1The history of African fiction is one notably informed by the travels and experiences of its diasporic communities. Indeed, travel both within and away from the continent is a central part of Africa’s global historical narrative. Achille Mbembe notes how “traces of Africa cover the face of the capitalist and Islamic worlds from one end to the other,” as a consequence of “the forced migrations of the previous centuries” as well as of those movements “driven by colonisation” (Mbembe 27). From the mid-twentieth century, the African communities outside of the continent have continued to grow, with “an estimated 1.6 million African immigrants in the US” alone, a population that has “doubled every decade since 1970” (Selasi 2015). Such a narrative of diasporic growth has been reflected in literary output. At the beginning of the 2000s, Simon Gikandi observed that “the most important [recent] novels that have come out of Africa […] have been produced outside the continent” (Gikandi 394-95). He notes that although “Africa continues to be an important point of reference for these novelists,” the latest chapter in the history of the African novel is concerned with “the story of the African subject at home in the world” (395); in other words, the narrative of the African diaspora in the contemporary world. Although the diasporic theme has indeed continued in the intervening years, there has been a notable shift in recent fiction concerning the “African diaspora.” Novels such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013), Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is For the Thief (2007), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013), Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go (2013) and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust (2014) have marked a move to stories concerning the return to Africa, thus emphasising the importance of the continent as the originary point of departure. The protagonists of these novels may well leave the continent, but the idea of Africa as the locus of “home” is reaffirmed, as is its importance to the contemporary worldview. Arguably, such a subtle shift in focus chimes with the appearance of the term “Afropolitanism,” with these novels reflecting generational changes relating to travel within and from the continent.

2I wish to explore the troubled return “home” in Ghana Must Go and Dust in order to extend the notion of Afropolitanism as a utopian concept. Following Mbembe’s initial formulation, I interpret Afropolitanism as emphasising the continent’s central—not peripheral—role in a global history of cultural movement and economic migration. The conceptual value of Afropolitanism, then, is in its situating Africa as a centre of the kinds of knowledge and identification associated with cosmopolitanism. However, such knowledge and identification are not necessarily celebratory and definitely not straightforward, particularly as dramatised in Ghana Must Go and Dust. In both novels, the originary African “home” is troubled and mutable, a complicated affective concept. Journeys leading away and returning back to the originary location enable the characters to consider and revise what constitutes “home” for them as individuals and collectively. Ghana Must Go and Dust re-situate the originary African “home” as central to the self-knowledge of the contemporary trans-generational diaspora. However, the originary African “home” in Ghana functions as a background to resolving individual crises of belonging for a privileged family. In contrast, Dust’s exploration of ambivalent and troubling histories emphasises the importance of rehabilitating history as a way of being able to move on, psychologically and concretely. Ultimately, the narrative resolutions of both novels register Afropolitanism as a world-view in progress, demonstrating the possibility of going beyond notions of identity as fixed to a particular community or location.

Defining “Afropolitanism”

3As an Anglophone term, “Afropolitanism” was popularised by Taiye Selasi, initially through her online article “Bye-Bye Babar” and in subsequent interviews and think-pieces, particularly at the time of the publication of Ghana Must Go, her first novel. Selasi deemed her generation “Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world” (Selasi 2005; my emphasis). Her idea of the “Afropolitan” subject emphasises their experience of global travel and urban life, although for most there “is at least one place on The African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen” (Selasi 2005). Selasi’s focus is on the generation who have come of age in the twenty-first century, “dispersed across Brixton, Bethesda, Boston, Berlin” (Selasi 2005), the children of Africans who left the continent in the 1960s and’70s. Importantly for Selasi, this “new demographic” is “redefining what it means to be African,” with the distinguishing characteristic of the Afropolitan subject being “a willingness to complicate Africa” (Selasi 2005); that is, refusing to essentialise the continent’s complex history and present position within the world.

4Yet, arguably, Selasi’s original article was taking up—and, by focusing solely on the children of the African diaspora, narrowing—a term formulated by Achille Mbembe, in a short essay also published in 2005. [1] Beginning by considering Africa’s long history of dispersal and movement, Mbembe rightly argues that Africa’s migratory history and “the dispersal of populations and cultures was not just about foreigners coming to settle in our backyard” (Mbembe 27). He reminds us that Africa has long been shaped by “a history of people in perpetual movement throughout the continent” (27). Acknowledging that Africa was changed by the colonial imposition of borders throughout Africa, Mbembe notes that the African subject’s “way of belonging to the world, of being in the world and inhabiting it, has always been marked by […] the interweaving of worlds” (28). It is this longer view of Africa’s historical and cultural movement within and outside of the continent that informs his sense of Afropolitanism. For Mbembe, Afropolitanism is a way of understanding how world history manifests itself on the continent, “not simply that a part of African history lies somewhere else, outside Africa” (28). Africa’s history of dispersal and travel emphasises the continent’s central—not peripheral—role in a global history of cultural movement and economic migration. “Afropolitanism,” then, names a conceptual approach that reframes the continent as globally connected, directly shaping world history, not just a passive recipient of invading and visiting cultures. As such, Mbembe states that Afropolitanism is both “an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world” as well as “a political and cultural stance in relation to the nation, to race and to the issue of difference in general” (28-29). While Mbembe vacillates here between Afropolitanism as an aesthetic and as a political position, he ultimately foregrounds Africa’s centrality within world history and a renewed diasporic attachment to the continent. This latter point was subsequently taken up by Selasi in relation to the young diasporic generation of Afropolitans which preoccupy her article.

