Obama's half-brother Mark talks about his new autobiography

(19 Dec 2013) The US President Barack Obama's half brother has written an autobiography claiming that their late father was abusive.
Mark Obama Ndesanjo said he is trying to set the record straight on some points in the president's bestselling 1995 memoir "Dreams From My Father."
In that book, Obama seeks to learn more about their father, a mostly absent figure, after learning of his death in a car crash in 1982 at age 46.
Ndesanjo's book "Cultures: My Odyssey of Self-Discovery" comes four years after his novel, "Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East."
As in his first book, Ndesanjo wanted to raise awareness of domestic abuse by using his family's story, although he said in an interview with The Associated Press that not all the president's relatives have welcomed his decision to air private matters in public.
When asked how he would describe his relationship with Barack Obama , he said, "Right now it's cold and I think part of the reason is because...I think part of it is because of my writing. My writing, I think, has alienated some people in my family."
Ndesandjo was speaking ahead of a news conference to launch the book in Guangzhou on Thursday.
Like the president, Ndesandjo also has a white American mother, Ruth Baker Ndesandjo, a Jewish woman who was Barack Obama Senior's third wife.
In his new book, Ndesandjo recalls beatings meted out by his father to his mother and one incident in which his father held a knife to his mother's throat because she took out a restraining order against him.
His parents met when Obama Senior was a graduate student at Harvard University and moved in 1964 to Kenya, where Mark and his brother David were born.
Obama Senior had earlier divorced President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, after Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.
Mark Ndesandjo's mother later divorced the senior Obama and married another man, whose surname both mother and son also took.
The book recounts Ndesanjo's first encounter with Obama, who was visiting Kenya in 1988.
Ndesandjo said they did not hit it off.
"Barack thought I was too white and I thought he was too black," he said.
"He was an American searching for his African roots, I was a Kenyan, I'm an American but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots."
Brought up in Kenya, Ndesandjo moved to the US for college, earning a bachelor's degree in physics at Brown University, a master's in the same subject from Stanford University and an Masters in Business Administration at Emory University.
The 500-page book includes an appendix listing a number of alleged factual errors in Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams from my Father," such as quotes incorrectly attributed to Ndesanjo's mother.
"It's a correction. A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book and I can understand that because to me, the book for him was a tool for fashioning an identity. It was a tool and he was using it and he was using composites," Ndesandjo said.
Ndesanjo, 48, has lived for about a decade in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen, next door to Hong Kong.
He works as a consultant and is a volunteer music teacher at an orphanage.
Some of the book's profits will go to charities for children, including Ndesandjo's own foundation, which uses art to help disadvantaged kids.
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