Wings of the African soul: Magical realism, memory, rebirth of a continent

“Let memory be wings, let language be lightning, let Africa be reborn in her own imagination.” – Reimagining Africa through Kojo Laing

By Umar Osabo

IN a world where the tangible so often tyrannizes the spiritual, Ghanaian writer Kojo Laing crafts literary resistance. His 1988 novel, Woman of the Aeroplane, reads not just as fiction but as prophecy, an enchanted map for African transformation. Born in Kumasi in 1946, Laing traversed both Ghanaian traditions and Western education, merging myth and modernity in a style that redefined postcolonial African literature. Educated in Scotland, yet spiritually rooted in Ashanti metaphysics, Laing wrote from the margins of reality.

Woman of the Aeroplane is his boldest spell. Set in the imagined city of Tukwan in a futuristic 2015 Ghana, the novel bends space, time, and syntax. Here, magical aeroplanes remember the dead; ancestral spirits are carried across borders; and language itself becomes an act of revolution. The novel emerged from a Ghana bruised by economic crises, coup d’états, and IMF austerity. But Laing did not retreat into complaint. Instead, he conjured a novel that offered Africa something deeper: a mytho-poetic blueprint for rebirth.

Magical realism in African literature is not a borrowed Latin aesthetic; it is a return to ancestral modes of knowing. As Jean-Pierre Durix asserts, magical realism in postcolonial contexts “restores the sacred in a secularized world.” Laing’s genius lies in his ability to collapse the spiritual into the political, the mythic into the mundane.

Faustina Anyan, the novel’s protagonist, is not merely a character; she is an allegory of Africa itself—broken, yet divine. She is chosen to return ancestral spirits to their homeland via a sentient aeroplane. This quest is more than a plot device; it is a call for epistemological repatriation. Just as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o urges us to “decolonise the mind,” Laing invites us to recolonize our spiritual archives.

As Faustina journeys from Levensoba to Tukwan, the reader is invited into a Ghana where cities breathe, memory is a political act, and history refuses to die. The aeroplane is not just a machine—it is a mythological vessel, echoing Chinua Achebe’s declaration that Africa is a continent “where the gods walk among men.”

Laing’s literary world is not isolated. It dialogues with a constellation of West African works that similarly use the magical to critique and reconstruct.

In Dangerous Love, Ben Okri portrays Lagos as a surreal landscape where the protagonist Omovo paints against the backdrop of political chaos. His world, like Laing’s, is filled with ghosts and symbols. “Reality is not always visible,” Okri writes. This invisible reality is also Laing’s canvas.

Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar gives us a mythical Sierra Leone, where history, spirits, and satire collide. Like Laing, Cheney-Coker reimagines the city as a haunted geography, a psychic battleground. His poetic diction matches Laing’s in both density and daring.

Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard is perhaps Laing’s literary ancestor. Tutuola’s surreal journey through a realm of spirits and monsters laid the groundwork for African magical realism. Where Tutuola invented spirits, Laing gives them passports and politics.

Camara Laye’s The African Child, though more realist, reverberates with spiritual reverence for the land and ancestors. His narrative voice, gentle yet dignified, prefigures Laing’s belief in an enchanted Africa.

Even beyond Africa, Laing converses with Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Where Faustus sells his soul for knowledge and power, Africa—symbolized in Laing’s text—has bartered its spirits for modernity. But Laing offers redemption, not damnation. Faustina’s mission is a reversal of Faustus’s fall.

The themes of Woman of the Aeroplane are not literary ornaments; they are policy imperatives, cultural strategies, and socio-political blueprints.

Memory as resistance
“The present was confused, the future a sad animal, but the past was not forgotten,” Laing writes. In an age where African history is often outsourced or erased, Laing proposes memory as revolution. Ghana, Nigeria, and other African states must invest in indigenous histories, not as museum pieces but as living pedagogies.

Language as liberation
Laing’s syntax defies English grammar. His metaphors are African in rhythm, global in reach. This linguistic rebellion echoes Ngũgĩ’s position in Decolonising the Mind and supports curriculum reform that promotes indigenous languages in education and governance.

Women as mythic agents
Faustina is not a token heroine; she is the embodiment of mythic rebirth. In this, Laing reimagines the role of women beyond marginal participation. Development frameworks must not just include women but center them, as Nawal El Saadawi insists: “The liberation of women is the liberation of society.”

Urban spirituality
Laing’s Levensoba and Tukwan are not mere settings—they are spiritual characters. African cities must be re-planned not as industrial nightmares but as eco-spiritual communities. Indigenous architecture, green technology, and public art must converge in city planning.

Afrofuturism as vision
Before Afrofuturism became a buzzword, Laing was charting metaphysical futures. The future Ghana of 2015 in the novel is a space of spiritual technology. Africa must invest in technological innovation rooted in ethical, cultural, and ecological values.

Step action, theme model texts:
Reclaim memory and ancestors – Woman of the Aeroplane
Reform education and decolonized knowledge – The African Child
Promote local languages – identity and freedom – Dangerous Love
Empower Women – matriarchal agency – Last Harmattan…
Reimagine cities and sacred space – Levensoba
Commission local art and cultural self-esteem – The Palm-Wine Drinkard
Form literary alliances and continental renaissance – Laing, Okri and Cheney-Coker
Spiritual technology and ethical development – all the above

Laing’s aeroplane is not just transport—it is metaphor. Africa must not flee from itself, but return to its spiritual runway. As Okri writes, “We began before words, and we will end beyond them.”

Laing shows us the power of story as infrastructure, of myth as ministry. His novel is a gospel for the African soul. Through magical realism, he delivers not fiction but prophecy. Africa, he tells us, can fly—but only if it remembers.

* Dr Osabo, a critical thinker, writer, journalist, teacher and Pan-Africanist ambassador, can be reached at umarmosabo@gmail.com