“DREAMS OF MY VIOLENT DRUNKARD FATHER”
Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barack Obama’s half brother, Mark
As the US President arrives in China, Barack Obama’s half brother reveals that when he was a child their father was a violent drunk
Telegraph & News Sources
On the eve of his older sibling’s first-ever visit to China, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo has emerged from the shadows to reveal the disturbing truth about the late Barack Obama Sr, his and President Obama’s father.
Last week, Mr Ndesandjo published an autobiographical novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Tale of Love In The East. It paints a shocking picture of his abusive and alcoholic father, one that is at odds with the man portrayed in Dreams From My Father, President Obama’s best-selling 1995 memoir.
“I can remember my father hitting my mother and me. They’re memories I don’t like to dwell on because it’s very painful for me,” said Mr Ndesandjo, who has lived in China for seven years.
“I had a very difficult early childhood and there were things that happened to me that really hardened me.”
In his book, Mr Ndesandjo describes a father who was a heavy drinker and who began to abuse his wife, verbally and physically, soon after they were married. Their son witnesses his mother running, screaming, into the night to escape being beaten.
“There were some thumps as of someone falling,” reads one passage. “His father’s angry voice raised itself… He didn’t remember what they were fighting about, but his stomach felt sick and empty.
“His mother was being attacked and he couldn’t protect her. ‘You bastard!’ he remembered her screaming out. And that was just one night. There were many more.”
The novel gives a new insight into President Obama’s dysfunctional family. His father was married four times and had eight children. The 43-year-old Mr Ndesandjo was born in Kenya to Mr Obama Sr’s third wife Ruth Nidesand, a Jewish-American whose parents were originally from Lithuania. They met in Boston, where Mr Obama Sr had gone to study at Harvard after divorcing his second wife, Barack Obama’s mother. The future President was just two years old when his father left him, and they would meet again only once, in 1971.
That lack of contact may explain the very different views the brothers have of their father, who became a government economist but died in a car crash while driving drunk in 1982.
President Obama’s image of his father came from stories told by his relatives. In Dreams From My Father, the young Barack describes crying over his father’s grave because he had ended up back in Kenya and “could not outlive a mocking fate”.
Present throughout his memoir is a tone of regret that is in sharp contrast to Mr Ndesandjo’s pointed portrait, in Nairobi to Shenzhen, of a troubled and violent man.
Unlike President Obama, though, he stayed with his father until he was eight, when his mother left her husband to return to the United States. “The things I’ve said about him are based on what I knew, my own personal experiences. I’m not speaking for anybody else. But I lived with him,” said Mr Ndesandjo.
“My mother used to say he was a brilliant guy but a social failure. This was a guy who was a goat-herder, but he still achieved. He went to Harvard and had a very respected position in Kenyan society. But then it sort of crumbled away.”
His mother has since returned to Kenya, where she runs a kindergarten in Nairobi, but raised Mr Ndesandjo in Boston, where he took his stepfather’s surname. “It was a huge culture shock for me to go to America. It was very, very difficult because I had no support structure. The only thing I had to pull me through was my mother,” he said.
Nairobi to Shenzhen is dedicated to her, as well as to his younger brother David, who died in a motorcycle accident.
Mr Ndesandjo has only met his famous sibling on a few occasions, the most recent being at his inauguration as President in January. With his shaven head, red bandana and a gold stud in his left ear, his style is very different from President Obama’s. But they share the same slim build, as well as a vague facial resemblance. Mr Ndesandjo was also as elusive as any politician, refusing to be drawn on whether he has discussed his father with his brother, or anything concerned with US-China relations, when he met The Sunday Telegraph in a Guangzhou hotel.
He denied that the release of his novel, which he is self-publishing via a small “vanity press” in California, had been timed to coincide with his brother’s four-day visit to Beijing and Shanghai, which starts today.
