Flying Africans
Legendary figures of Gullah/Geechee culture — the Creole communities of the Lowcountry of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. The legend holds that certain enslaved Africans, particularly those recently arrived from Africa, retained the ability to fly. When the conditions of their enslavement became unbearable, they would simply rise into the air and fly home to Africa.
The most cited account is the Ibo Landing, in which a group of enslaved Igbo people from Nigeria, upon arriving in chains at St. Simons Island, Georgia, turned and walked into the water — singing — and drowned rather than submit to enslavement. In the folk retelling, they flew.
Flight as Liberation
The Flying Africans legend is one of the most powerful aeromythic narratives in American culture precisely because it transforms an act of desperation into an act of sovereignty. Flight is the ultimate refusal of bondage — not escape, but transcendence. The sky is freedom’s final address.
The legend recurs in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, in Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, and in the broader tradition of Afrofuturism — which consistently uses the imagery of flight and spaceflight as a metaphor for Black liberation from earthly oppression.