Michael Sheridan Shenzhen, China
He has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid public attention and his family links remain unknown to most of his acquaintances in Shenzhen, a border boomtown in southern China where he has lived since 2002.
Mark Ndesandjo is the son of Barack Obama’s late father and his third wife, an American woman named Ruth Nidesand who runs the up-market Maduri kindergarten in Nairobi.
Obama, however, refers to him simply as “my brother” and says he was the only uncontested heir after their father, a Kenyan, died in a car crash in 1982.
But the two men held sharply diverging views on their African heritage and while Obama chose to live in the glare of publicity, his half-brother submerged himself in the crowds of the most cosmopolitan city in China.
Friends say he has a long-term Chinese girlfriend in her 20s from Henan, a poor landlocked province that sends millions of migrants to the coastal cities.
He lives in Nanshan, a brash new district of high-rises and streets teeming after dark with young migrants eating spicy street food and cramming into bars, karaoke joints and massage parlours.
“He is big, strong and full of energy, speaks good Chinese and is a really easygoing guy,” said a Chinese friend, “He always wears a hat over his shaven head. I believe he has several consultancy jobs.”
Chinese officials said there are unanswered questions about his internet-based company, Worldnexus Ltd. It has provided corporate communications and website design to Chinese firms seeking customers in English-speaking markets, of which the United States is the biggest.
Worldnexus is not registered to conduct business in Shenzhen and officials at the city’s commercial administration bureau said this raised potential issues of taxation and compliance with the law by its customers.
The company’s Chinese-language website promises “increased communication efficiency” to clients and lists Shenzhen exporters of electronics and machine parts among its contracts.
The website lists an office address in the west of the city but despite a search of the area and checks with local police, no such building could be located.
Nor is Worldnexus Ltd legally registered in Hong Kong, where many businesses choose to incorporate for their China trade, according to an official data check.
Contacted by The Sunday Times last week, Ndesandjo said: “Thanks for your interest. However I am not giving interviews at this time.”
He did not respond to four subsequent requests for comment.
However Ndesandjo told a Chinese businessman last week that Worldnexus was not trading at the moment, saying that he hoped to “re-start the business next year” and adding that the website was “out of date.”
Any family connection between the Democratic presidential contender and the flood of Chinese imports that are blamed by many Americans for destroying American jobs could be politically embarrassing.
Obama has staked out a populist position on trade with China in the US election campaign, calling in December 2007 for a ban on all toys from Chinese factories until safety inspections were put in place.
But although the kinship between the two men is bound to cause a sensation in China – as in their father’s native Kenya, no distinction is drawn between full and half brothers – they do not appear to be close.
Ndesandjo, who had an elite education in the United States, collecting a degree from Brown University, a masters in physics from Stanford and an MBA from Emory, did not share Obama’s emotional view of his roots.
Obama painted a disappointed picture of his half-brother in his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, in which he celebrated his own return to Kenya and rediscovery of his African inheritance.
At a rather tense lunch, Obama quoted “Mark” – his family name is never given away in the book – as saying Kenya was “just another poor African country” to which he felt little attachment.
Mark added: “there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.”
According to Obama’s account, Mark looked him in the eye and said: “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing. Well, you’re right.”
“At a certain point I made the 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 and children. That’s enough.”
Barack Obama senior fathered eight children by four different women.
Obama wrote that Mark didn’t want to ask himself a lot of questions about the meaning of racial identity, dismissing the idea with the words: “life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.”
Asked last week whether he was quoted accurately in the book, Ndesandjo did not respond.
Obama wrote that on parting, “we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.”
Two decades after that encounter, the extended and complex Obama family is bound to come under further scrutiny as the US election enters its final months after the Democratic and Republican party conventions.
“That not enough has been written about his family is strange,” wrote columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times last March, “If nominated, Obama’s family baggage will be pored over.”
Lee Cary
In the eighth year of the third millennium, near the time the earth’s Great Cooling began, a London town crier called Gerard the Baker heralded the coming of the Child who was the Anointed One. The London Baker’s news fell upon many among the people with shock and awe as it offered a gift uncommon to the silly season — laughter.
Russ Vaughn
Best appreciated when humming the tune of the popular Civil War song, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again,” or the Irish folk classic, “Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye.”Also, with sincere apologies to my Hibernian forbears whose folk lyrics and music I keep misusing for political purposes. Somehow, however, I think their Irish eyes are smiling.
Rick Moran
One must be careful when criticizing the messiah, for obvious reasons:
I know it is not politically correct to say that Obama “creeps me out.” That’s because immediately after uttering such blasphemy, our friends on the left would put me on the couch and matter of factly inform me that I am suffering from “The White American Disease” and recommend a torturous rehabilitation that would include watching 6 hours a day of “Blaxploitation” films and continuous viewings of Roots in order to inculcate the proper amount of white guilt and outrage directed against white males into my racist psyche.
