The book recounts Ndesandjo’s first encounter with Obama, who was visiting Kenya in 1988. They did not hit it off.
“Barack thought I was too white and I thought he was too black,” Ndesandjo said. “He was an American searching for his African roots. I was a Kenyan. I’m an American, but I was living in Kenya, searching for my white roots.”
The 500-page book includes an appendix listing a number of alleged factual errors in Obama’s 1995 memoir, Dreams from my Father, such as quotes incorrectly attributed to Ndesandjo’s mother.
“It’s a correction. A lot of the stuff that Barack wrote is wrong in that book and I can understand that because to me for him the book was a tool for fashioning an identity and he was using composites,” Ndesandjo said.
“I wanted to bring it up because first of all I wanted the record to be straight. I wanted to tell my own story, not let people tell it for me,” he said.
More in the South China Morning post.
Mark Obama Ndesandjo is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch, or fill in our speakers´request form.
