On the streets of Guangzhou and nearby Shenzhen, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo is turning heads. Since holding a press conference for his semiautobiographical Nairobi to Shenzhen: A Novel of Love in the East on Nov. 4, Ndesandjo, a half brother of U.S. President Barack Obama, has appeared on television in Hong Kong, and his picture has been splashed on the front pages of China Daily, the South China Morning Post and other regional newspapers.
Ndesandjo had shunned the limelight until now. He is one of two children born to Barack Obama Sr. and his third wife, an American teacher named Ruth Nidesand, whom Obama Sr. met while the two were students at Harvard. Tall and slim like the President, Ndesandjo had avoided any association with the Obama name. For most of his life, he used only his stepfather’s Tanzanian surname, Ndesandjo, but he has now added Okoth, a word from the language of his father’s Kenyan tribe, the Luo, as well as his original surname, Obama.