5Since these initial discussions by Mbembe and Selasi, the term has been adopted yet much debated (Wawrzinek and Makokha 2011, Eze 2014, Cawood 2015, Deckard et al. 2015, Dabiri 2016). As Maureen Moynagh has observed, “there is an uneasy tension between those who understand Afropolitan to mean primarily those with connections to Africa who have grown up in the West or who reside primarily in Europe or the US, and [those who are] clearly more interested in Afropolitans resident on the continent” (Moynagh 283). In addition, for some, Afropolitanism potentially prioritises the economic and social privilege of a tiny minority. As Andrew Smith notes, “for most people in the modern world, migration is a terrifying option” (Smith 245-46). Even for those who are not forced to travel for the purposes of economic or physical survival, international travel remains a minority pursuit across the globe. Free movement is usually dependent on wealth; even returning home is usually only an option of the wealthy. Nonetheless, and mindful that enthusiasm for Afropolitanism has sometimes overlooked issues of economic inequality, I do find the concept useful in offering “a way of theorizing the conceptual possibilities of an African-centred worldliness” (Moynagh 281).

6The formulation offered by Mbembe can be developed by aligning Afropolitanism with Robert Spencer’s recent reconceptualisation of cosmopolitanism, whereby cosmopolitanism is understood as an “intellectual, moral, and political process,” not merely “an outlook or a form of conduct” (Spencer 3, 6; original emphasis). As Spencer outlines, cosmopolitanism is “characterised by self-awareness, by a penetrating sensitivity to the world beyond one’s immediate milieu, and by an enlarged sense of moral and political responsibility to individuals and groups outside one’s local or national community” (4) In recognising “the global reach of problems that require both democratic global institutions and, in order to make these legitimate and effective, global allegiances and solidarities” (5), Spencer articulates cosmopolitanism’s utopian impulse. I interpret Afropolitanism as drawing attention to such particular-yet-shared historical conditions, fostering a sense of cultural and political identification across the African nations. Afropolitanism can be viewed as a form of utopian solidarity, a means of asserting Africa’s centrality as a cultural force, emerging as a response from within the continent itself. I regard Afropolitanism as, ideally, a means for fostering consciousness through its commitment to critical self-reflectiveness. As such, both cosmopolitanism and Afropolitanism are unfinished, incomplete processes: as Spencer notes, “[c]osmopolitanism does not yet exist although traces of it can be found in distorted or incomplete forms” (3).

7In its work to forge solidarities and underline the continent’s centrality in world history, I regard Afropolitanism as strategically utopian. According to Ernst Bloch, in order to be socially and politically useful, the utopian function needs to be grounded in recognition of the possible (concrete utopia), must exhibit “militant optimism” and educated hope (“docta spes”), is enacted by both “positive” and “negative” thinking, and, crucially, is anticipatory (“Not Yet”) (Bloch 137, 146-47). As such, utopian thinking does not require what Patrick Williams refers to as “a fully worked-out, comprehensively detailed blueprint”: “on the contrary, it is partly glimpsed, partly understood, and very much carefully constructed through the ongoing practice of those who desire it” (Williams 107). Whereas abstract utopia is “wishful thinking” in the realm of the “fantastic and compensatory,” Ruth Levitas sees concrete utopia as “anticipatory rather than compensatory,” reaching “forward to a real possible future, and involves not merely wishful but will-full thinking” (Levitas 15). In other words, utopia is not to be understood as an imaginary dreamland but as something we know to be lacking, something that indicates unrealised potential not yet available to us. Crucial for Bloch’s understanding of utopian thinking is its emphasis on possibility. It would be a mistake to interpret utopian thinking as a failed mode of political thought: the political impetus of utopian thinking confronts the reasons that make the production of utopia so difficult. Bloch stresses that hope is vital in thinking about utopia, not a passive strain of thinking positively: “Hope is critical and can be disappointed […] Hope is not confidence. Hope is surrounded by dangers, and is the consciousness of danger and at the same time the determined negation of that which continually makes the opposite of the hoped-for object possible” (Bloch 17). This understanding of hope is one of tough optimism. It is to have faith in a future that you cannot foresee. As such, utopian thought is willful and committed, not simply wishful and purely optimistic. Utopia cannot be born of success: the lessons imparted by failure are vital to the educated hope and militant optimism of the utopian function. It is this particular sense of incompletion and melancholy-tinged hope for a “Not Yet” future that I argue informs the utopian impulse of the journeys back to Africa in Ghana and Dust.

