Mark Obama Ndesandjo: Exorcising the ghosts of my father

When he wrote his first novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen, Mark Obama Ndesandjo, President Barack Obama’s half- brother, knew it would hurt some family members.

It was fiction alright, but the plot had parallels with his own life which was marked by the kind of domestic violence and tolerance that defies belief.

After reading the book his brother, Malik, sent him an email admonishing him: “This is not good. There are things best left unsaid.”

Clearly, Ndesandjo does not subscribe to this view. In his new autobiography, An Obama’s Journey: My Odyssey of Self-Discovery across Three Cultures, he lays it all bare.

It is a revelatory book and the brutality of his honesty is as startling as the skill of his telling is engaging.

INTENSE TALENT

Ndesandjo has the ability to make you not just conceptualise but to actually smell the whisky in the breath of his perpetually drunk father, Barack Obama Snr.

In fact, Chapter Three of the book is titled Johnnie Walker Black Label. He will make you hear the dull thud of his father’s blows as he pounds his mother Ruth and her shrill screams as she runs into the darkness to escape him, attracting the attention of neighbours – night after night.

“My mother did not scream like normal people or the way one hears actors doing it in the movies,” he writes. “Her scream was terrifying, like an animal’s, high-pitched and flat, repeated again and again. Every time I heard it, it tore into my heart like a lance. I was too afraid to go to the living room.”

And you will be appalled by the anecdote of his first sexual experience at the age of six or seven, a rape by another boy in the house garden which, at that tender age, he never understood as such. It is difficult to put this book down, all 374 pages of it.

SELF-DISCOVERY

An Obama’s Journey is the story of the search for self-discovery by the son of an intellectually brilliant man who was an unmitigated social disaster.

Obama Snr, through the eyes of his son Ndesandjo, comes across as the comprehensive encyclopaedia of how a father and husband should never be.

His is a searing evaluation of what constitutes success remarking, in the context of his Harvard-educated father, that doctorates and diplomas have little currency to children; what matters is what they witness at close hand, the forces that bind or rip apart families.

Because of a terrifying father who only offered drunkenness and violence, the mixed-race boy born in Kenya in 1965 grew up conflicted, confused and angry, hating the epithets that he was referred by – chotara, half-caste, white “one thousand times”.

He took refuge in the absolute love of his long suffering mother. She was his entire universe. For this reason, there doesn’t appear anything about her that he cannot understand, explain away or forgive. The book reads like a love ballad for her.

THE THIRD WIFE'S STORY
Ruth Ndesandjo, Obama Snr’s third wife, was born Ruth Beatrice Baker to a middle class Jewish family in Massachusetts, US, in 1936.

She was teaching elementary classes when Obama Snr, then a student at Harvard, happened in her life. An intense romance grew, almost overnight, it would seem.

Then Obama Snr returned home, but not before inviting her to follow him, promising to marry her. In short order, she followed him, utterly breaking the hearts of her parents, Ida and Joe Baker.

Ndesandjo says this is what she told him about that bitter separation: “When I decided to leave for Kenya to marry Obama, one of my friends told me that Ida literally started tearing her hair out.

She couldn’t stand the thought of a black man marrying her Ruthie. Before I left, Ida gathered our neighbours and brought them to our house.

They all tried to talk me out of going. For many years, she wouldn’t even talk to me. After I left, she had a nervous breakdown. My father took her out of the country on a three-month trip to help cure her – she was so depressed.”

LOVE WITH CAPITAL L
Ruth arrived in Nairobi, naturally expecting Obama Snr to receive her at the airport. But he was not there.

She chose not to see anything amiss in this and, as Ndesandjo notes, when people are in love, they excuse the defects of the people they love and find no need to seek answers or explanations.

Ruth, as quoted in Sally Jacob’s The Other Barrack, said she was in love with a capital L.

But what was to follow can only be seen to be believed. Ruth already knew that Obama Snr had two children from a current or previous marriage — it wasn’t clear if he had divorced Kezia, his first wife, whom he had married in 1956 — and he told her that he would need to take care of them.

She agreed. He also had another son in Hawaii but this was unknown to Ruth. He would only tell her this much later in Kenya.

VIOLENT DRUNK

The family lived in Rosslyn Estate in Nairobi and from the start, Ruth’s life alternated between loneliness and beatings from her husband, who had become a chronic violent drunk.

While he was in America, Obama Snr was almost a model character. But there was a reason for that; he was a minority there and, like other African students, was held to a certain standard of behaviour.

On return home, any such restriction vanished and he was now hostage to the cultural and peer pressures that challenged him to prove his so-called manhood.

It is difficult to figure out why Ruth endured so much physical and verbal abuse for seven long years before finally throwing in the towel.

There is a running theme of being madly in love and, of course, the acknowledgement that she had burnt her bridges with her parents. The love bit startles and shocks. Why does such a good person put up with such bestiality?

There was a time when she was saved from a knife he was holding to her neck by her step-son Malik, then known as Bobby.

The family moved to Woodley at some point and they were the talk of the neighbourhood with never ending screams rending the nights and alarmed neighbours sometimes forming small delegations to go and intervene.

