Parents can be the source of dreams - and nightmares.
In his best-selling memoir Dreams From My Father, Barack Obama wrote about the absence of his father during his childhood and how that influenced him.
Yesterday, the US president's half-brother told how the presence of their father turned his childhood into a nightmare.
'My father beat me. He beat my mother. You just do not do that. I shut these thoughts in the back of my mind for many years,' said Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo.
The normally press-shy Ndesandjo broke his silence about Barack Obama Snr yesterday while speaking to reporters in Guangzhou to promote his new novel, entitled Nairobi to Shenzhen. He welled up with emotion as he talked about the violence that both he and his mother suffered at the hands of his father. Obama Snr married Ruth Nidesand, his third wife, whom he met while he was studying at Harvard, after divorcing the president's mother, Ann Dunham, in 1964.
'My mother used to say of my father, 'He's a brilliant man, but a social failure',' Ndesandjo said. 'And I remember times in my house when I would hear screams, when I would hear my mother's pain. And I was a child, and I could not actually, I could not actually ... I could not protect her.'