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“Let Us All Mutate Together”: Cracking the Code in Laing’s Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 October 2016

Ian P. MacDonald
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Abstract

Both Derek Wright and Francis Ngaboh-Smart have interpreted Laing’s Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992) as an allegory for the emergence of the Internet. In that novel, a future Africa has been digitally erased from the Web archive, and the story follows a civil war aimed at reintegrating the continent into the global scene. Beginning from this reading, I approach Laing’s next work, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006), as a formal sequel to Major Gentl, investigating the changing landscape of global digital access and its potential as a site of resistance over the decade that separates their publication. If, in Major Gentl, West Africans have been exiled from the Web, the eponymous protagonist in Roko uses networked access to interrupt neoliberal economic and social engineering underway in the global North. Through experiments in “genetic mutation”—a metaphor for cyborgian transformation from biological to networked existence—Roko hacks the evolutionary process and forces Africa’s voice into the digital sphere in an attempt to remedy that technology’s unequal distribution. In both novels, Laing indigenizes science fiction using a technique I refer to as jujutech—a hybrid of science fiction and African folk traditions. The resulting style identifies the ways the genre itself mutates and evolves as it escapes the gravity of its Euro-American roots. Laing’s decision to publish Roko electronically further points to form following function, highlighting new avenues for the dissemination of experimental African works in underrepresented genres.

Keywords

African literaturescience fictionKojo LaingBig Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsterspostcolonialismtranshumanismcyborginternettechnologypostmodernismdigital divide
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 3 , Special Issue 3: Special Issue: African Science Fiction , September 2016 , pp. 313 - 328
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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References

1 Laing, Kojo, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (Accra: Woeli, 2006)Google Scholar. This goes so far as to have events and claims recur in nearly identical language at several spots in the novel as if the text were “rebooting” to this earlier moment. This occurs, for example, with the description of Bishop Bender’s arrival on pages 181 and 242, as well as with the Wordman’s mediations regarding the beginning of the universe on pages 158 and 225.

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12 Although it cannot make up a significant portion of this treatment, there is a way to see Laing’s characterization in his most recent novels as indirectly partaking in the para-SF genre of the superhero. Roko’s specific access to jujutech and the iconic and hyperbolic nature of his adversaries (the Pope, Zala, the Archbishop, Bender, Solo, and so forth, each with their own access to alternative magics and technologies) call to mind the pantheon of (anti-) heroes that populate the worlds of publishing entities like DC or Marvel, beings whose powers are, like Roko’s, also often the result of genetic mutation. In the same way that Gotham serves as an extension of Batman, or Superman embodies Metropolis, “Gold Coast city,” the Vatican, and “Canterbury city” operate more as home hunting grounds for their super(naturally)-powered protectors than as actually existing spaces. This could very well be read as an ironic response to early representations of the political in African literature—like A Man of the People (1966) or Season of Anomy (1973)—which in turn, as argues, Ngaboh-Smart, “may easily lead to a redemptive politics and the belief that somewhere there is a superhuman being that would free the masses from the gloom and apathy of politics” (92)Google Scholar.

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