HER TESTIMONY
Hear her own testimony: “I can remember running out into the night several times when he was after me to beat me, and screaming for help ... these memories are very painful for me to write about but I think I might as well once and for all.

“I can remember a neighbour coming out of his house trying to help me as I went screaming down the street, but I think I eventually stayed in a friend’s home and then begged Obama to let me come back because, of course, I couldn’t bear to be away from my baby. Ever!”

In Dreams from My Father, Obama Jr writes of a conversation he had with Ruth. They are discussing Mark who was then about to join Stanford University to study theoretical physics and him, who was joining Harvard to do law.

“Don’t be so modest, dear,” he quotes Ruth as saying. “The things Mark studies are so complicated only a handful of people really understand it at all.”

She parted Mark on the hand, then turned to me. “And Barry, I understand you are going to Harvard. Just like Obama (Snr).

You must have gotten some of his brains. Hopefully not the rest of him, though. You know Obama was quite crazy, don’t you? The drinking made it worse. Did you ever meet him? Obama, I mean?”

“Only once, when I was 10.”

“Well, you are lucky then. It probably explains why you are doing so well.”

ABANDONING PROBLEMS
This passage is quoted by Ndesandjo in the second appendix to the book with the comment that his mother denies ever making these comments.

This, in effect, accuses Obama Jr of making up a story. True or not, there isn’t the slightest doubt, given the life story of his father, that Obama Jr, the US President, is an immensely lucky man.

We now know that Obama Snr, abandoning problems at home as he always did rather than face them, left Ruth and went back to Honolulu to meet Ann Dunham, the future President’s mother, whom he had abandoned a decade earlier.

He was jobless and ravaged by drink at that time but his charm was intact. He wanted Ann and son Obama Jnr to come back with him to Kenya, never mind that Ruth was still his wife. Ann actually considered it.

In The Other Barrack, by Sally Jacobs, Susan Botkin Blake, Ann’s old school friend, is quoted as saying: “He had come back and wanted her to go to Africa with him, finally.

Of course, this is what she had wanted all those years he had been away. But now, she told people, she could not face leaving again.”

FILES DIVORCE
Suppose, just suppose, Ann had accepted the entreaties. She could have packed suitcases and her little Obama Jnr. And how would the brilliant boy’s life have turned out?

Nobody knows, of course, but he certainly would never have become President of the United States. Who knows, he might have become an MCA or MP. But President of Kenya? Not a snowball’s chance in hell.

But it is this journey to see Ann that gave Ruth her chance of escape. Taking advantage of his absence, she filed for divorce and got it. He was shocked to learn about it but still she stayed with him.

Obama Snr, however, was an incorrigible abuser and he plunged into his old ways.

It took another Obama Snr outing, mercifully brief, for her to quickly get a pick-up truck and cart away her few possessions and rent a house in Westlands.

Finally, she was free of him, although it would take the intervention of the police to stop him from stalking her.

RUTH REMARRIES

Ruth eventually met and married a well-known Voice of Kenya broadcasting personality, Simeon Ndesandjo, whose name Mark adopted.

Tentative at first, the marriage blossomed and Mark finally felt fatherly love. But the ghosts of his father stalked him and it took Ruth’s persistent pleas to him not to abandon his father’s side of the family.

It sounds incredible that a person so abused can still find it in herself not to have any bitterness towards her tormentor.

This, in the main, is what his story is about, the journey of overcoming decades of a psychological barrier to be able to use the Obama name once again.

In his introduction to An Obama’s Journey, Ndesandjo makes this statement: “This book ... is not even about brothers and fathers, sisters and mothers.

Nor is it about revenge and hate. It is primarily about a search for meaning, a memoir about family connections, self-discovery, and ultimate redemption.”

INCISIVE WRITING

After reading it, you would grant him the second part of that statement. But about it not being about brothers, fathers, sisters and mothers, nothing could be further from the truth.

It is hardly possible to lay your hands on a text that incisively writes about and analyses one’s immediate and extended family, warts and all, more than this one.

The reader is struck by Ndesandjo’s observant and critical eye and his ability not to miss even the smallest details.

After attending his brother’s inauguration in 2008, the US President promised to visit Ndesanjo in China where he works and lives.

The President kept his promise. They met at the St Regis Hotel in Beijing. This is how Ndesandjo reports the encounter. “When he walked through the door and saw me, he instinctively held out his hand.

Feeling momentarily insulted, I hugged him instead. Soundlessly, he hugged me back. I detected a faint smell of cigarette smoke and knew that, in spite of his and Michelle’s best efforts, today he had been playing truant.”

NO ESCAPE

No family member escapes this merciless scrutiny. And to be fair, he doesn’t spare himself either.

To cap all this, the first appendix at the end of the tome is an illustration of the Obama family genealogy, from the 1700s to the present.

The second appendix is a critique of President Obama’s book, Dreams from My Father, pin-pointing every inaccuracy that Ndesandjo thinks his brother has made. And they are a handful.

Is there a salutary lesson in this book? Yes. And that is that there is no hurt and no violation too big to be forgiven. But it takes more than an ordinary effort to do so.

An Obama’s Journey was launched in the US on September 15.

Ndesandjo will be in Kenya on October 18 to launch the book during the Classic Dinner Series by Sterling Quality at the Intercontinental Hotel.