How I found my way to my half-brother

In my dream my father is sitting next to me in the car as we drive around our hometown of Malindi, in Kenya. I realize it must be odd for him, because so much has changed in the decades since he died.

He keeps shaking his head in disbelief at the thronging crowds of modern Africa and all the buildings, the vanished forests, the once-empty bush and all the other things that have changed. I say I’m pleased to see him but ask why he has returned here after all these years and he just says: “Take care of Michael.”

I first learned about Michael at the age of 13 when I found my mother in the kitchen weeping over her Cinzano. She revealed that my father, working far away in Ethiopia for months and years on end, had taken a mistress and fathered a son there. I learned he was called Michael.

I began to hate my father for what he had done. I wanted to protect my mother, but did not know what I could do. I feared we would lose our home and that everything in my life would collapse.

My mother took to writing her and my father’s names in all of our books and on all of the things we possessed in the Malindi house. I figured my carefree adolescence had been hijacked. For a long time I did not want to ever see my father again. He had vanished in Ethiopia. At the same time I became terrified it might become true forever.

When he finally did come home, I did not know if I was happy or angry. We fought. He thrashed me when I was rude to him. Even as a teenager I felt safe when I caught the scent of him, which I had loved so strongly as a small child climbing into his lap. He was flawed but I couldn’t do without him.

When I grew up, I was able to speak to Dad about many, though of course not all, of the things that he had chosen to do in his life. Before he got too addled with age, I like to think we became friends. In one conversation he asked me to become the executor of his will, the main reason being that he wanted me to see that after he was gone, his son Michael would be all right.

I was happy that he put his trust in me, but then for several years he decided I would not be able to fulfill his wishes because he was convinced I would get killed in the places I visited as a journalist — Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Somalia and other such spots. Before he died — and as the fire cooled in my belly and I slowed down — he did finally reinstate me as the person he wanted to carry out his wishes, especially when it came to the boy, Michael, whom I had never met.

From my own childhood, I had always adored Ethiopia. Later, as a foreign correspondent, after months in a bush war in 1991, I rode into Addis Ababa on a Russian tank with the rebels when the city fell and it became my home for a while.

I had dodged gunfire but I was too scared to track down my half-brother Michael. My father took care of him in his will and the boy had a good education and he got two university degrees. He has excelled in his life and is married with three super children. Though I did establish contact with him, for many years I put off our meeting even while I was in Ethiopia. I told myself it was out of loyalty to my mother. But I’m not sure if it was just Mum.

Eventually, I caved in and on one of my trips to Addis Ababa, Michael and I got together. The anticipation increased ahead of my visit and then on the day, when we first met, I recognized very deeply that he was my brother.

I had seen photographs of him as a child and we had sent each other pictures. But in his presence, I felt an incredible closeness. We loved each other on sight. As we walked around Addis he kissed the door of his parish Orthodox church and then we ate injera with our fingers.

He showed me a photo of me and my siblings, taken in the 1970s, which he had treasured all these years, though I was the only one to finally meet him. We both cried a bit, yes, but we were happy.

All the years, the things out of our control that weren’t our fault, the missed chances, the misunderstandings, the past regrets, our short time on earth: it was surely time to put these things behind us.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s April 2025 World edition.