,” he said.  Unable to speak in his local language, he holds society and his parents responsible for not teaching him his mother tongue. He said that he can speak the English part of Sheng, but has trouble pronouncing his own mother tongue.   “My parents speak Swahili and Kenya’s slang called Sheng. They don’t speak their traditional languages. I blame them for the person I’ve become because it was their duty to pass the language onto me,” Nderitu said.

Similarly, Peter Waithaka, 25, said he can understand Kikuyu, his mother tongue, but is unable to use it to speak.  “I can hear the Kikuyu language but I can’t speak it. I feel like mother languages are just things of the past which in this modern era where we have computers, laptops, and the internet, these languages will disappear,” he said.

With over 40 tribes inhabiting Kenya, it is home to numerous languages and dialects, passed down from generation to generation.  The country has adopted Swahili and English, which are taught in schools, as the two national languages. The local languages which connect people to their ethnic groups are only learned at home when children grow up.

Worrisome phenomenon

According to studies by linguists, most Kenyan youths can barely speak their ethnic languages.  Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Clara Momanyi, a linguist at Kenyatta University in Nairobi, described the phenomenon as worrisome.   “The upbringing of kids these days isn’t like the way we were brought up, because parents are neglecting some of the traditional roles which we’ve had in Kenya since time immemorial,” she said. “They’re not teaching kids our culture nor our languages.”

She said that many young parents do not know their languages themselves, so they cannot teach them to their own children.  They feel it is better to teach them Swahili and English than their own mother tongue, which is why they grow up not knowing these languages.  “Sooner or later we have these languages disappearing because of a lack of teachers,” warned Momanyi. “They will disappear and of course, our culture will also disappear because languages are the vehicle in which languages are passed on from generation to generation.”

Waithaka, who is a young musician, says that in big cities, schools punish students for speaking in vernacular or ethnic languages.  “We’ve been urged to speak mostly English. You can speak Swahili twice a week,” he explained. “This has been [policy] in Kenya for a long time to improve English speaking and comprehension of students at the cost of languages like Kikuyu, Luo, and Kamba.”

Parents to blame?

Many also worry that the government is indifferent to documenting and doing research to keep the local languages alive.  

Kimani Njogu, a university teacher of Swahili and African languages, said parents have to take most of the blame for not passing down these languages to their children. She also faults the government for its indifference.   “It’s important that we try and learn our mother tongues because they connect us with our history and our identity and give us a sense of belonging,” she said.   The government has also failed to preserve the languages, says Njogu.

Martin Njoroge, a linguist at the US International University in Nairobi, said the Sheng has evolved and is being used as a first language by some speakers. He said it is no longer slang.   “A language must have culture, history, geography, and solidification of its grammar and vocabulary, so in my view, Sheng is on the path to becoming a language,” he explained.   “I do not think that Sheng will go away, it will continue adjusting itself and very soon we will have first language speakers of Sheng.”  He said Sheng has a future now, as other communal languages are on their way to extinction.

The Yaakunte language of the Yaaku tribe, once indigenous to Ethiopia and Kenya, has been listed among six local languages (Sogoo, Lorkoti, Kinare, Kore, and Elmolo) which have gone extinct, according to Jennifer Koinante, executive director of the Yiaku Laikipiak Trust, a local advocacy group .

The Yaaku tribe, former hunter-gatherers and beekeepers who once numbered over 5,000, have been assimilated into the Maasai tribe.  The Yaaku over time gave up their language in favor of the Maa language of the Maasai.  Today, only seven people speak Yaakunte, all of them over 70 years old.

I find this very sad indeed.  About ten years ago when I was in Kisumu for a month, I met a charming African family of mother and three daughters, all very well educated .... private schools for the girls .... and together as a family they spoke English.   But the mothers 'mother' tongue was/had been Dholuo, and her greater family all spoke Luo in their homes.   Tragically, the mother felt that her children should be 'modern' and forget their 'primitive' heritage.   How sad.

However, the girls spoke fluent English and French, adequate Kiswahili .... and absolutely NO Dholuo.  I spoke more Dholuo than they did !!  This meant they couldn't speak to their own grandparents, who knew no English and so rarely saw the grandchildren .... probably even as little as 25 years ago they would have visited and spent time together, and learned from their grandparents the traditions and stories of their heritage ... and when the grandparents die, that cultural history, their heritage, will be gone.