The Theory Of Flight (Paperback)

Genie has gifts that transcend time and space, and this is her story. It is also the story of her forebears – Baines Tikiti, who, because of his wanderlust, changed his name and ended up walking into the Indian Ocean; his son, Livingstone Stanley Tikiti, who, during the war, took as his nom de guerre Golide Gumede and who became obsessed with flight; and Golide’s wife, Elizabeth Nyoni, a country-and-western singer self-styled after Dolly Parton, blonde wig and all.

With the lightest of touches, and with an overlay of magical-realist beauty, this novel sketches, through the lives of a few families and the fate of a single patch of ground, decades of national history – from colonial occupation to the freedom struggle, to the devastation wrought by the sojas, the hi virus, and The Man Himself. By turns mysterious and magical, but always honest, The Theory Of Flight dwells not on what was lost and what went wrong in a nation’s history, but on the personal triumphs and why they matter.

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My review

Wed, 4 Dec 2019 | Review by: Breakaway R.

A book of rare imagination and style – from Africa Rare imagination and style were the criteria for the South African Sunday Times Barry Ronge award for fiction in 2019. Ndlovu’s book won the prize hands down. For me, it started with the cover – which promised both beauty and pain; travel transcending time, mind, body and soul, plus a sense of intellectual elegance and eloquence. In hindsight, having now read the book, perhaps I over-interpreted the cover– nonetheless, it seems that all of the promises made there, were fulfilled. From the cover to the cast of Characters that opens the book – lead by ‘Imogen ‘Genie’ Zula Nyoni: around whose life and death the events of this story take place’ - I warmed increasingly to this work. And it is invaluable to be able to refer back to a ‘who’s who’ in a novel of such richly woven intensity. Following the Characters is the Prologue which lightly introduces the reader to what is to befall some of these intriguing players. Like Baines Tikiti who ‘in a bid to quench his wanderlust, walked into the Indian Ocean’, and ‘how Elizabeth Nyoni sealed her fate with the turn of her ankle’. In it, Ndlovu also reveals that what happens to Genie is not in a vacuum, but ‘the result of a culmination of genealogies, histories, teleologies, epistemologies and epidemiologies – of ways of living, remembering, seeing, knowing and dying.’ So now I am completely hooked. The body of the book is divided into two ‘books’ and many parts with chapters focusing on the journey and development of each of the individual characters. Set somewhere in Africa, it begins with ‘Genesis’ and the exotic story of Genie’s grandparents, specifically Baines who had fallen in love with a contraption that could fly through the sky. It closes with a majestic herd of elephants raising dust in the early morning savannah sunlight – and overhead an aeroplanes silver wings flashing in the golden sky. What happens in between is a wealth of words and images. It’s informed in part by Ndlovu’s own childhood memories of playing in a field of sunflowers, and by her deep affinity for history. But also, as she put it in an interview, ‘by a group of characters who became my friends and wanted me to tell their stories.’ In terms of style, as someone who though Zimbabwean by birth, has lived in many countries and read widely, she cites the lyricism of writers like Yvonne Vera and Alice Walker as having been inspiring. A recurring line in the text is ‘there are eyes that are not for beauty to see.’ Make of that what you will, but what is interesting to know is that this during the time of writing Theory of Flight, Ndlovu was also working on a PhD dissertation on the theme of Travel and Belonging. More interesting still is that she has finished a second book, picking up on some of the characters here and is already working on a third. I for one, can’t wait. Nancy Richards Woman Zone Cape Town received a copy of this book to review, on behalf of Breakaway Reviewers.

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