Obama's Brother Speaks Out
ZHOU, China -- The mixed-race son of a brilliant but troubled Kenyan academic and a white American woman writes an emotionally wrenching book about his search for identity and self.
This is not the familiar story of President Obama. It is the tale of his publicity-shy younger half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years and has just produced a loosely autobiographical work of fiction titled "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East."
Barack Obama Sr. married Mark'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, the Kenyan capital, where Mark spent much of his childhood.
How much of the book is true?
While he allowed that some of the characters are composites, he said many scenes 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," Ndesandjo said later. "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, a man Ruth Nidesand married after divorcing Barack Obama Sr. But then, Mark Ndesandjo said, he watched the televised scenes of joy in Chicago's Grant Park the night a man with that hated last name was elected president of the United States.
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This is not the familiar story of President Obama. It is the tale of his publicity-shy younger half-brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who has lived in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years and has just produced a loosely autobiographical work of fiction titled "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East."Barack Obama Sr. married Mark'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, the Kenyan capital, where Mark spent much of his childhood.
How much of the book is true?
While he allowed that some of the characters are composites, he said many scenes 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," Ndesandjo said later. "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, a man Ruth Nidesand married after divorcing Barack Obama Sr. But then, Mark Ndesandjo said, he watched the televised scenes of joy in Chicago's Grant Park the night a man with that hated last name was elected president of the United States.
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