Locating “home” in Ghana Must Go and Dust

8The idea of the originary home, whether located in Nigeria, Ghana or Kenya, looms large in the psychic landscape of characters such as Fola and Kweku (Ghana Must Go), and Odidi and Ajany (Dust). For each, “home” represents a double-bind: a place to escape from yet also somewhere to escape to. Sara Ahmed reminds us how “transnational journeys of subjects and others invite us to consider what it means to be at home, to inhabit a particular place, and might call us to question the relationship between identity, belonging and home” (Ahmed 78). In other words, “home” is not a straightforward physical manifestation of identification but an idea that has the potential to trouble one’s sense of belonging to a locale, a community, a region. In Ghana Must Go and Dust, leaving and returning to an originary location create the conditions for characters to consider and revise what constitutes “home.”

9Both novels feature families of the African diaspora, albeit in notably different ways. Ghana Must Go focuses on the intertwined lives and inner selves of the Sai family. Kweku and Fola meet after leaving Ghana and Nigeria, respectively, for the educational and professional opportunities of the US. After they marry, Kweku establishes a successful surgical career, while Fola sets aside her ambitions in law to raise their four children: Olu, twins Kehinde and Taiwo, and Sadie. Fola and Kweku return to the continent to take baby Olu to visit Kweku’s mother in Ghana, who sadly dies before they reach the village. But after this brief visit the family beings to fragment. Kweku is forced to take the blame for a horribly unjust surgical malpractice case and loses his surgical consultancy career. Ashamed, he abandons Fola and the children, as a form of self-imposed exile. Confused and heartbroken, Fola swiftly moves the family elsewhere in the US, all but erasing Kweku from their lives. After later trying and failing to reconcile with Fola and Olu, Kweku moves to Ghana, builds a house on the coast and marries a younger woman. Back in the US, the remaining Sais become increasingly remote from each other, before Fola suddenly relocates to Ghana after inheriting property from her legal guardian. Neither Fola nor Kweku discover that the other resides in the same country. As the novel progresses, it appears that the transitory existence of Kweku and Fola informs an ever-increasing sense of detachment in their relationships—to “home,” to their African origins, even to each other and their children. Fola exemplifies such a sense of detachment when she thinks if

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this house or that one, this passport or that, whether Baltimore or Lagos or Boston or Accra, whether expensive clothes or hand-me-downs or florist or lawyer or life or death—didn’t much matter in the end. If one could die identityless, estranged from all context, then one could live estranged from all context as well.

11The family is forced to face its estranged rootlessness when Kweku unexpectedly dies of cardiac arrest in Ghana. His death means that Olu, Kehinde, Taiwo and Sadie must make the journey to Ghana to join their mother, an event that causes the Sais to confront the memories and realities they have long ignored. More importantly, in Ghana they are made to consider what—or, more accurately, who—constitutes “home.”

12Whereas the Sai family are recognisably Afropolitan in the Selasi mould, Dust concerns a diverse cast of travelling characters whose lives revolve around movement across Kenya’s starkly different urban and rural environs, the African continent and the rest of the world. However, the central “character” of Dust is notably static: the farming homestead named Wuoth Ogik looms over the lives of the Oganda family and all those whose lives become tangled in its thorny history. Built by an English settler, Hugh Bolton, during the East African region’s colonial occupation, Wuoth Ogik becomes the residence of Nyipir Oganda, a mercenary and Bolton’s former assistant, after the Englishman disappears. Ostensibly the family home of the Ogandas, Wuoth Ogik is a place inscribed with the histories of those who inhabit and pass through it: “This place. Wuoth Ogik. Forces converged here. People left stories at springs. These were passed on from one season to another” (Owuor 240). Wuoth Ogik is not a sentimentalised, nostalgic location, but a place where difficult histories make their mark and converge. As Ajany suggests early in the novel, Wuoth Ogik shows how “[p]laces are ghosts, too” (121). It is the childhood home of Odidi and Ajany, the children of Nyipir and his wife, the mysterious and ever-wandering Akai Lokorijom. All four tend to stay outside of the actual house, with Nyipir working on the land and Akai disappearing for days and weeks, ostensibly shepherding the cattle but, really, avoiding Wuoth Ogik. Due to growing up in isolated Wuoth Ogik, a close bond is forged between elder brother and younger sister, although their sense of belonging to Kenya develops differently. From a young age, the anxious and artistically talented Ajany finds that “home” is something she wants to escape, always seeking the sound of “Far Away” (50) in a seashell and painting rivers and ships sailing to “Far Away” (52). Due to the siblings’ solitary existence, Odidi conjures up imaginary relatives for them, “a web of doting dream relations into which he and Ajany inserted their longing to leave” (117). Yet Odidi and Ajany begin to differ in their attachment to the world outside of Wuoth Ogik. As a young adult, Ajany applies to art schools outside of Africa. Odidi implores her that ‘“Here, we belong […]. We stay here,’Jany”’ (119). But Ajany “can’t see it” or feel it in her heart: “Was it possible that two separate feelings of place could exist between them? What if she stayed? Instant nausea […] She saw his rootedness, compared it with her floundering” (119-20). Ajany eventually leaves Wuoth Ogik and Kenya, ending up in Brazil as a nightclub dancer and in an abusive relationship with a musician, Bernardo. Yet she returns when Odidi, with whom she has not been in regular contact, is gunned down in Nairobi, following the violent upheaval around the 2007 elections in Kenya.

