The Theory of Flight Study Guide

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu was born in 1977 in the city of Bulawayo in what is now Zimbabwe (during its colonial period, it was called Southern Rhodesia and, at points, Rhodesia). Due to political violence in the lead-up to Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence, Ndlovu’s family fled to Sweden when she was very young and then moved to the U.S. After Zimbabwe’s independence, they returned, and Ndlovu lived there until leaving to attend Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BFA from Emerson in 2000. She later earned an MFA in Film Studies from Ohio University, an MA in African Studies from Ohio University, and a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. In 2003, a short film she directed, “Graffiti,” won a Silver Dhow at the Zanzibar International Film Festival, an important festival held annually in Tanzania since 1997. In the mid-2010s she left the U.S.; she has since lived in both Zimbabwe and South Africa. In 2018, she published her first novel, The Theory of Flight, for which she won South Africa’s Sunday Times Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The History of Man (2020), continues the stories of characters introduced in her first novel; she has plans to write four novels in this series.

The Theory of Flight takes place in an unnamed country implied to be Zimbabwe during its colonial period, civil war, and postcolonial independence. It represents the devastating effects of both political violence and the HIV/AIDS pandemic on Zimbabweans. In the late 19th century, the land now known as Zimbabwe was invaded by the British South Africa Company (BSAC), a corporation seeking to exploit Africa’s natural resources. In 1923, the U.K. annexed the land and named it Southern Rhodesia after BSAC founder Cecil Rhodes. In 1965, the colony’s white minority government declared independence from the U.K. and began calling itself Rhodesia. From roughly 1964–1979, a civil war was fought between said white minority government, a guerrilla army associated with an African nationalist party called the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU), and a guerilla army associated with another African nationalist party called the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU). In 1980, Zimbabwe gained its independence, and the leader of ZANU, Robert Mugabe, became its prime minister. He served as prime minister from 1980 to 1987 and as president from 1987 to 2017, when he was unseated in a coup. From 1982 to 1987, Mugabe’s ZANU soldiers carried out a campaign of incarceration, rape, and execution against suspected political dissidents, primarily of the Ndebele and Kalanga ethnicities, in west, southwest, and central Zimbabwe. This campaign, now known as the Gukurahundi genocide, killed approximately 20,000 and is repeatedly alluded to in The Theory of Flight. Also in the mid-1980s, cases of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe spiked dramatically; by the turn of the millennium, almost a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population was HIV-positive, though in recent years the prevalence has dropped to approximately 13 percent.

Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu has named several older Zimbabwean authors as touchpoints for her work. In high school, she read Coming of the Dry Season, a collection of short stories by Charles Mungoshi that was banned in colonial Rhodesia. The collection contains a description of a violent car accident, to which Ndlovu pays homage in The Theory of Flight. In addition to Charles Mungoshi, Ndlovu has been deeply influenced by fellow Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangarembga, particularly her 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, set after Southern Rhodesia’s white-dominated government declared independence from the U.K. but before Zimbabwe’s 1980 independence. Ndlovu wrote about both Mungoshi and Dangarembga in her PhD thesis at Stanford, as well as other famous authors associated with Southern Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, such as Doris Lessing, Shimmer Chinodya, and Yvonne Vera. In addition to indirectly representing much of Zimbabwe’s modern history, The Theory of Flight is also a magical-realist novel. Famous magical-realist novels include Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Finally, The Theory of Flight makes repeated reference to the poem “Binsley Poplars” by English poet and Jesuit Catholic priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. As “Binsley Poplars” represents the destruction of nature’s beauty by careless, greedy humanity, The Theory of Flight may use it to underline how a corrupt, powerful minority has exploited and harmed Zimbabwe’s land and people in both the colonial and postcolonial periods.