Obama's Brother - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 11-04-2009, 01:14 AM

Obama's half brother recalls their abusive father
By William Foreman, Associated Press Writer
1 hr 17 mins ago

GUANGZHOU, China – President Barack Obama's half brother has broken his media silence to discuss his new novel — the semi-autobiographical story of an abusive parent patterned on their late father, the mostly absent figure Obama wrote about in his own memoir.

In his first interview, 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 goes 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 refused all interview requests until now.

Ndesandjo, who said he attended Obama's inauguration as a family guest, declined to discuss his earliest memories of the president or describe their relationship over the years. However, he said he plans to meet his brother in Beijing when the president makes his first visit to China on Nov. 15-18.

"My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She is his biggest fan," he said.

Shortly after divorcing the president's mother, Obama Sr. met Nidesand while studying as a graduate student at Harvard University. Nidesand returned with Obama Sr. to his native Kenya in 1965, where Mark and his brother David were born and grew up. David later died in a motorcycle accident.

In Kenya, Obama Sr. also had four children with his first wife, Kezia, some of them while he was still married to Nidesand. Nidesand and Obama Sr. eventually divorced amid allegations of domestic abuse. Nidesand returned to the United States and later married a man whose surname Mark Ndesandjo took.

Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident in 1982 at age 46.

President Obama saw his father only once after his parents' divorce, when he was 10 years old. In a best-selling memoir, "Dreams from My Father," Obama wrote about his fatherless upbringing and search for identity.

In it, Obama described a visit to Kenya to meet his half siblings and learn more about his father. While painting his father as abusive, he called Obama Sr. a gifted but erratic alcoholic who never lived up to his intellectual promise or his family responsibilities.

Obama, in his book, also quotes Ndesandjo criticizing their father, saying, "I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife and children. That was enough."

Ndesandjo, who is an American citizen, spent most of his childhood in Kenya before moving to the U.S. to go to college and work in telecommunications and marketing. He has a bachelor's degree from Brown University in physics and a master's degree in the same subject from Stanford University. He also earned an MBA from Emory University in Atlanta, he said.

"I see myself in many ways as a person who has many places, has feet in many places," he said.

Intensely private, Ndesandjo declined to answer several questions about himself. He even refused to give his age, saying only that "I'm younger than Barack."

With a trim, athletic physique, he has a strong resemblance to his taller brother in Washington. His left ear is pierced, and he wore a black crew neck shirt under a dark jacket to the interview last week.

Ndesandjo 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 now speaks Mandarin and said he earns a living as a consultant in strategic marketing, though he would not elaborate on his business.

Ndesandjo said the White House was aware of the book project. A White House spokesman declined to comment on Ndesandjo's interview or to discuss President Obama's relationship with his half brother.

The author said 15 percent of the book's proceeds would be donated to charities for children.

Closely patterned on Ndesandjo's own life, the novel depicts David, an American who leaves the U.S. corporate world after the 9/11 attacks 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.

In the book, David also writes letters to his American mother asking for details about her failed marriage to his late abusive Kenyan father.

In one passage, Ndesandjo writes, "David easily remembered the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none."

Ndesandjo said such passages were drawn from his own experience.

"I remember situations when I was growing up, and there would be a light coming from our living room, and I could hear thuds," he said in the interview, tears welling in his eyes. "I could hear thuds and screams, and my father's voice and my mother shouting. I remember one night when she ran out into the street and she didn't know where to go."

Ndesandjo said his mother often called Obama Sr. "a brilliant man but a social failure."

The novel never mentions other wives David's father might have had. Nor does it include a half brother who would become the first black U.S. president.

On Wednesday, a week after speaking to the AP, Ndesandjo said at a book-launching news conference that 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.

Since the election, he said the extra attention has changed his life, but he has coped by focusing on things that are important to him: music, writing, calligraphy and teaching piano to disadvantaged children.

"The simple things sort of help pull you through," he said.

Ndesandjo told the AP he didn't want to touch on any political themes in the book. "I think my brother's team is doing an extraordinary job and I really don't want to cause him additional heartburn," he said.

Besides the inauguration, he said he last visited his brother in Austin, Texas, before a debate last year with then-Democratic rival Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"He came up to me, and we hugged. I gave him a gift, a gift of calligraphy," Ndesandjo told the AP. "I was just thinking of how happy I was and how proud and how much I loved him."

"It was a very powerful experience."

