Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu’s 2018 novel, The Theory of Flight, takes place in an unnamed country and features a main character, Genie, who has fantastical beginnings. Genie wasn’t born; she hatches from a golden egg and dies by ascending above the clouds on silver wings. Though the setting is unnamed, it is obvious that Siphiwe is writing about Zimbabwe. As the judges of the 2022 edition of the Windham Campbell Prize described her this month, “Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu is both a chronicler and a conjurer whose soaring imagination creates a Zimbabwean past made of anguish and hope, of glory and despair: the story of the generations born at the crossroads of a country’s history.” Siphiwe is from Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, Bulawayo, and this is where a lot of the action of the novel takes place.

Siphiwe studied screenwriting in a US college and has a postgraduate degree in film. Her short film, Graffiti, has won film prizes such as the Silver Dhow Award at the Zanzibar International Film Festival in 2003. I have interviewed her before, discussing the Afrofuturist themes in The Theory of Flight (this was her first novel; her second is The History of Man). But this time, what interests me is how she writes about race in Zimbabwe in The Theory of Flight. I was struck by one character in particular: Vida, or Jesus, who is Genie’s great love. He is what is known in southern Africa as “coloured”—shorthand for a person of mixed race, though it points to a more complex history than just mixing. In a video interview with Siphiwe about The Theory of Flight, English professor Tsitsi Jaji, who is also from Zimbabwe, said about Vida/Jesus: “I have to say: I have never read a novel that took a coloured Zimbabwean seriously, as [someone with] a rich and complex inner life as well as social life, [like The Theory of Flight does].” The interview explores these themes.