Obama’s Half-Brother Reveals What the President Did the First Time They Met in Kenya and Talked About ‘Heroes of Western Culture’

President Barack Obama with half-brother Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo and his wife. (Image: Mark Obama Ndesanjo Foundation Ltd.)

Sharona Schwartz

President Obama’s half-brother told an Israeli newspaper that when he first met Barack, he was struck by his sibling’s rejection of Western culture.

“I remember that my impression at the first meeting was that Barack thought that I was too white, and I thought that he was too black,” Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo told Maariv. “He was an American citizen on a journey in search of his African roots, while I was a resident of Kenya seeking to find his white roots.”

“I remember that when I spoke with him about the heroes of Western culture he rolled his eyes impatiently. My feeling was that, here is an American who in many ways is trying to be a local Kenyan youth. This is something I tried to flee my entire life,” Ndesandjo said of the brothers’ first meeting in Kenya, which Obama described in his 1995 best-selling memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

In his memoir, Obama also described the first meeting with his brother: “I don’t feel much of an attachment [to Kenya]. Just another poor African country,” Obama quoted Ndesandjo saying. He went on to say, “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots … Well, you’re right.”

As reported on TheBlaze last month, Ndesandjo has said he wants to “set the record straight” about some of the details presented in Obama’s memoir.

The siblings have met since that first meeting in Kenya, including in 2007 before then-candidate Obama’s debate with rival Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“I came to visit him in Texas, and it was one of the happiest moments of my life. He entered the room where I was waiting for him, looked at me and said, ‘Mark, what happened to your afro?’ And I asked: ‘What happened to your afro?’ He said: ‘I cut my hair.’ It was a real moment, very natural, as if for a moment we returned to being two brothers,” Ndesandjo recounted.

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