Kano

Kano, in Nigeria, appears in Romain Gary’s wartime account as the setting of a crash that left its crew unharmed but revealed the precarious conditions of flying in Africa. The incident also sharpens the contrast between the human risk of the air missions and the shortage of machines available to the Royal Air Force.

Setting and Wartime Context

Kano enters the narrative during Gary’s service in Africa, where aircraft and crews were stretched thin. The account gives the place a specific role rather than a sustained portrait: it is where a sandstorm interrupts a flight and turns an ordinary movement through the air into a crash.

The Crash

At Kano, the aircraft was caught in a sandstorm, struck a tree, and crashed with enough force to leave a hole three feet deep in the ground. Gary and the others aboard emerged stunned but unhurt. The account emphasizes the improbable survival without describing lasting injury or a change in the crew’s immediate status.

The Royal Air Force was annoyed by the loss. Aircraft were difficult to obtain, and the reaction, as Gary recalls it, treated the machine as more valuable than the lives of the French airmen. The crash thus records not only a hazardous flight but also the unequal measure applied to people and equipment within a strained wartime operation.

Place in Gary’s Wartime Account

The Kano crash is followed by another aircraft accident the next day, this time involving a Blenheim that overturned during takeoff and caught fire; Gary and his companion again escaped without serious harm. The second crash is not located in Kano, but its place in the sequence makes the first incident part of a wider pattern of perilous flying rather than an isolated mishap.

Later, frustrated by having too many crews and too few machines, Gary applied to transfer to a Royal Air Force unit ferrying aircraft along the route from the Gold Coast through Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Egypt toward the Libyan battlefields. In that broader account, Kano marks the vulnerability of the aircraft-and-crew system before Gary sought a role in moving scarce machines across the continent.