The Theory of Flight Summary

In a colonized country implied to be Zimbabwe, a young Black man who loves travel, Baines Tikiti, marries a woman named Prudence but leaves to sell gramophones in South Africa. Years later, he pays for her and his son (Livingstone Stanley Tikiti) to visit. Although he teaches them about his new obsession (airplanes), he ultimately sends them away again due to his son’s albinism. He keeps sending money, but Prudence sends it back—a rejection that motivates him to walk into the ocean and let it take him away.

Livingstone grows up in Prudence’s hometown, called the Beauford Farm and Estate ever since a British colonizer bought it. During the civil war, Livingstone joins the freedom fighters and changes his name to Golide Gumele. When his superiors learn of the airplane obsession he inherited from Baines, they send him to the USSR to study aeronautics. On his return, he meets an aspiring country singer named Elizabeth Nyoni, who tells him she wants to fly to Nashville. Golide resolves to make her dream come true one day. He decides to construct an airplane out of spare parts from a downed plane.

In 1974, soldiers invade the Beauford Farm and Estate. They force one pretty schoolgirl, Thandi, to jump into a latrine. Afterward, Elizabeth, carrying a golden egg, moves to the farm. When Elizabeth mentions that Thandi could model, Thandi runs away to the city to do so, and she becomes involved with a man named Dingani Masuku. After Dingani wins a scholarship to study in the U.S., Thandi realizes she’s pregnant. She and Dingani marry. They leave their son Marcus with Thandi’s parents on the farm and move to the U.S.

During the war, on September 3, 1978, Golide sees elephants crossing the Zambezi River, has a vision of Elizabeth hatching their daughter from a golden egg, and shoots down a passenger plane carrying white heiress Beatrice Beit-Beauford (who survives), her two mixed-race sons, and others. Beatrice, after inheriting the Beauford Farm and Estate from her colonizer father, used her wealth to fund the freedom fighters. She was flying to face charges of treason engineered against her by the colonial government’s spymaster, Emil Coetzee. She survives the plane crash, but her sons and several others die.

After the war, Marcus has become friends with Elizabeth’s daughter Genie, who hatched from the golden egg. Near the farm, the children find a sunflower field and an abandoned car, in which they pretend to travel. One day, they’re playing in the field when Golide appears. When Genie, Golide, and Elizabeth reunite, Marcus feels he belongs with them. But in the U.S., Thandi and Dingani hear of violent civil unrest occurring near the farm. They decide to move home and take Marcus away. They arrive with Golide and Elizabeth to the sunflower field where Marcus and Genie are playing and force Marcus into their car. Genie tries to rescue him, but when Elizabeth tells her to let Marcus go, she does—breaking Marcus’s heart.

Later, The Man Himself—the postcolonial nation’s corrupt leader—sends a journalist named Bhekithemba to investigate a cult forming on the Beauford Farm and Estate around Golide, who is building silver wings to fly his wife to Nashville. After Bhekithemba’s article comes out, soldiers invade the farm and massacre many inhabitants. They rape Jestina Nxumalo, Thandi’s parents’ servant, and force her to serve Thandi’s parents poisoned tea. After the soldiers leave, Jestina wanders the farm, dazed, before returning to her employers’ house, where she finds a terrified Genie. Community members rush in, demanding to know where Golide is; they believe the article about him brought the soldiers. Genie claims that her parents flew off. The community demands that Jestina take Genie away. On their way out of the compound, Genie tells Jestina that she plans to choose her own endings from now on.

Dingani and Thandi adopt Genie. One day, after waiting a long time for Thandi to pick them up from school, Genie and their daughter Krystle walk to Dingani’s office, where they overhear Thandi and Dingani fighting. Genie wants to go to a friend’s house; when Krystle balks, Genie suggests she wait for her parents in the lobby. After Genie leaves, Krystle changes her mind and runs after Genie. Genie tries to recross a busy street to fetch Krystle—and a distracted driver, Kuki, hits Genie with her car, sending her flying.

A mixed-race homeless man, Vida, catches Genie in his cart. As a teenager, Vida fell in love with Kuki and Emil Coetzee’s son. After the son died in the war, Vida enlisted, hoping to be killed. On September 3, 1978, at age 17, he encountered Golide, who stuck him up with an AK-47 but didn’t shoot him. After the war, Vida decides to live on the streets. When war and HIV/AIDS orphans, including a gang called The Survivors, start making trouble, Vida begins intervening to help people—as he does with Genie.

A few years after the car accident, Genie is sitting with Marcus, telling him about the elephants she once saw crossing the Zambezi, when Marcus kisses her. She hurries away. Later, Krystle hears yelling downstairs. When she enters the kitchen, she finds her family terribly upset. Marcus is asking how it’s possible that Genie has HIV. When Dingani and Thandi explain you can get HIV from blood transfusions as well as sex, Krystle remembers the car accident and concludes Genie’s HIV is her fault—but later, when she begs Genie’s forgiveness, Genie claims Krystle doesn’t need to be forgiven.

