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.

2 Laing, Kojo, Major Gentl and the Achimota Wars (Oxford: Heinemann, 1992)Google Scholar.

3 Issifou, Moussa, “Beyond the Language Debate in Postcolonial Literature: Linguistic Hybridity in Kojo B. Laing’s Woman of the Aeroplanes ,” Journal of Pan African Studies 6.5 (2013)Google Scholar, accessed November 20, 2015.

4 Ngaboh-Smart, Francis, Beyond Empire and Nation: Postnational Arguments in the Fiction of Nuruddin Farah and B. Kojo Laing. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 144 Google Scholar.

5 All in-text paginations come from Kojo Laing, Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters.

6 Cooper, Brenda, Magical Realism in West African Fiction: Seeing with a Third Eye (New York: Routledge, 1998), 205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ngaboh-Smart, Beyond Empire and Nation, 146.

8 Kropp Dakubu, M. E., “Representations Transformations in the Fiction of Kojo Laing: The ‘Language of Authentic Being’ Revisited.” Connotations 8.3 (1998/1999): 358 Google Scholar.

9 Zeleza, Paul. Science and Technology in Africa (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003), 2 Google Scholar.

10 Wright, Derek, “Returning Voyagers: The Ghanaian Novel in the Nineties,” Journal of Modern African Studies 34 (Spring 1996): 187 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Elder, Arlene, Narrative Shapeshifting: Myth, Humor, and History in the Fiction of Ben Okri, B. Kojo Laing, and Yvonne Vera. (Martlesham, Suffolk: James Curry, 2009), 88 Google Scholar. It is not clear just who has decided that African authors are ethically mandated to remain serious on the subject matter of Africa’s postcolonial challenges, but we can presume that such a prescription comes from Arlene Elder herself. This form of “policing” native performance recalls Roger Berger’s rejection of similar complaints in the context of Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross in “Ngugi’s Comic Vision,” Research in African Literatures 20.1 (1989): 1–25.

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.

13 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations and Simulacra, trans. Sheila Faria Glaswer (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Ppress, 1994), 2 Google Scholar.

14 Rushdie, Salman, Shame (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 1983), 22 Google Scholar.

15 The name Ghana, too, has its historical complications—arising to honor an empire located north and inland from the country that later adopted its name, chosen in part to resuture the newly independent country into a history outside the traumatic intercession of Europe, pointing to the fraught intersection of history and nomenclature. To be sure, throughout Laing’s work, the theme of (re-)locating lost geographies plays an important role.

16 Fabian, Johannes, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 16–31 Google Scholar.

17 Laing, Kojo, “This Is Not a Paper,” Anglophonia-Caliban: French Journal of English Studies, textes réunis par C. Fioupou (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2000), 105 Google Scholar.

18 Appiah, Anthony, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 120–121 Google Scholar.

19 Fukuyama, Francis, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Picador, 2002), 153–154 Google Scholar.

20 One might, I presume, respond with “robot” or “android” slaves, the notion of machines as slaves informing such SF classics as Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) and Asimov’s I, Robot (1950). But such an example begs the question: in order for the concept of slavery to truly apply, the cyborgs in question must have self-reflection and consciousness. They stand in for, rather than supplant, the original labor-bearing body of the African slave.

21 Gibson, William, Neuromancer (New York: Ace, 1984), 6 Google Scholar.

22 Haraway, Donna, The Haraway Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004), 299 Google Scholar.

23 Consider the following passage, which incorporates the realms of the subconscious into the empirical space of the laboratory: “Roko believed that after his discovery of the God-gene in a dream (a well-researched dream) the scientists in Canterbury were now saying it didn’t exist. Fine, dreams didn’t exist either, in the same narrow emotional terms of doing science” (44).

24 Consider this in terms of Roko’s 1986; the novel literally initiates an end-of-days moment that, at the novel’s close, breaks open into what might be considered a new historical paradigm (339).

25 Baudrillard, Jean, Simulations, trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983): 103 Google Scholar.

26 “And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them . . . and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection” (KJV Rev. 20:3–4).

27 Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx (New York: Routledge, 2006): 80ff Google Scholar.

28 The Deputy Jesus frequently shifts between races, ethnicities, and genders, as for example on pages 49, 61, 148, and 189.

29 Tracy Packiam Alloway, “Selfies, Facebook and Narcissism: What’s the Link?” Psychology Today Online, May 11, 2014. Web. Accessed July 10, 2014.

30 World Bank, “Internet Users per 100 People: Ghana 2006.” Worldbank.org. N.d. Web. Accessed March 3, 2016; Linnet Taylor, “Inside the Black Box of Internet Adoption,” Policy & Internet, April 19, 2015. Web. Accessed June 19, 2015, doi: 10.1002/poi3.87 (2015); Chinn, Menzie and Farlie, Robert, “The Determinants of the Global Digital Divide: A Cross-Country Analysis of Computer and Internet Penetration,” Economic Growth Center Discussion Paper No. 881 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004 Google Scholar; Fuchs, Christian and Horak, Eva, “Africa and the Digital Divide,” Telematics and Informatics 25 (2008): 99–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oyeleran-Oyeyinka, Banji and Lal, Kaushalesh, “Internet Diffusion in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Cross-Country Analysis,” Telecommunications Policy 29 (2005): 507–527 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.