(Bernard) Kojo Laing (1946– ) is a notable fiction writer and poet from Ghana who attended school in the United Kingdom and graduated from Glasgow University in Scotland. Since 1985, Laing has served as headmaster at a school his mother founded in Accra. His early work was in poetry, much of it considered to be in the surrealism genre; he often uses Ghanaian Pidgin English alongside standard English. In his fiction, the surrealist impulse from his verse is often transformed into prose that exists within the territory of the speculative or outright science-fictional. His acclaimed novels include Search Sweet Country (1986), reissued by McSweeney’s in 2012; Women of the Aeroplanes (1988); and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (1992). His work has been awarded the National Poetry Prize Valco Award and the National Novel Prize in Ghana.
In her review of the novel in Slate Book Review, Uzodinma Iweala wrote, “Reading Search Sweet Country is like reading a dream, and indeed at times it feels like the magical landscapes of writers like the Nigerian Ben Okri or the Mozambican Mia Couto. Each page delivers an intense blast of vivid imagery, a world in which landscapes come to life when inanimate objects receive human characterization.” Women of the Aeroplanes, meanwhile, is regarded as a utopian fantasy of sorts, set in Africa and Scotland, and Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars is a complex set of experimental fictions set in 2020 in “Achimota City,” an environment indebted somewhat to cyberpunk conceptions of the future.
Although Laing hasn’t written much short fiction, “Vacancy for the Post of Jesus Christ” is a kinetic and clever take on the alien contact story that also interrogates organized religion and general human nature. It originally appeared in The Heinemann Book of Contemporary African Stories (1992), edited by Chinua Achebe and C. L. Innes.