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Prologue
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Theory of Flight, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Individual Aspiration vs. Group Belonging
Colonialism and Postcolonialism
Love, Family, and Selfishness
Gender and Sexuality
Beauty
Summary
Analysis
Genesis. The morning after Elizabeth Nyoni has sex with Golide Gumede, she feels an object pass out of her body and land on her mattress: a golden egg. On seeing the egg, Elizabeth realizes she and Golide are now forever linked.
Elizabeth’s golden egg may be an allusion to “The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg,” one of Aesop’s fables, in which a farmer kills his goose that lays golden eggs trying to find a massive amount of wealth inside it but finds nothing, thus depriving himself of his steady income. The fable illustrates how greed can cause people to ruin sources of value. The allusion to Aesop may foreshadow a bad end for Elizabeth (who laid the egg) or the egg itself. In the prologue, wings symbolized individual aspiration, so this golden egg may symbolize Elizabeth’s aspirations. Yet the egg also connects her to Golide, which complicates the distinction between individual and shared aspirations.
Themes
In a flashback, Golide’s father—initially named Bafana Ndlelaphi—is born on the farm of Mr. Chalmers, who teaches him to read and write, unusual skills for young Black people in that time and place. With these skills, Bafana becomes the assistant to a traveling salesman, discovers he adores travel, and—having read about explorers like David Livingstone and Thomas Baines in Mr. Chalmers’s library—changes his name to Baines Tikiti, which means “a ticket—something one purchased in order to go on a journey. Something that gave one purpose.”
David Livingstone (1813–1873) was a Scottish missionary; Thomas Baines (1820–1875) was an English artist. Both were famous for exploring Africa. Context clues suggest that the novel’s events take place in Africa, in an area colonized by the British, in the first half of the 20th century. Bafana Ndlelaphi’s decision to take a new name reflecting his “purpose,” i.e., to take “journey[s],” shows that people’s aspirations deeply shape their identities.
Themes
Female customers adore Baines, who manages to convince many poor women to spend their last money on defective goods. Yet when he reaches the town that later becomes the Beauford Farm and Estate, Baines meets Prudence Ngoma, who rejects his goods one after another. Soon enough, Baines asks Prudence to marry him. In return, she asks where he’s from; when he says Ezulwini, she replies that she hasn’t heard of it. Shortly after, they marry and move to Ezulwini.
Prudence’s comment that she’s never heard of Baines’s hometown seems dismissive. Yet shortly after she makes the comment, she decides to marry him and move there. This decision implies that Prudence finds places she’s never heard of attractive—that she, like Baines, aspires to travel.
Themes
Though married, Baines still loves travel. He gets a job in South Africa as a traveling gramophone salesman. After supporting Prudence from afar for five years, Baines returns, tells her about South Africa (which makes her want to join him there), and gets her pregnant. After she has a son—named “Livingstone Stanley Tikiti” by Baines in a letter—she waits two years before traveling to South Africa.
Baines names his son after explorer David Livingstone, as if to inspire the baby to love travel, and his stories make Prudence want to see South Africa too. Although travel may be Baines’s individual ambition, it also affects—and sometimes inspires—the people around him.
Themes
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Baines’s apartment in South Africa is covered with pictures of airplanes. As Baines explains how airplanes will revolutionize travel, Prudence pictures both their family reunited and her own future experience of flight. She goes home and waits for Baines to earn enough money for her and Livingstone Stanley Tikiti to join him. After five years, Baines sends for them—but, discovering that his son is an albino, he sends his family back to Ezulwini. He does this despite loving his son, who’s also fascinated with airplanes.
Prudence imagines both that her family will reunite and that she will have a chance to fly—a group aspiration and an individual one. Yet Baines is unwilling to live with his albino son, implicitly due to cultural prejudices against albino people (e.g., that they bring bad luck or contain evil spirits) in sub-Saharan Africa. Baines’s selfish failure to accept his son thwarts Prudence’s aspirations both for herself and for their family.
Themes
Prudence returns home pregnant with a daughter, Minenhle. She moves to her hometown, now the Beauford Farm and Estate. Livingtone Stanley Tikiti retains, from the trip to South Africa, a few impressions of his father and “a knowledge and understanding of flight.” Baines keeps sending the family money; Prudence, unwilling to accept the man who rejected her son, sends it back. After receiving yet another unopened envelope, Baines wades into the Indian Ocean and lets it take him. When Prudence learns of this, she hopes it quenches his “wanderlust.”
Despite Livingstone’s rejection by his father, he holds onto the “knowledge and understanding of flight” he learned from his father, showing the unexpected influences individuals can have on each other. Baines’s decision to drown shows how painful his loss of family belonging was to him—even though it was self-inflicted—and how his individual aspiration to travel wasn’t enough to mitigate that loss.
Themes
From Baines, Prudence learns to value character over charm. She raises Livingstone Stanley Tikiti to be a man of character. When the war begins, he joins the freedom fighters and changes his name to Golide Gumede, “fields of gold,” because he wants a future of material and immaterial goods for his people. When a superior sees his drawings of airplanes, he is sent to the U.S.S.R. to become an aeronautical engineer.
Prudence raises Livingstone to be the opposite of Baines. And indeed, while Livingstone renames himself as Baines did, he renames himself for a group aspiration (a prosperous future for the country) rather than a potentially selfish individual one (adventure) as Baines did. Though the novel never names the country where it takes place, various clues (the author’s birthplace, the country’s proximity to South Africa) suggest Zimbabwe. During the Zimbabwe War of Independence (1964–1979), the U.S.S.R. gave support to an African communist political party called the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) with an associated guerilla organization, the Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA).
Themes
Upon returning from the U.S.S.R., Golide sees a woman’s ankle through a Victoria Falls beer hall’s open door and longs for her. Opening the door wider, he discovers a woman with “dark brown skin” and blond hair—Elizabeth Nyoni, a singer whose role model is Dolly Parton. That day, Golide and Elizabeth spend hours together. He tells her his dream, to have a home on Beauford Farm and Estate; she tells him hers, to fly to Nashville and become a country singer. They swear to aid each other’s dreams. Golide realizes he didn’t study airplanes for his father—he’s been preparing his whole life to help Elizabeth.
American country singer Dolly Parton released her debut album in 1967, so Golide and Elizabeth met in 1967 at the earliest—but likely later, when Parton had become more famous. Elizabeth’s dream to fly to Nashville more tightly connects the motif of flight to individual aspirations. Yet her and Golide’s oath to support one another’s dreams suggests that individual aspirations need not necessarily damage people’s relationships.
Themes
Golide knows that airplane parts are expensive, but he wants to teach people they’re “still capable of flight, and at no cost to themselves.” He decides to shoot down a passenger plane and salvage the parts. His superiors agree to the plan. On September 3, 1978—which, Golide muses, is the 140th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s escape from slavery—Golide is preparing to shoot down a plane when he sees elephants approaching the Zambezi River. First one plunges in, then the others. Golide, overcome, envisions Elizabeth hatching a daughter from a golden egg. Then he shoots down the plane.
African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1817/1818–1895) escaped from slavery on September 3, 1838. The Zimbabwe People’s Revolutionary Army (ZIPRA) shot down a passenger plane, Air Rhodesia Flight 825, on September 3, 1978. The majority of passengers died in the crash. The juxtaposition of images here—Douglass’s escape, ZIPRA’s attack, and the hatching of Elizabeth’s egg—may suggest that aspirations toward progress, freedom, and (re)birth require violence, or it may simply suggest that seemingly disparate people are linked by coincidences across history.
Themes
