The Other Barack Read Online Free

Kenya to attend college in the United States in the 1980s and resolved to have nothing more to do with the hated Obama name. 10 When he met his half-brother Barack for the first time on a visit home to Kenya, Mark told him, “At a certain point I made a decision not to think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.” 11 Determined that he would be nothing like the cold and loveless man who haunted his childhood, Mark had blocked all memory of him.
    By the time the presidential cavalcade came two decades later, Mark was a forty-three-year-old international marketing consultant living in Shenzhen, China, with a BA in physics from Brown University and master’s degrees from Stanford and Emory Universities. At least once during
the campaign he met with the half-brother he resembles markedly in both stature and expression. Obama describes his brother’s appearance as though he were “looking into a foggy mirror.” Like his siblings, Mark found himself propelled by his half-brother’s inspiring success to reexamine the family’s turbulent history and open doors he had long thought firmly closed behind him. He spent months reading the diaries that his mother kept during the seven years she was married to his father and began to ply her with questions he had never wanted to ask before. 12
    Years earlier Mark had begun work on a book that explored many of the same issues that Barack Obama wrestled with in Dreams from My Father . Mark was likewise struggling with questions about his own mixed-race identity, his relationship to his father, and his search for rootedness. Obama’s election in November of 2008 is what moved him to complete his manuscript, and at the end of 2009 he wrote an autobiographical novel called Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East under the name Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo. The world’s embrace of the Obama name had at last enabled him to take ownership of it as well.
    In his book the father figure is a menacing and dangerous presence. His son—David in the book—remembers him as “the hulking man whose breath reeked of cheap Pilsner beer who had often beaten his mother. He had long searched for good memories of his father but had found none.” 13 One night, the father turns violently on his wife while their six-year-old son cowers in the next bedroom listening in horror. “His mother’s voice was screaming as if terrified,” Mark wrote. “The child almost didn’t recognize it. And then there were some thumps as of someone falling. His father’s angry voice raised itself as if in a duet with the unrecognizable voice. . . . His mother was being attacked and he couldn’t protect her.” 14
    Nor did his conversations with his mother trigger particularly happy memories of his father. “I do not remember him ever smiling. Except when he drank,” Mark said in an interview.
    Yet, as with his older brother’s memoir, even Mark found a resolution of sorts through his writing. In revisiting his experiences, he began to reflect on his own father’s life and the hardships he too had endured. “I knew that my father had been through some traumatic experiences as a child and I began to realize that there must have been an emotional hardening in him
that was not his fault,” Mark explained. “When love is absent or you are physically abused as he was you develop a hard emotional skin. And that made me think differently about him.”
    Next in line is George Hussein Onyango, the youngest of the sibling tribe, now twenty-nine, who lives in the sprawling Nairobi slum of Huruma on the city’s east side. In the final months of his life Obama Sr. moved in with a young woman less than half his age, named Jael Atieno Onyango. George, their only child, was born six months before