22 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographygoing home drunk every night. His boasting proved his undoing and left him without a job, plunged
him into prolonged poverty and dangerously wounded his ego.”
Ochieng recalls how, after sitting up all night drinking Black Label whisky at Nairobi’s famous
Stanley Hotel, Obama Senior would fly into rages if Ruth asked where he had been. Ochieng
remonstrated with his friend, saying: “You bring a woman from far away and you reduce her to
pulp. That is not our way.” But it was to no avail. Ruth sued for divorce after her husband
administered brutal beatings. In fact he was a menace to life, said Ochieng. “He had many
extremely serious accidents. Both his legs had to be amputated. They were replaced with crude false
limbs made from iron. He was just like Mr Toad [from The Wind In The Willows], very arrogant on
the road, especially when he had whisky inside. I was not surprised when I learned how he died.”’
(Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his
father,” London Daily Mail, January 27, 2007)
The Daily Mail was able to track down Obama Senior’s third wife. ‘Ruth refused to comment on
the abuse charges when we tracked her down to the Kenyan school where she now works. She said:
“I was married to Barack’s father for seven years so, yes, you could say Barack is my stepson.
Barack’s father was a very difficult man. Although I was married to him the longest of any of his
wives he wasn’t an easy person to be around.” Mr Obama has acknowledged that his father
grappled with a drinking problem. But with a gift for words that makes Mrs Clinton’s utterances
seem stiff and stale, he has turned it into another component of the myth. Drink, he says, like drugs
is one of “the traps that seem laid in a black man’s soul.”’ (Sharon Churcher, “A drunk and a bigot -
what the US Presidential hopeful HASN’T said about his father,” London Daily Mail, January 27,
2007)
This other American wife is named Ruth Nidesand. The son she had with Obama Senior, who is
therefore Obama’s half-brother, has been located by the British press in China. We read: ‘Barack
Obama’s half-brother 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. 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.^3 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.’ (Sunday Times, July 27,
2008)
As for the rest of Obama’s eight to ten siblings: ‘The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it
had found George Hussein Onyango Obaa living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the
outskirts of Nairobi. Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke
for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic
contender. "No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less
than a dollar a month." According to Italy's Vanity Fair his two metre by three metre shack is
decorated with football posters of the Italian football giants AC Milan and Inter, as well as a
calendar showing exotic beaches of the world. Vanity Fair also noted that he had a front page
newspaper picture of his famous brother - born of the same father as him, Barack Hussein Obama,
but to a different mother, named only as Jael. He told the magazine: "I live like a recluse, no-one
knows I exist." Embarrassed by his penury, he said that he does not does not mention his famous
half-brother in conversation. "If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related.