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 2010.

Other Obama relatives working on books include a half sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, daughter of Obama's mother and her second husband, Lolo Soetoro; and Craig Robinson, first lady Michelle Obama's brother.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/as_china_...JhbWFzaGFsZmJy

Jolie Rouge · 11-17-2009, 11:57 AM

Obama's Half Brother Mark Ndesandjo Speaks Up in China
By Ling Woo Liu / Guangzhou
28 mins ago

On the streets of Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo is turning heads. Since holding a press conference for his semiautobiographical novel Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East on Nov. 4, Ndesandjo, the half brother of U.S. President Barack Obama, has appeared on television in Hong Kong, and his picture has been splashed on the front pages of the China Daily, the South China Morning Post and other regional newspapers.

Ndesandjo had shunned the limelight until now. He is one of two children born to Barack Obama Sr. and his third wife, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom Obama Sr. met while the two were students at Harvard. Tall and slim like the President, Ndesandjo had avoided any association with the Obama name. For most of his life, he used only his stepfather's Tanzanian surname Ndesandjo, but he's now added Okoth, a word from the language of his father's Kenyan tribe, the Luo, as well as his original surname, Obama.

His novel, written in diary form, is based on his own experiences growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father and moving to China where he fell in love with a Chinese woman and began working with orphans. President Obama's name is mentioned just once, when Ndesandjo thanks several people, including "Barack," in the foreword. With this book, Ndesandjo says he's stepping into the public eye in order to raise awareness of domestic violence, promote volunteerism and share his tale of starting a new life in a new land. "I am an Obama, and a large part of my life was a repudiation of that," Ndesandjo tells TIME. "To a certain extent, my brother ... opened my eyes to things that I had left behind for a long time." (Ndesandjo is still reticent about detailing his personal life beyond the fictionalized account, saying he may save that for a second book, a true autobiography.)

Ndesandjo's life was hardly ordinary even before the world discovered his connection to the President of the United States. Educated in international schools in Nairobi, Ndesandjo, an American citizen, moved to the U.S. after high school, where he earned physics degrees from Stanford and Brown as well as an executive M.B.A. from Emory University. Soon after 9/11, he was laid off from his marketing job at telecommunications-equipment maker Nortel Networks in Atlanta. He decided to reinvent himself by moving to China, a country he had visited with classmates while at Emory. Since 2002, he has taught English and worked as a business consultant in Shenzhen, a 14 million–strong metropolis in southern China, just across the border from Hong Kong.

His self-published book was released just days before his brother's visit to China. Ndesandjo says he plans to introduce his wife, a native of Henan province whom he married last year, to his brother before he leaves China on Wednesday. During the course of TIME's interview in Guangzhou, Ndesandjo, who speaks fluent Mandarin and practices Chinese calligraphy, was overwhelmingly positive about his life in China, the Chinese people and culture. "I'm so happy my brother is coming to China because I've experienced the warmth and the graciousness of the Chinese people," he says. "If we can continue seeing the mutual positive points in these two great cultures, I think it'll be good for the world in general."

The two brothers have met a handful of times in their lives, the last of which was during Obama's inauguration in Washington. In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama describes his first encounter with his brother, an ambitious student who had severed ties with his father's side of the family as well as his African roots. "I don't feel much of an attachment [to Kenya]. Just another poor African country," Ndesandjo says in Dreams. He goes on to say, "You think that somehow I'm cut off from my roots ... Well, you're right."

One of Obama Sr.'s eight children with four women, Ndesandjo was raised by both birth parents until their divorce in the early 1970s. He has refused to tell reporters his age, but he is likely to be in his early 40s. Ndesandjo says his father was brilliant, but that alcoholism drove him to beat his wife and children. "The relationship I had with my father was a difficult one," he says, fighting back tears. "I didn't have positive memories of my dad because of domestic violence."

Ndesandjo says his mother, who runs a kindergarten in Nairobi, inspired him to work with children. A trained pianist, he has given piano lessons to Chinese orphans and performed at an event in January that raised $37,000 to alleviate poverty in China. Harley Seyedin, president of the American Chamber of Commerce in South China, the organization that sponsored the charity event, has been a close friend of Ndesandjo's for the past six years, but only learned of his friend's relationship with the President last year when reading news reports. "He's a very private person and he wanted to continue to live his modest lifestyle," says Seyedin. "But his primary message is raising awareness of domestic violence and to get the message out, you have to go public." To underline this message, Ndesandjo has arranged for 15% of the proceeds from book sales to be used to help orphans in China.

