Nimerudi nyumbani

I thought as the tiny, 36-seat Kenya Airways plane touched down at Zanzibar Airport. Kiswahili for I have returned home.

People repeat it back to me, when they hear that my father was born in Pemba. Aa, umerudi nyumbani. Karibu.

The longing for home, the quest for homeland - so deeply rooted in us, yet so infantile. I tend to be suspicious of it. It lends itself to romanticization, fantasy love affairs with place, at the expense of genuine engagement with socio-economic-political reality.

But there is the truth of my body, electric with joy, reaching out like anemone unfurling, to everything that surrounds me here. Maybe that's an and, rather than a but. Maybe I can hold both: the delight and the probing, questioning scepticism.