Another POTUS daddy issue? The disturbing truth about the late Barack Obama Sr.

Mark Ndesandjo, the once intensely private half-brother of President-elect Barack Obama talks to the Telegraph in China.

Remember the treatise from Maureen Dowd on the relationship of George W. Bush, to his father?

Recall the vigor in which the press seized the chalice from her dowdy hands and carped and analyzed about GWB and George the elder. Theories and speculation shuddered through the media and nary a leg tingled.

The daddy issue may be back.

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Our alcoholic father beat me, says Barack Obama's half brother, Mark

As President Barack Obama begins his China visit, his half brother who lives there reveals that when he was a child their father was a violent drunk

By David Eimer in Guangzhou Telegraph
Published: 5:17PM GMT 14 Nov 2009

The southern Chinese city of Shenzhen is a world away from Washington DC.

The booming border town and the staid American capital are both home to members of the Obama family. That, though, is where the similarities end, because while Barack Obama resides in the splendour of the White House and is perhaps the most recognisable person on the planet, his younger half-brother Mark lives anonymously in a rented two-bedroom flat in Shenzhen's suburbs.

Now, 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.

"I've been working on this book for a number of years. It just happens to be coming out now. I did have publishers who were interested in it, but they wanted me to write about my brother and I didn't want to do that," said Mr Ndesandjo, who is now writing his autobiography.

There is no doubt, though, that the timing is beneficial because of the huge interest in President Obama's debut trip to China, the first state visit by a US President since 1998. Climate change, trade and further co-operation to rein in North Korea's nuclear programme are expected to be top of the agenda when Mr Obama sits down with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao.

Both the Chinese and the Americans have stressed the importance of the US-China relationship in the run-up to the talks, but there is plenty of potential for disagreement. President Obama has said he will raise China's unwillingness to allow its currency, the yuan, to float freely, something which makes US exports more expensive. The Chinese would like President Obama to make a statement acknowledging their sovereignty over Tibet.

But Mr Ndesandjo is more concerned that his brother meets his Chinese wife. "My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She's his biggest fan," he said.

He married Liu Zuehua, from central Henan Province, last year. "She's the focus of my life, but I really want to keep that private," he said.

They live a modest existence in Nanshan, a district of Shenzhen close to the border with Hong Kong, in one of the high-rise apartment blocks that house the millions of Chinese who have flocked to the province in recent years, to work in the companies and factories that have made it a boom town.

Mr Ndesandjo is not obviously wealthy, though. "I took advantage of a promotion and got cable TV installed for a few days so we could watch the election night last November," he said.

With degrees in maths and physics, as well as an MBA, he spent 11 years working for telecommunications companies in the US. Made redundant after 9/11, he decided to move to China in 2002. "I didn't want to go back into the corporate world; I wanted to do something different. I liked the idea of the intellectual challenge of learning the language," said Mr Ndesandjo, who now speaks and writes fluent Mandarin.

Since being in Shenzhen he has been involved in an online communications company and was a partner in a chain of barbecue restaurants. Now, he spends his days practising Chinese calligraphy, writing and teaching piano at a local orphanage. A keen jazz and classical pianist, he occasionally gives concerts for charity and is donating 15 per cent of his novel's proceeds to a fund for disadvantaged children.

More than anything, living in China seems to have helped him come to terms with his traumatic childhood. He will be passing on what he has learned to President Obama when they meet. "I'd encourage my brother to understand that China is really about family," said Mr Ndesandjo. "Families here have a tremendous bond. That's why people in China work so hard and have the goals they do. You have to understand that if you want to understand China

."