13Clearly, the notion of “home” in Ghana Must Go and Dust is troubled and mutable. As such, the complex narrating of individual memory creates the terrain of “home” in both novels. As the perspectives and memories of different characters accumulate, a sense of shared history begins to emerge to the reader and, eventually, the characters themselves. Ahmed notes that

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migration involves, not only spatial dislocation, but also temporal dislocation: “the past” becomes associated with a home that is impossible to inhabit, and be inhabited by, in the present. The question then of being-at-home or leaving home is always a question of memory, of the discontinuity between past and present.

15The narrative forms of Ghana Must Go and Dust collapse borders of space and time in this manner, underlining the importance of memory in how home is imaginatively and emotionally formed. The overarching narrative shifts between characters’ perspectives and memories, with Ghana Must Go particularly relying upon free indirect discourse to convey the interiority of the Sai family. In contrast, Dust’s short, often staccato sentences suggest the buried (whether consciously or not) nature of the histories rising to the surface within each character, fragments of memories that refuse to stay buried. Such a mapping of home is shown most immediately through the last thoughts of Kweku and Odidi (both novels commence with the death of a central character). As they die, each finds their thoughts turning to family and home. Sixteen years after leaving his family behind, Kweku’s last moments cause him to reflect on how far he has travelled:

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Born in dust, dead in grass. Progress. Distant shore reached […] [S]till farther, past “free,” there lay “loved,” in her laughter, lay “home” in her touch, in the soft of her Afro? […] That he found her and loved her and made their love flesh four times over—it matters, if only to him. […]
And so to death.

17As he dies in a garden in Ghana, Kweku pinpoints “home” as belonging to Fola, his ex-wife and the mother of his children. The restlessness and rootlessness which Kweku has experienced all of his life comes to rest at the memory of Fola: she is his “home”—not his childhood village, not the United States, not his new house in Ghana. Here, home is associated with emotional connection and memory, not viewed as a static locale.

18Similarly, the heart-breaking last thoughts of Odidi in Dust also return to memories of individuals, with his mind racing through his life:

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It is said that in the throes of battle dying men cry out for their mothers. Akai-ma, Odidi groans. […] And even though his leg is heavier than a tree trunk, he tries to carry it home. […] Akai-ma! She fixes everything. Retrieves those who belong to her. […]
Ajany.
His sister.
… Poor’Jany. […]
Ache becomes pining, every straggling breath now consecrated to presence, a single word bursting through—Baba! […]
A father’s whispered entreaty to a fleeing son: Stay. Stay, please.
The son left. Never bothered with an answer or even a backward look.
Now, years later, from a bitumen-smelling potholed backstreet, Odidi’s heart bleeds out his answer: Coming home. Wait for me.

20Like Kweku, Odidi’s mind turns to the people who engender safety and familiarity. Their dying thoughts portray the experiences of death and home as sensual and sensory, establishing how home is signified in both novels: not so much the memories of the childhood home but of particular people. As Kweku collapses into the grass, he “feels” home in the memory of Fola; Odidi’s consciousness retreats from the pain of his failing body to imagining the formative people in his life. Ahmed underlines how home “becomes the impossibility and necessity of the subject’s future (one never gets there, but is always getting there), rather than the past that binds the subject to a given place” (Ahmed 78). For Kweku and Odidi, physical return is forever deferred but their dying thoughts complete their journeys “home.” For their people left alive, however, their subsequent reuniting with family and returning to Africa is not as easily resolved.