But really, some of the stuff this guy pulls is really too much. Here’s just a sample:
9. It creeps me out that there are about twice as many women at Obama rallies as there are men. Now I am not of the Melvin Udall School of anti-feminist thought (when asked how he writes women so well, Udall responds “I think of a man, and I take away reason and accountability”). But what is one to think when watching the reaction of females as Obama is speaking? I’m sorry, but it is hard to imagine a man covering their mouth, chest heaving, barely able to contain himself and then ooooohing and aaaaaahhing when the messiah says something particularly vapid and innocuous.Elvis, I can understand. But a politician?8. It creeps me out that the press seems hypnotized by this guy. Grown men and women blubbering like babes when talking about how exciting he is, how mesmerizing he is when he speaks.
It’s as if “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” has come to life and the pods have been placed in every newsroom in America. It isn’t just Crissy Mathews and MSNBC. It’s news anchors at CNN, reporters for Time and Newsweek, editorial writers at WaPo and the New York Times. Big media is in the tank for this guy in a big way. They have thrown off all semblance of fairness (never mind objectivity) and just don’t care that people know they are in Obama’s corner. They can’t be shamed into changing. They evidently won’t be deflected from doing their best to elect Obama.
This kind of thing causes the hairs on the back of my neck to prick up – like walking through a graveyard at midnight. It is just plain creepy – no other word for it.[snip]
6. It creeps me out that with the exception of most conservatives, Obama’s radical associations and radical past – including his being on a first name basis with an unreconstructed terrorist – doesn’t seem to bother many people. What am I missing here? When Obama makes an actual political alliance with a radical Maoist organization like The New Party, going so far as to attending their meetings and recruiting their members to work on his state senate campaign, why is there no call for the candidate to explain himself? Nor has there been any effort – save a couple of scattered stories in the National Review and elsewhere that detail Obama’s association with the radical group ACORN.It’s as if the entire “Obama movement,” made up mostly of good, mainstream Democrats, is so in thrall to the candidate that they can’t see the warning signs of this fellow’s true radicalism. They dismiss his past by simply pointing to the here and now and saying “See? He really is a moderate kind of guy after all.” We don’t know that because no one has ever – ever – asked him to explain why he sought the endorsement of a radical communist group when running for the state senate and why he associated himself with the radical group ACORN.Beyond creepy. Truly scary…
By David Bueche
Barack Obama has earned his place in history as the first postmodern candidate for president. He belongs to the deconstructionist school; his “texts” have no fixed meaning. He is able to take varying positions and claim consistency.
“I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse.”
“We cannot impose a military solution on what has effectively become a civil war. And until we acknowledge that reality, uh, we can send 15,000 more troops; 20,000 more troops; 30,000 more troops. Uh, I don’t know any, uh, expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to, uh, privately that believes that that is gonna make a substantial difference on the situation on the ground.”
“And what I know is that what our troops deserve is not just rhetoric, they deserve a new plan. Governor Romney and Senator McCain clearly believe that the course that we’re on in Iraq is working, I do not.”
“Here’s what we know. The surge has not worked. And they said today, ‘Well, even in September, we’re going to need more time.’ So we’re going to kick this can all the way down to the next president, under the president’s plan.”
“After putting an additional 30,000 troops in, far longer & more troops than the president had initially said, we have gone from a horrendous situation of violence in Iraq to the same intolerable levels of violence that we had back in June of 2006. So, essentially, after all this we’re back where we were 15 months ago. And what has not happened is any movement with respect to the sort of political accommodations among the various factions, the Shia, the Sunni, and Kurds that were the rationale for surge and that ultimately is going to be what stabilizes Iraq. So, I think it is fair to say that the president has simply tried to gain another six months to continue on the same course that he’s been on for several years now. It is a course that will not succeed.”
“Finally, in 2006-2007, we started to see that, even after an election, George Bush continued to want to pursue a course that didn’t withdraw troops from Iraq but actually doubled them and initiated a surge and at that stage I said very clearly, not only have we not seen improvements, but we’re actually worsening, potentially, a situation there.”
“I had no doubt, and I said when I opposed the surge, that given how wonderfully our troops perform, if we place 30,000 more troops in there, then we would see an improvement in the security situation and we would see a reduction in the violence.”
“These kinds of hypotheticals are very difficult,” he said. “Hindsight is 20/20. But I think that what I am absolutely convinced of is, at that time, we had to change the political debate because the view of the Bush administration at that time was one that I just disagreed with, and one that I continue to disagree with — is to look narrowly at Iraq and not focus on these broader issues.”
