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 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 a Jewish American mother who divorced his Kenyan father.
The novel goes on sale today by the self-publishing company Aventine Press.
For the past seven years, Ndesandjo has been living in the booming southern Chinese city of Shenzhen.
Ndesandjo, who attended Obama’s inauguration as a family guest, said he plans to meet his brother in Beijing when the president visits China from Nov. 15-18.
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.
Shortly after divorcing the president’s mother, Obama Sr. met Nidesand while studying as a graduate student at Harvard.
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.
Ndesandjo, a US citizen, spent most of his childhood in Kenya before moving to America to go to college and work in telecommunications.
Ndesandjo moved to China after 9/11, when his job was eliminated amid the recession.