As a Kenyan-American in China, Ndesandjo is part of a growing community of Africans migrating to cities like Guangzhou to do business. Ethnic strife in China has made headlines in recent months after 200 Han and Uighur Chinese were killed in July, in the worst ethnic violence in decades. That same month, a Nigerian man was critically injured trying to escape one of many visa checks in Guangzhou's sizeable African neighborhood. Also this year, a half–African American, half-Chinese contestant on a Chinese reality-TV show and a half–South African, half-Chinese athlete on China's national volleyball team became the subject of a flurry of racist comments in China's blogosphere. But Ndesandjo is optimistic about ethnic-minority life in China, saying, "If you make an attempt to understand where these attitudes come from, it can really help."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/2009111...08599193969500

See Barack Obama's family tree. http://www.time.com/time/photogaller...834628,00.html

Read "The Five Faces of Barack Obama." http://www.time.com/time/politics/ar...834623,00.html

See the story of Barack Obama's mother. http://www.time.com/time/nation/arti...729524,00.html

Jolie Rouge · 11-18-2009, 05:46 PM

Obama says he met with half brother while in China
By Tini Tran, Associated Press Writer
Wed Nov 18, 10:24 am ET

BEIJING – President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he met briefly with a half brother who lives in China and who recently wrote a semi-autobiographical novel about the abusive Kenyan father they share.

Obama, who spent three days in China during his first official tour of Asia, acknowledged the meeting in an interview with CNN. He offered no details. An aide said later that the meeting took place Monday night after Obama arrived in Beijing, the Chinese capital.

The White House had declined to say whether the president and Mark Ndesandjo would meet. And no White House official mentioned the visit until Obama did when asked about it.

"I don't know him well. I met him for the first time a couple of years ago," Obama told CNN. "He stopped by with his wife for about five minutes during the trip."

Describing the meeting as "overwhelming" and "intense," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview Wednesday that he had long anticipated the chance to welcome his famous brother to China.

"I think he came directly off the plane, changed some clothes and then came down and saw us," Ndesandjo said. "And he just gave me a big hug. And it was so intense. I'm still over the moon on it. I am over the moon. And my wife. She is his biggest fan and I think she is still recovering."

In the CNN interview, Obama said he hadn't read his brother's book, "Nairobi to Shenzhen," which features a protagonist who is the son of a Jewish mother and an abusive father from Kenya.

Ndesandjo has revealed in previous interviews that his father, Barack Obama Sr., beat him and his mother. The president also wrote about his father, who abandoned him as a child, in his best-selling memoir.

"It's no secret that my father was a troubled person," Obama said. "Anybody who has read my first book, 'Dreams from My Father,' knows that, you know, he had an alcoholism problem, that he didn't treat his families very well. Obviously it's a sad part of my history and my background but it's not something I spend a lot of time brooding over."

Ndesandjo said he bought tickets months ago to fly from the southern boomtown of Shenzhen, where he has lived since 2002, to Beijing, in hopes of reconnecting with his brother. The two last met in January when Ndesandjo attended Obama's inauguration as a family guest.

The three chatted on Monday, with Obama being introduced to Ndesandjo's wife, a native of Henan, China, whom he married a year ago, he said. He gave few details of what they discussed.

"All I can say is, we talked about family, and it was very powerful because when he came in through that door, and I saw him and I hugged him, and he hugged me and hugged my wife. It was like we were continuing a conversation that had started many years ago," he said.

The two men did not grow up together. Ndesandjo's mother, Ruth Nidesand, was Barack Obama Sr.'s third wife. Before arriving in Beijing on Monday, Obama had been in a townhall-style meeting with students in Shanghai, and joked that a family gathering at his house "looks like the United Nations."

President Obama's father had been a Kenyan exchange student who met his mother, Kansas native Stanley Ann Dunham, when they were in school in Hawaii. The two separated two years after he was born.

The senior Obama married Ndesandjo's mother after divorcing the president's mother. They returned to Kenya to live, where Mark and his brother, David, were born and raised.

Obama Sr. died in an automobile accident in 1982 at age 46.

Ndesandjo lives near Hong Kong and earns a living as a marketing consultant. For most of that time, he has maintained a low profile, with few people knowing of his connection to the U.S. president.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091118/..._obama_brother