President Barack Obama first met his younger half-brother Mark Obama Ndesandjo in 1988, but they didn’t reunite until 2008 while Obama was in the heat of his presidential campaign in Austin, Texas. This never-before-seen video of the reunion was released by Inside Edition on Tuesday.
Obama Ndesandjo and Pres. Obama had the same father, but Ndesandjo’s mother Ruth — a Jewish school teacher who the senior Obama met at Harvard in 1964 — remarried after divorcing their father, hence Mark’s last name.
The initial meeting shown in this video seems to be a tad awkward, but that’s likely because Pres. Obama was slated to debate Hillary Clinton a few minutes after the meeting. Likely the unexpected meeting caught him off-guard. But the brothers became fast-friends. Ndesandjo visited the White House in 2009 and the president met with his brother during a China visit later that year.
Ndesandjo received a Masters degree from Stanford and an MBA from Emory University and later moved to Shenzhen, China in 2002 and got married. He has released an autobiography: Cultures: My Odyssey of Self-Discovery. The book covers his Kenyan upbringing with Barack Obama, Sr., who he says was an abusive alcoholic.
h/t Buzzfeed