21Home may well be signified by people rather than particular locales, but this does not mean that the return to Ghana and Kenya is embraced by the Sai family or Ajany. On the contrary, the notion of coming home is desired yet feared; as Ahmed emphasises, there “is movement and dislocation within the very forming of homes as complex and contingent spaces of inhabitance” (Ahmed 88). Such dislocation can be found in the broken-hearted “home” of the Sai family unit and embodied in the rural, Gothic homestead of Wuoth Ogik. Home is not a straightforwardly affective concept: as Ahmed says, “being-at-home is a matter of how one feels or how one might fail to feel” (89). In other words, finding oneself confronted with a familiar location or group of people is not necessarily celebratory or disastrous. Home may be defined by a lack of identification and sentimental attachment. On returning to Kenya, Ajany’s conflicted response demonstrates such an affective dichotomy: “The longing for her people is a sudden sizzling ache. What if I had stayed? Damp eyes blink at the thought […] They [she and Odidi] should have gone together Far Away” (Owuor 119). Here, Ajany’s attachment to “her people” cannot overcome the unthinkable idea of returning to Wuoth Ogik, and she wishes instead that she had taken Odidi away from the homestead, from Kenya altogether. Ajany’s instincts cannot reconcile her attachment with the notion of her staying home. In Ghana Must Go, the very notion of there being a fixed idea of home, never mind a physical location, is continually disputed by the Sai family. Despite her becoming inured to starting over throughout her life, Fola still acknowledges that a desire for “home” lingers on, and is why she laughs when reflecting on the journeys undertaken by herself and her late ex-husband:

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Poor little boy, who had walked on this beach, […] never guessing his error […]: that he’d never find a home, or a home that would last […] She laughs at the thought of that boy on this beach, and […] laughs hardest at the thought of herself in that house, twelve years old, still a girl, still believing in home.

23Fola may have become understandably cynical about “still believing in home,” but a desire for belonging remains in their children. Taiwo recalls a memory of a car ride with her mother, Fola asking her elder daughter:

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“What are you always staring at back there, my darling?” [asked Fola]
“The houses.”
“The houses? You have a house of your own.”
But not a home was the difference she saw even then, peering in from the car, from outside, as they passed—and saw now as she paused on the sidewalk outside. Lighting a cigarette. The cliché. But not a home.

25Despite being surrounded by her remaining family unit, Taiwo fails to feel at home although she cannot explain why. It is the youngest member, Sadie, who manages to best articulate the (lack of) dynamic within the Sai family, describing them as “weightless,” a “scattered fivesome,”

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a family without gravity, completely unbound. With nothing […] pulling them down to the same piece of earth, a vertical axis, nor roots spreading out underneath them, with no living grandparent, no history, a horizontal—they’ve floated, have scattered, drifting outward, or inward, barely noticing when someone has slipped off the grid.

27By considering what the Sais are not, Sadie’s thoughts depict “home” as an idea anchored in biogenetics and geography. She sees home as a fixed historical and physical location, something that would “pin down” her family. Although Owuor’s novel, rightfully, sidesteps the focus on biogenetic affinity found in Selasi’s text, both Ghana Must Go and Dust use the death of a family member as the prompt to reunite the estranged characters by returning to Africa. Once face-to-face, the Sais and Ogandas are forced to renegotiate what “home” means when one has left it behind, particularly when returning means that they must confront the difficult pasts that they share with, or have deliberately kept from, one another. Ultimately, the return to Africa represents individual resolution and collective unity, therefore suggesting the utopian potential of home in each novel. Inevitably, the anxious return home represents a form of “journey’s end” in both novels. But the manner of resolution differs significantly.

Journey’s end: arriving “home”

28The focus upon the anxiety provoked by the notion of home—as a place of confronting difficult histories, as experienced by Ajany in Dust, or for the assumed promise of resolution sought by Ghana Must Go’s Kweku and Fola—appears to contradict the utopian impulse I suggest lies within these novels. Here, I differ from Bill Ashcroft’s interpretation of travel as a utopian act, whereby the transitory subject is always “propelled by desire, the desire for discovery, for the place or the experience that can throw one’s present situation into relief” (Ashcroft 249). Clearly, this is not necessarily the case in these novels, which feature characters who fear returning home due to the memories they will be forced to confront, how the past breaks into their present circumstances. Yet such fear does not colour my reading of “home” in either novel as, at best, ambivalent or, at worst, nightmarish. Instead of locating the utopian impulse within the act of travelling—thus always deferred as the destination can never fulfil the anticipation of utopia—I instead locate it within Ghana Must Go and, more pertinently, Dust, precisely at the final return “home” at the end of each narrative.

29Selasi’s novel is an important Afropolitan text as it re-situates the originary African home—chiefly, Ghana—as central to the self-knowledge of the contemporary trans-generational diaspora. However, Ghana Must Go supports uncomfortable ideas of Africa as a place of experiential extremes and privileges consanguineous kinship. In Ghana Must Go, the West African nations are often depicted as no more than superficial backdrops for the Sais’ personal epiphanies and confrontations with traumatic events. Nigeria and Ghana are simplistically set against each other, with the former portrayed as a site of trauma (civil war, sexual abuse) and the latter as a paradisiacal land of easy living and fresh starts. The depiction of Kweku’s coastal village neighbours is particularly patronising, with a nameless boy “smiling brightly, possessed of that brand of indomitable cheerfulness Kweku had only seen in children living in poverty” (Selasi 2013, 25). Such an elitist approach to the depiction of the villagers becomes increasingly problematic when considering the anti-nativist sentiment of Mbembe’s original definition of Afropolitanism:

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According to nativistic logic, identities and political struggles are founded on the basis of a distinction between “those who are from here” (autochthons) and “those who came from outside” (non-natives). Nativists forget that, in their stereotyped forms, the customs and traditions to which they claim to adhere were often invented not by the actual autochthons, but by missionaries and settlers.

