Obama’s brother recalls dad in book
Beatings by father led to changing last name
GUANGZHOU, China — The mixed-race son of a brilliant but troubled Kenyan academic and a white American woman writes an emotionally moving book about his search for identity and self.
This is not the familiar story of President Obama. It is the tale of his little-known, publicity-shy younger brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years and has just produced his autobiographical novel, “From Nairobi to Shenzhen.”
Speaking out for the first time publicly, after largely avoiding the media, Ndesandjo on Wednesday made only a few references to his famous brother, saying, “We are family. I love my family, and we are in touch.”
Ndesandjo was at his brother’s presidential inauguration in January. He said he plans to see Obama when the president makes an official visit to Beijing later this month.
He credits Obama’s election last year with allowing him to come to terms with his painful past and moving him to finish writing his book.
In the 255-page novel, self-published through Aventine Press, Ndesandjo’s character is called David. He makes no reference to his brother, Barack. But he depicts their Kenyan father as an abusive alcoholic who beats David and David’s Jewish American mother.
Barack Obama Sr. married Ndesandjo’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, while he was studying at Harvard, after divorcing President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The elder Obama and Nidesand lived together in Nairobi, Kenya, where Ndesandjo spent much of his childhood.
How much of the book is true? “It’s a work of fiction, but there’s a lot going on in there that parallels my life,” Ndesandjo said in a brief interview before a news conference called to launch the book he said was nearly a decade in the making.
While he allowed that some of the characters are composites, he said the violence at home echoed his own experience as a victim of, and witness to, domestic violence.
“My father beat me. He beat my mother. And you just don’t do that,” he said. “I shut those thoughts in the back of my mind for many years.”
“I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams and I would hear my mother’s pain,” he said. “I was a child. . . . I could not protect her.”
Ndesandjo said his memories of his father were so bitter that he stopped using the name Obama and adopted the last name of his stepfather, whom Ruth Nidesand married after divorcing Barack Obama Sr.
But last November, Ndesandjo said, he watched the televised scenes of joy in Grant Park in Chicago on the night that a man with that hated last name was elected president.
“There was this remarkable movement from fear towards hope,” Ndesandjo said. “I was so proud of my brother Barack.”
The election “peeled away some of that hardness,” he said. “I became proud of being an Obama.” He added Obama back to his name and found the drive to complete the book.
He said he wrote the book partly to raise awareness of domestic violence. He said 15 percent of any proceeds will go to assist orphans and other kids.
Ndesandjo bears a striking resemblance to Barack Obama — lean, with a similar face. This is what America’s 44th president would look like if he shaved his head, wore a bandanna, favored black T-shirts and sported an earring.
Ndesandjo, who is a U. S. citizen, has an academic pedigree as lofty as his half brother’s, with bachelor’s degrees in both physics and math from Brown University, a master’s degree in physics from Stanford and an MBA from Emory. He is also an accomplished pianist, does Chinese calligraphy and has just completed reading the Chinese epic “The Dream of Red Mansions” — in Mandarin Chinese.
After working in telecommunications and marketing in the United States and then losing his job, he relocated to China just after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In Shenzhen, the booming city bordering Hong Kong, he began teaching English, giving piano lessons, learning Chinese and dedicating himself to helping orphans and underprivileged children— much like David in his novel.
Ndesandjo was married in China. In his novel, David falls in love with a beautiful Chinese woman named Spring but must still confront the internal demons that linger from the violence he suffered at home.
Even in China, Obama’s ascent to the White House has brought unwelcome attention to the brother who has tried to maintain a low profile and lose himself working for children in Asia. “Since the election, I have been getting a few more phone calls, especially from reporters,” he said.
“I’ve tried to keep focused on the important things in my life,” he said. “The music, the calligraphy, the writing of course and helping the kids learn piano.”
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