Background

Bernard Kojo Laing was born on July 1, 1946, in Kumasi in the Ashanti region of Ghana. He was the eldest of six children and was baptized Bernard Ebenezer, but he later dropped his Christian name in favor of his African identity.

Laing’s father, George Ekyem Ferguson Laing, was the first African rector of the Anglican Theological College in Kumasi. His mother was Darling Egan.

Education

Although Laing’s family belonged to the educated middle class, they were by no means rich. Laing had to sell snacks on the street in Accra when he was a child. His disgust with this experience influenced his perception of the city and is distinctly expressed in his writings.

Laing spent the first five years of his early education in Accra and was later sent to Scotland in 1957, where he had both his primary and secondary education. In 1968, he graduated from Glasgow University with a master’s degree.

Laing also studied rural administration at the University of Birmingham in 1975. At the university, Laing was first influenced by the existentialists and was introduced to various African poets, who were beginning to get international attention. Also, during this time, Laing began to publish his own poetry in several Scottish poetry journals.

Career

In 1969, Laing returned to Ghana, after graduating his studies abroad. Throughout the 1970s, Laing, who dropped his Christian name for writing purposes, continued to write poetry.

In 1978, he was moved to Accra, where he served his government through the many years of tumult and political chaos that enveloped his nation. He worked for five years as an administrative secretary of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana-Legon and in 1984 became head of Saint Anthony’s School in Accra, which had been established by his mother. The same year he began writing novels.

From 2005, Laing devoted himself full-time to writing.

In 2010, he traveled to Cape Town to write for Pilgrimages, a program sponsored by the Chinua Achebe Center for African Writers and Artists to foster writing about Africa during the 2010 World Cup.

Achievements

• Laing’s main contribution to world literature is his ability to create a hybrid of languages and images from both the traditional African and modern Western worlds.
  
  Laing received the National Poetry Prize Valco Award in 1976 and the National Novel Prize from the Ghana Association of Writers in 1985. In addition to winning the VALCO Literary Award, Search Sweet Country also won the Ghana Book Award.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars

    (The rebirth of Africa in the year 2020 AD is the starting...)

    1992
  • Woman of the Aeroplanes

    (Critically acclaimed Ghanaian author Kojo Laing’s second ...)

    1988
  • Search Sweet Country

    (Accra, Ghana, the 1970s. In the streets, marketplaces and...)

    1986
  • Godhorse 1989
  • Big Bishop Roko and the Alter Gangsters 2006

Views

Like many fellow Africans of the postcolonial era, Ghanian author Kojo Laing is a product of two different, often conflicting worlds. Laing, who emerged as one of the most recognized writers in his homeland during the 1970s and 1980s, explored the contradictions and hostilities in a world shaped by both African traditions and European colonial policies.

His works, such as Godhorse (1989), appropriate the common symbol of technology, such as the car, and by simplifying its locomotive movements, compare it with daily human actions, such as walking or transplanting crops in the fields. By carefully and cleverly blending mixed symbols and language, Laing reveals the complexity of interdependent relationships within society.

Occasionally drawing on the techniques of surrealism, Laing’s poetry addresses themes of alienation and identity. His novels likewise combine the real and supernatural, often in international settings. Laing sees the battle between technology and heritage as an important part of this cultural clash, and his novels often revolve around the way new generations of Africans can amalgamate the two themes. Often Laing’s characters lean towards one or the other, and thus cause further social conflict. However, Laing, who was educated in both Ghana and Scotland, makes it obvious that he favors both technology and tradition and believes social wounds can only be healed with compromise and understanding.

Personality

Laing is a unique poet whose poetic subjects, form, and techniques are inimitable. His linguistic dexterity and unusual images are bound to charm the reader.

Laing was particularly enamored of the work of Shakespeare, whose work encouraged him to begin writing poetry.

One of his favorite pastimes was hunting, which provided him with a source of imagery.

Interests

• Hunting

• Writers

  William Shakespeare

Connections

Laing was married to Josephine Forbes, a social worker. Later, the couple divorced. They had six children.

Father:

George Ekyem Ferguson Laing

Mother:

Darling Egan Laing

ex-wife:

Josephine Forbes

References

• Dictionary of Literary Biography: Sixteenth-Century British Nondramatic Writers unknown Edition
  1996
• Magical Realism in West African Fiction This study contextualizes magical realism within current debates and theories of postcoloniality and examines the fiction of three of its West African pioneers: Syl Cheney-Coker of Sierra Leone, Ben Okri of Nigeria and Kojo Laing of Ghana.
  1998
• Narrative Shape-Shifting: Myth, Humor and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera: 0 Responding to many of the same neo-colonial concerns as earlier African writers, Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing and Yvonne Vera bring contemporary, hybrid voices to their novels that explore spiritual, cultural and feminist solutions to Africa's complex post-independence dilemmas.
  2009
• Beyond Empire and Nation: Postnational Arguments in the Fiction of Nuruddin Farah and B. Kojo Laing The impact of nationalism on the emergence and development of African literature is now well documented. Globalization or the postnational state it seems to herald, the emblematic phenomenon of our era, has not received much attention.
  2004