31Whereas Mbembe refers to the short-sightedness of “autochthons” in ideologically distancing non-natives and overlooking the colonial registration of “tradition,” Selasi’s novel closes with a disconcerting incident of a “non-native” appearing to access a dormant, hereditary sense of belonging. A notion of biogenetic lineage and connection to Africa is established earlier in the novel, when Kehinde enviously reads the “resemblance to the people they come from” in the faces of his siblings, Olu and Sadie:

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Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P, in the world […] [T]he face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing—is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.

33It is possible to read this moment as Afropolitan for its acknowledgement of Africa’s long history, a visible record of the continent’s influence spreading across the globe. However, such a notion of biogenetic belonging must be read alongside a later episode, pivotal to the novel’s narrative resolution: Sadie’s dance with the local Ghanaian girls. As the youngest of the Sai children, Sadie feels that her lack of association with Africa signifies her disconnect from her mother and siblings. Yet it is Sadie who is depicted as being the most “naturally” African by the close of the novel. Arriving at Kweku’s childhood village, Sadie’s Ghanaian relatives instantly recognise her similarity to the late Ekua and greet her with “welcome back,” much to Sadie’s confusion (Selasi 2013, 265). The Sais are then invited to a small celebration where the local girls dance for them. As Sadie awkwardly sits to watch, she thinks how she has “never been particularly drawn to this music, to African drumming, though she wonders why not: the reaction is visceral, she feels her heart slow, or succumb to this new form of beating” (Selasi 2013, 267). Just as she is considering her visceral response to the music, a girl dances up to Sadie, offering her hand, and says “Please seestah, come. Come and dance, please, I beg”:

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When they speak of it later they’ll say that a girl came to Sadie and pulled her up off of their bench, gave a little demonstration of the base two-step footwork, which Sadie repeated a few times herself, that the drummers, encouraged, started drumming a little faster, that Sadie kept pace, to the delight of the crowd, and that before they all knew it, she was dancing in the clearing as if she’d been born doing traditional Ga dance. No one will know what it is in this moment that overwhelms Sadie, not even Sadie herself […] The children resume clapping and cheering in Ga, the chubby dancer, “My sees-tah!”

35Sadie’s co-option into the local “seestah”-hood and newfound sense of belonging is clearly meant to be celebratory, especially as her dancing is the catalyst for bringing the family together, prompting confrontation and reconciliation with her siblings and mother. Yet Sadie’s “awoken” African identity taps into uncomfortable associations with some kind of innate “Africanness,” as if it were a hereditary identity waiting to surface. This is why Mbembe’s insistence that “Afropolitanism is not to be understood the same as Pan-Africanism or negritude” is important, for Africa is not simply a point of cultural reference situated in a cultural “past” (Mbembe 28-29) or touchstone for a global racial solidarity. Contrariwise, Selasi’s novel arguably reduces the political potential of Afropolitanism to an individualistic way of viewing one’s place in a biogenetic lineage at the expense of a more nuanced and self-reflective engagement with the term’s potential utopian impulse.

36Whereas the originary African “home” in Ghana Must Go functions as a background to resolving individual crises of belonging for a privileged family, Dust’s exploration of ambivalent and troubling histories succeeds in dramatising Kenya as a hub of African-centred worldliness and anticipatory utopian visions. The secrets located in Wuoth Ogik connect to Kenya’s political upheavals from colonialism and the independence era alongside a varied cast. In contrast to the somewhat anonymous portrayals of West Africa in Ghana Must Go, the Kenyan locations of Dust are depicted as visceral environments, providing a sense of the familiar, although not one to be confused with comfort and belonging. Instead, the physicality associated with the “home” environment emphasises how each individual is an element of a much greater, larger history. Nairobi is the location of the novel’s opening, where Odidi violently dies from gunshot wounds after being pursued by officers after a botched robbery; yet it would be a mistake to construe the homestead of Wuoth Ogik as a rural idyll, a counterpoint to a brutalised city. If anything, Dust’s primary location promises more danger than its urban counterpart. The first glimpse of Wuoth Ogik is from the vantage point of the biplane flying Ajany, Nyipir and the body of Odidi back from Nairobi. As Ajany looks out at the familiar landscape, the narrator informs the reader of the “hollowed brown rock” where the young Ajany and Odidi “would survey the rustling march of desert locusts,” as well as “golden-brown pastures” where they would “run after homemade kites” and “eat cactus berries” (Owuor 26). But this initial idyll is immediately followed by a moment of literal and psychological turbulence:

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Ajany crushes the screaming stuck inside her mouth […] First landing aborted. They veer upward. Ajany scrunches her eyes shut, grits her teeth, and prays they will stay suspended in space and lost to time. Second descent. She is anticipating the crash. The end. The plane evens out, crabs into a soft landing. Dust twirls on their tail.