When Genie turns 18, she leaves the Masukus’ home and moves onto the streets with Vida, claiming it’s her turn to save his life. She helps him salvage scrap metal, and he shows her what he’s been doing with it: welding together sculptures of street people he knows in a secret warehouse. One day, Genie cuts herself in the warehouse, orders Vida to stay away, and tells him her life story. Vida decides to accept Genie completely. They move into a run-down mansion Vida inherited from his white ancestor, and they begin a relationship—though she makes him promise not to talk about love to her.

Genie shows Vida’s sculptures to Beatrice, whom she met while Beatrice was in a nursing home. Beatrice buys them and donates them to a public park. Critics rave about their “postcolonial” aesthetic—until The Man Himself declares Vida “too white” to be postcolonial and orders the statues torn down. Instead, the statues are sold to international galleries. Vida starts going to an annual artists’ conference in Stockholm.

The Man Himself summons Valentine Tanaka (who works for his domestic surveillance organization), shows him a “precious and beautiful something” discovered on the Beauford Farm and Estate, and orders him to evict the war veterans squatting on it. Later, Valentine visits Beatrice at her nursing home, where she’s talking to her childhood best friend Kuki, Emil Coetzee’s ex-wife. When he tells them that he needs the deed to the farm, Beatrice tells him she sold the farm to The Survivors.

When Genie learns of the discovery on the farm, she stops taking her medication and sends out a series of items, including a Victoria Falls postcard to Krystle.

When Vida is 57, he blurts out that he loves Genie during sex. Shortly after, he leaves for Stockholm. When he returns, he finds her on their bed, covered in blood—with a funeral suit hanging prepared for him in their closet. He rushes Genie to the hospital and alerts Dingani. Seven days after Genie enters a coma, Vida visits the hospital and decides she has left her body, and he comes to a resolution.

Meanwhile, Thandi calls Marcus, who lives in the U.S. with his wife Esme, and tells him Genie’s in a coma. Afterward, Marcus calls Krystle, who doesn’t pick up. The next day, Krystle—ignoring Marcus’s calls—steps on a baby bird and sees that it’s wounded but not dead. She slides it into the box using the Victoria Falls postcard Genie sent her and brings it to an animal shelter, where a tall, flirtatious man named Xander Dangerfield accepts it. Leaving the shelter, she listens to Marcus’s messages.

Back home, Marcus, Krystle, Dingani, and Thandi discover that Genie has vanished from the hospital. They visit Valentine’s office, trying to file a missing person report. Valentine—who came to know and admire Genie after she held up under a demeaning government interrogation when she was 15—stalls the Masukus’ attempts to find her. After the veterans squatting on the Beauford Farm and Estate report that they have found her body in the sunflower field, however, he goes to inform the Masukus in person.

The next day, the Masukus’ house gets a landline call. Marcus picks up. It’s Jestina, crying. She tells him Valentine called to inform her that Genie’s body has been found and that Genie had HIV. She curses what “they” did to Genie. Marcus asks who “they” are. Jestina hangs up without explaining. Dingani abruptly declares that the 1987 massacre at the farm was his fault. He bragged to his friends that he knew the freedom fighter Golide Gumele, who was building an airplane on the farm by himself. One of them informed on him to the government. He was arrested and interrogated; during the interrogation, he blurted that Golide was building the plane to attack the government.

Valentine leads a convoy of interested parties, including Vida, Jestina, and the Masukus, to the Beauford Farm and Estate. When The Survivors and the veterans show the visitors around, Jestina asks why the compound’s houses are empty. One Survivor explains that AIDS ravaged the community. Jestina concludes that some of the soldiers who raped people during the 1987 massacre infected their victims with HIV—and that young Genie may have been one of their victims. After the convoy carries Genie’s body to one of their cars, she mysteriously flies away on “silver wings” but leaves behind a “beautiful and precious something” made of her heart.

The Man Himself meets Valentine in his office and accuses him of helping Genie escape from the hospital and die as she wished. Valentine, who secretly admired Golide, admits it. He then accuses The Man Himself of trying to hoard all the “beautiful and precious somethings” that formed from the hearts of Golide’s murdered followers—and walks out of the office.

After Genie’s funeral, Marcus leads the funeral party to the Zambezi River, where Krystle runs into Xander Dangerfield—who came to see Victoria Falls because of Genie’s postcard, which Krystle left in the box she gave him. They all watch elephants approach the river. They hold their breath as the first elephant dives in—and an airplane flies overhead.