Obama’s half brother says president’s success inspired his own book

This is not the familiar story of President Obama. It is the tale of his little-known, publicity-shy younger brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, who has lived in the Southern Chinese city of Shenzhen for seven years and has just produced his autobiographical novel, “From Nairobi to Shenzhen.’’

Speaking out for the first time publicly, after largely avoiding the media, Ndesandjo yesterday made only a few references to his famous brother, saying: “We are family. I love my family and we are in touch.’’ Ndesandjo was at his brother’s presidential inauguration in January, and he said he plans to see Obama when the president makes an official visit to Beijing later in November.

But he credits Obama’s election last year with allowing him to come to terms with his painful past.

In the 255-page novel, self-published through Aventine Press, Ndesandjo’s character is called David. He makes no reference to his brother, Barack, but he depicts their Kenyan father as an abusive alcoholic who beats David and David’s Jewish American mother.

Barack Obama Sr. married Ndesandjo’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, while he was studying at Harvard, after divorcing President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. The elder Obama and Nidesand lived together in Nairobi.

“It’s a work of fiction, but there’s a lot going on in there that parallels my life,’’ Ndesandjo said in a brief interview before a news conference called to launch the book. He said the book was nearly a decade in the making. While he allowed that some of the characters are composites, he said the violence at home echoed his own experience as a victim of, and witness to, domestic violence.

“My father beat me. He beat my mother. And you just don’t do that,’’ Ndesandjo said later. “I shut those thoughts in the back of my mind for many years.’’

“I remember times in my house when I would hear the screams and I would hear my mother’s pain,’’ he said. “I was a child. . . . I could not protect her.’’

Ndesandjo said his memories of his father were so bitter that he stopped using the name Obama and adopted the last name of his stepfather, a man Ruth Nidesand married after divorcing Barack Obama Sr. But then, Ndesandjo said, he watched the televised scenes of joy in Chicago on the night a man with that hated last name was elected president.

“There was this remarkable movement from fear towards hope,’’ Ndesandjo said. “I was so proud of my brother, Barack.’’

The election “peeled away some of that hardness,’’ he said. “I became proud of being an Obama.’’ He added Obama back to his name and found the drive to complete the book.