38Notice that there is no mention of any relief on Ajany’s part. Instead, it is plausible that her fear is not that the plane might crash but that she will land back home. Ajany would rather stay suspended and lost in time than return to Wuoth Ogik in the present moment. But return she must, for, although she does not know it, Ajany’s coming home is the catalyst for the excavation of secrets and the breaking of a violent historical cycle.

39The importance of location to Dust is due to its portrayal of memory as an elemental force, one which makes its physical mark on the landscape. Whereas memory belongs to the interior, psychological realm in Ghana Must Go, memory is physically manifest throughout Dust. The very entity of atmospheric dust—“most of which is generated by the world’s deserts” (Middleton 165)—appears as an animistic force pursuing the characters throughout the novel. In the previous quotation, the passage notes how dust pursues the biplane; in Owuor’s novel, the histories accumulated within Wuoth Ogik are embodied by the dust coating its land and domestic spaces. With its ability to travel and settle, atmospheric dust tells a story of where someone has been and where they are going: “In the dust, skid marks. Footprints. Tire trails. Pathways […] In dust, an outline, a grooved, leafshaped scar. ‘Every crevice contains a story […]’ Galgalu always says” (Owuor 42, 43). Dust is also what becomes of the body after death, hence the Book of Common Prayer’s reference to “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust” in the funeral service. Nyipir buries his son within a cairn, a structure made of interlocking stones: “Nyipir imagines Odidi’s body disintegrating under the weight of clay, of stones. Nyipir reaches forward and scoops hard, hot, brown-red soil. Squeezes it in his hand. It crumbles. Dust” (303). As such, Odidi returns and becomes a part of Wuoth Ogik. Towards the end of the novel, Ajany, rubbing “her face in the soil, kneads it in desire, its aches and promises,” asks a question which is repeated throughout the novel: “What endures? Spaces in the heart that accommodate the absent […] What endures? The hard earth: her limits” (354; original emphasis). The physicality and tactility of Wuoth Ogik embody the absence of those she longs to see again. The absent are both there and not there, part of landscape. Predicting this mutability in death, Odidi imagines how to explain his death to Ajany: “He’ll say, ‘The land woke up at dusk and said to itself, “Today I’ll be Arabel Ajany. And the lake looked at the land that was Ajany and said, “Today I’ll be Odidi Ebewesit.” That is why we roam. Because sometimes we are places, not people’” (9). As much as home is comprised of one’s “people,” Dust acknowledges that memory and a sense of belonging are frequently tied to geographical location. This is why Nyipir needs to bring his son’s body “home” and why, ultimately, Ajany has to return to discover the secrets which bind, yet also tear apart, her family. The sensual, visceral power of Wuoth Ogik on its people is reminiscent of Ahmed’s argument that the “immersion of a self in a locality is not simply about inhabiting an already constituted space”:

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Rather, the locality intrudes into the senses: it defines what one smells, hears, touches, feels, remembers. The lived experience of being-at-home hence involves the enveloping of subjects in a space which is not simply outside them: being-at-home suggests that the subject and space leak into each other, inhabit each other.

41The harsh environment of Wuoth Ogik matches the difficult histories that tie the characters to its landscape. Akai and Nyipir refuse to leave, bound to the unspoken secret of the cave, while their children grow up in a physically and socially arid home. All four endlessly wander the land, seemingly without purpose or end.

42As the novel progresses, the narrative spirals until the secrets of her parents’ past are revealed to Ajany by her mother. In the early 1960s, Akai discovers Wuoth Ogik due to her travels as a cattle-trader. Hugh Bolton becomes sexually obsessed with her, much to the distaste of Nyipir, his assistant at the time. Akai becomes pregnant and is sent away by Hugh, who lies when promising to come back for her and the baby. Akai returns to her family but relations become further strained when she gives birth to twins and a drought hits Kenya. Refusing to let her children die, Akai is cast out by her family, so she makes the dangerous journey back to Wuoth Ogik. By the time Akai arrives, the twins have died along the way and she herself is dying. When Hugh sees her, he screams “Whore! Whore! […] Rain preventer!” and attempts to kill her with a penknife. Horrified at the condition of Akai and Hugh’s behaviour, Nyipir fatally shoots Hugh. Nyipir aims the rifle at Akai but she pleads with him and, together, they move Hugh to a cave where he bleeds to death. The pair wait to be discovered but “[n]o-one came” (Owuor 344-351), as Akai tells Ajany. Instead, Nyipir and Akai create “new myths about Wuoth Ogik,” for in “Kenya’s pre-and early post-independence days, anything was believable. And a story repeated often enough became fact” (351). But myth-making does not prevent the memories from re-emerging. After bringing Odidi back to be laid to rest at Wuoth Ogik, Akai spurns her husband and daughter before fleeing. Isaiah, who thinks he is Hugh’s son, arrives to discover what happened to Bolton, while Ali Dida Hada, a former colleague from Nyipir’s days in the police, reappears to investigate Bolton’s “disappearance.” Feeling the past finally catching up, Nyipir recovers Bolton’s bones from the red cave and builds a second cairn for Bolton, next to Odidi. Increasingly haunted by the violence he committed in serving first the colonial police and then in the name of the nation, Nyipir appears to associate his son’s violent demise with Kenya’s turbulent history and his role within it. From Ajany’s investigations into Odidi’s life in Nairobi, Nyipir knows that Odidi was forced into a life of petty crime due to his refusal to support a corrupt political system: a talented civil engineer, Odidi’s attempt to create a reliable water system across Kenya was continually blocked due to financial greed and underhand deals, leading him to abandon his successful business. As such, the creation of a final “home” for Hugh’s remains begins a process of closure for the extended Oganda clan, one which is also registered in the physical landscape of the novel.

