Half brother [in Red China] congratulates Obama

Obama’s half brother and six-year resident of Shenzhen, sent his congratulations to Obama yesterday immediately after the U.S. Democratic senator won the 2008 presidential election.

Mark Ndesandjo (2nd from left) teaches children to play the piano at
Shenzhen Social Welware Center. This picture was featured in the Shenzhen
Daily on March 11, 2004.

Ndesandjo was very happy about his half brother’s victory and sent him his best wishes, Ndesandjo’s best Chinese friend and business partner Sui Zhengjun told the Shenzhen Daily yesterday.

“We sent text messages to each other after the election, and he was very happy with the outcome,” Sui said. “He, like many Americans, has very high hopes about Obama’s concept of change and hopes Obama can really bring changes to America. He told me he was very satisfied as not only Obama’s half brother but also as an American.”

Ndesandjo “disappeared” from the public after media reported at the end of July that he was Obama’s half brother and was a businessman living in Shenzhen. Sui refused to say where Ndesandjo was at the moment, suggesting that the First Half Brother might go back to America to avoid the media.

Ndesandjo’s company, an Internet-based consulting company, Worldnexus Ltd., in Nanshan District is still under operation despite a July Sunday Times report that Ndesandjo said it was not trading and might restart next year.

Sui, the register of the company, confirmed that Ndesandjo, the company’s former senior partner, had left the company at the beginning of this year for personal reasons but would come back in 2009.

“The company is still under normal operations. It will not be affected by any person’s coming and going,” Sui said.

Ndesandjo’s mobile was switched off yesterday morning and turned on later after the election was finished. However, several calls by the Shenzhen Daily went unanswered.

After Ndesandjo’s identity was revealed, the wine producers of Shenyang Dragon Medical Co. Ltd., Liaoning Province, invited Ndesandjo to be their product spokesman. Ndesandjo turned down the offer, saying that he would think about it after the election.

Sui said Ndesandjo still had no intention to do so, adding that his friend was “not that kind of person and preferred a quiet life.”

Ndesandjo is the son of Obama’s late father and his third wife. He came to Shenzhen from Florida in 2002 and is now engaged to a Chinese woman from Henan Province.

The Shenzhen Daily first wrote about his life in a March 11, 2004 report. The story, titled “More than just donating,” described his charity activities for orphans at Shenzhen Social Welfare Center.

In 1964, Obama Senior married his third wife, an American-born teacher called Ruth, who met at Harvard while still legally married to both Kezia and Ann and who followed him to Africa. She now runs the up-market Maduri kindergarten in Nairobi.

Senior had two children with Ruth.

One of them is Obama’s half-brother, Mark Ndesandjo, who has been helping to promote cheap Chinese exports in a low-profile business career while the Democratic senator has been winning worldwide fame in his race for the White House.

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.

Obama refers to Mark as “my brother” and says he was the only uncontested heir after their father, a Kenyan, died in a car crash in 1982.

Mark’s internet-based company, Worldnexus Ltd., provides 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.

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 has described Mark as “a black man of my height and complexion with a bush Afro and horn-rimmed glasses” who was studying physics at Berkeley during Obama’s 1987 visit.

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 if 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 after the US election.

“That not enough has been written about his family is strange,” wrote columnist Roger Cohen in the New York Times last March.”

Of course Cohen and his fellow Obama sycophants could have corrected that at any time - - but they didn’t.

http://www.theobamafile.com/ObamaFamily.htm

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