Kumasi

Kumasi is the nearest named location to the crash of a Blenheim bomber carrying Romain Gary across Africa. The aircraft came down in the bush south of the city during a ferrying flight, killing the pilot and navigator while Gary escaped physically unharmed. In the memoir, the place is associated not with a stopover but with the isolation and shock that followed the wreck.

Setting and Route

Gary’s flight belonged to an aircraft-ferrying route linking the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, and Egypt. Machines arrived in crates at Takoradi, where they were assembled before being flown across the continent toward the Libyan battlefields. With too many crews and too few aircraft, Gary sought a transfer to this work partly to escape the boredom and frustration of his existing circumstances. He made only one trip on the route, and his aircraft never reached Cairo.

The Crash South of Kumasi

The Blenheim crashed in the bush south of Kumasi. Gary survived without a scratch, but the pilot from New Zealand and the navigator were killed. He and the dead men’s fate were thus divided by the accident: he could leave the wreck alive, while the two others could not. Gary had to dig their resting place by hand, and the effort, the surrounding flies, and the sight of the crash’s aftermath overwhelmed him. When rescue planes circled overhead, he waved them away, mistaking their drone for the insects around him.

Narrative Significance

Kumasi marks the point where Gary’s attempt to exchange inactivity for purposeful flying instead brought him into immediate contact with death. His survival did not make the crash a clean escape: the deaths of his companions and the task of burying them left him shaken. The rescue aircraft’s presence offered a way out, yet his confused gesture briefly turned help away. The episode makes the African ferry route more than a line across a map; at Kumasi, it becomes the setting for a loss that Gary carries beyond the crash site.