43As the past is revealed, Wuoth Ogik literally falls apart. Coinciding with Ajany’s increasing knowledge of her parents’ murky past and what happened to Odidi in her absence, the water tank in Wuoth Ogik bursts, creating rivulets in the dust-coated house that look “like blood trails” (203). Towards the end of the narrative, the house is mostly reduced to “coral rubble,” causing Isaiah to speculate that “the house is dying” (284). More likely, the ghosts of the past are being released back into the atmosphere, just as the bodies of Odidi and Hugh are returned to the ground. Once Ajany knows the truth about the past, she sheds “tears for Odidi, fragile parents, and even Hugh Bolton.” Ajany realises that “[h]omelessness is where Far Away is” (353). One does not have to feel sentimental about home to mourn its loss.

44The confrontation with the past means that Dust ends with a reversal of power between Wuoth Ogik and its inhabitants, beginning with Akai and Nyipir going their separate ways to begin new lives. To drive home the cathartic release of memory into landscape, Dust concludes after a heavy rainfall descends, causing flash-floods which split the land into two. The land of Wuoth Ogik is physically transformed, releasing memory into the elements: the dust lingering in the air and the layers of settled dust are washed away by the rainfall and flash-floods. The last to leave, Ajany and Isaiah set alight the homestead before being caught in a flash flood. It is as if the land baptises them, cleansing them from the dust and ashes of history. The conclusion of Dust can be read as a warning about how the suppression of history leads to stasis, an inability to move forward. There is a final irony to Wuoth Ogik, revealed late in the narrative, concerning its name. After being asked by Hugh Bolton for a suitable name, Nyipir sarcastically replies “Wuoth Ogik? […] The journey ends” (316). For Hugh and Odidi, Wuoth Ogik does mark the end of their journeys through life. For the surviving characters, their release from Wuoth Ogik marks a new chapter in their lives and, possibly, in Kenya’s still young history as a nation. Indeed, the novel emphasises the importance of rehabilitating history as a way of being able to move on, psychologically and spatially. The last time the repeated question “what endures” appears in the novel, the answer is “[s]tarting again” (361). This sense of release goes beyond notions of identity as fixed to a particular community or location. By the novel’s end, the travelling aspects of the characters are less indicative of escape and more representative of an African-centred worldliness: Ajany and Isaiah decide to stay in Kenya and not return to Brazil and the UK, Akai shall probably wander beyond Kenya’s borders, and Nyipir travels to Burma to finally discover the fates of his father and brother who served for the British in the war. The resolutions between the characters correspond with an Afropolitan world-view as an ongoing process, not as a rigid and predetermined historical and cultural idea of Africa.

45Although Ghana Must Go and Dust resolve their narratives in markedly different ways—the former on a more individualistic concern, the latter as a unified “moving on” from the past—each is important in focusing upon the return to the African continent as central to identification and self-knowledge. The journeys of the Sais and Ogandas affirm Mbembe’s assertion that “[w]hile Africa has for long been a destination for all sorts of population movements and cultural flows, the continent has also, for centuries, been a point of departure to other regions of the world” (Mbembe 27). For too long, the African continent has been reduced to a historical and cultural “touchstone,” its contribution to global history being acknowledged—the point of departure, say—but rarely dwelled upon. And yet, as Moynagh comments, “redirecting attention from the diaspora to the continent itself seems essential if Africa’s position in the world is to change” (Moynagh 284). While I regard Dust as more successful in its focus on Africa than Ghana Must Go, both novels are nonetheless crucially important in their reorientation towards the originary point of departure. Both novels may frame the return “home” as melancholic, yet their narrative strategies work through the anxious homecoming to emphasise a more communicative sense of belonging (Ghana Must Go), as well as to liberate subjects from the trauma of intertwined national and personal traumatic pasts (Dust).