Subscribe
Jobs
Cars
Real Estate
Apartments
Classifieds
Shopping
GUANGZHOU, China – President Obama’s half brother has broken his media silence to discuss his new novel – the semiautobiographical story of an abusive parent patterned on their late father, the mostly absent figure Obama wrote about in his own memoir.
Mark Ndesandjo told The Associated Press that he wrote “Nairobi to Shenzhen” in part to raise awareness of domestic violence.
“My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don’t do that,” said Ndesandjo, whose mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.’s third wife. “It’s something which I think affected me for a long time, and it’s something that I’ve just recently come to terms with.”
Like his novel’s main character, Ndesandjo had an American mother who is Jewish and who divorced his Kenyan father. The novel, which went on sale Wednesday by the self-publishing company Aventine Press, is one of several books in the works by relatives of the president.
President Obama’s parents separated two years after he was born in Hawaii in 1961.
The senior Obama, a Kenyan exchange student, divorced the president’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, in 1964 and had at least six other children in his native Kenya.
For the past seven years, Ndesandjo has been living in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and has declined all interview requests.
Ndesandjo, who attended Obama’s inauguration as a family guest, declined to discuss his earliest memories of the president or describe their relationship. But he said he plans to meet his brother in Beijing when the president makes his first visit to China this month.
Ndesandjo, an American citizen, moved to China after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when his job was cut in the rocky U.S. economy. He taught English, immersed himself in the study of Chinese culture and volunteered as a piano teacher at an orphanage.
He said he earns a living as a consultant in strategic marketing, though he would not elaborate on his business.
Closely patterned on Ndesandjo’s own life, the novel depicts David, an American who leaves the U.S. corporate world after 9/11 to create a new life in China. He falls in love with a Chinese dance instructor and develops a bond with an orphan who is a gifted pianist battling a serious illness.
David also writes letters to his American mother asking for details about her failed marriage to his late abusive Kenyan father.
On Wednesday, Ndesandjo said his brother’s election victory, among other recent events, helped “peel away the hardness” that he developed emotionally during his difficult childhood.
“I became proud of being an Obama,” he said.
Another of the president’s half brothers, George Obama, 27, of Huruma, Kenya, has penned a memoir that will be published by Simon and Schuster in January.
