Mkokoteni is my meditation on the transnational journey between two worlds—Kenya and Germany. The title refers to the mkokoteni, a hand-pulled cart used in Kenya’s informal transport economy, which I see as embodying both labor and resilience. In this work, the cart becomes a metaphor for my own diasporic journey: a vessel that carries the weight of history, identity, and belonging across vast distances.

Through this short collage film, I explore the intimate tension between home and exile, the land and its memory, as I reflect on what it means to be connected to two places—Kenya, my birthplace, and Germany, my new home. But unlike traditional narratives of migration, which often focus on the relationship between people and their communities, I choose to connect with the land itself. The film delves into the sensory experiences that shape my connection to Kenya—the tactile textures, the familiar smells and sounds—that continue to resonate with me, even in a foreign landscape. This journey is not one of displacement but of reknowing—a search for continuity through my senses, where the land itself remains a constant, a carrier of memory and history.

In this space of diaspora, where home becomes both a memory and a myth, the mkokoteni serves as a mode of transport not just for my physical belongings, but for the fragments of my identity, culture, and belonging that are often scattered or erased. Laden with these elements, the cart moves steadily forward, embodying a kind of reparative justice—a reclamation of self and land, even as both become foreign over time. Mkokoteni speaks to the complex, often contradictory nature of belonging in the modern world: the ways in which I carry my histories with me, even as those histories shift, reconfigure, and reinvent themselves across borders.

This film is a form of life-writing for me, a visual diary of reconnection and transformation, an act of reckoning with my past, and an exploration of how I forge new roots in shifting terrains. It is my reflection on what it means to belong to the land, and what happens when that land is no longer fixed, but constantly in motion—just as my mkokoteni rolls forward, ever in transit, ever in search of home.

(Binyavanga Wainaina’s Travels Through Kalenjinland: “It comes from every direction—shrapnel climbing up my arms, warm pools at the base of my stomach, a pulse of rising heat in my temples, the feeling of home.”)