Ndesandjo said he wrote the novel, "Nairobi to Shenzhen," to call attention to domestic violence. "My father beat my mother and my father beat me, and you don't do that," Ndesandjo told The Associated Press in an interview. Ndesandjo's mother, Ruth Nidesand, was the third wife of Barack Obama Sr. "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," he said of the beatings. Ndesandjo's mother was an American Jew who eventually divorced his Kenyan father and returned to the United States where she married a man whose surname Mark Ndesandjo took.
Barack Obama Sr. separated from Stanley Ann Dunham, the president's mother, two years after their son was born in Hawaii. The senior Obama returned to his native Kenya where he had at least six other children, of whom Ndesandjo was one. Ndesandjo, who is married to a Chinese woman, now lives in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. Until now, he has refused all media requests, although he did attend Obama's inauguration as a family guest. He has declined to discuss the relationship he has with the president, but he did tell AP he plans to meet his brother in Beijing when Obama visits China later this month. "My plan is to introduce my wife to him. She is his biggest fan," he told AP.
