‘Back Home in the States’: The African’s Quest for Home in Postcolonial Africa in Chains of Junkdom by Okiya Omtata Okoiti

Abstract

This paper is a reading of the Kenyan psychological drama, Chains of Junkdom by Okiya Omtata Okoiti as an artistic contribution to a long-running debate on the definition of home in postcolonial Kenya. The two major positions in the debate are shown to have their origins in colonialism. The first position holds that a home is a house that is located in a territory deemed to belong to the ethnic community of the house owner, and is a locus of the correct social relationships, that is, of the immediate and extended family, the clan, and the ‘tribe.’ The second position insists that a house is a home to the person who owns and lives in it. The reading focuses on the relationship that the main character in the play, an African who is back in his country of origin after spending several years in the USA, has with a house he builds as he tries to make a home in his ‘native land’. An examination of the relationship surfaces the link between the debate on the definition of home to postcolonial identity-based politics that gives the debate its enduring quality in Kenya.