The Histories We Were Never Taught / 01
The Afronauts
During a theatre workshop in Derry, I encountered a history I had somehow missed for almost 60 years.
Like most people of my generation, I knew the familiar story of the Space Race. The United States and NASA. The Soviet Union. Sputnik. Yuri Gagarin. Apollo 11 and the Moon landings.
I grew up during that period. I was a small child when human beings first walked on the Moon. It was one of the defining stories of the twentieth century.
But nobody had ever told me about Zambia.
The Afronauts come to Derry
The workshop was led by artists from Circus Zambia, who were visiting Derry with Afronauts, an acclaimed circus and theatre production created with Wake the Beast.
They were remarkable actors, acrobats and performers. For me, it was wonderful simply to be back in a theatre workshop, listening, creating and reconnecting with something that has been an important part of my life.
I did not get the opportunity to see the production, something I now deeply regret. But during the workshop, the performers introduced us to the extraordinary story behind it.
In 1964, as Northern Rhodesia prepared to free itself from British colonial rule and become the independent nation of Zambia, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso announced that Zambia would enter the Space Race.
Nkoloso was not simply the eccentric figure later portrayed by much of the Western media. He was a teacher, a former soldier and a veteran of Zambia’s independence struggle. He had been imprisoned and reportedly tortured for resisting colonial rule.
He established the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. His recruits were not called astronauts or cosmonauts.
He called them Afronauts.
Reaching for the Moon
Nkoloso dreamed of sending Zambians to the Moon and eventually to Mars.
One of his leading recruits was a young woman, Matha Mwamba, whom he hoped would become the first African woman in space.
His proposed Mars mission would also include two specially trained cats and a missionary. Nkoloso reportedly warned the missionary, however, that Christianity must not be forced upon any Martians they encountered.
That detail has often been used to portray the entire enterprise as absurd. Yet, coming from a man who had fought against British colonialism, there is an unmistakable political edge to it.
A missionary travelling to another world and being warned not to impose his religion upon its inhabitants?
Perhaps Nkoloso was completely serious. Perhaps some of it was satire directed at colonialism and at the two superpowers competing to control the heavens.
Perhaps it was both.
What is clear is that he did more than make a grand announcement.
Nkoloso recruited and trained young Zambians. He sought international funding and approached UNESCO and several governments for support. He wrote and spoke publicly about the programme. He attempted to place a newly independent African country within a future that appeared to belong exclusively to the most powerful nations on Earth.
Working with what they had
The Afronauts did not have NASA’s laboratories, enormous budgets or sophisticated equipment. They did not have the resources of the Soviet space programme.
There were no centrifuges, zero gravity aircraft or vast training pools in which to simulate space flight and recovery.
They worked with what they had.
Recruits were rolled down hills inside oil drums to experience disorientation. They swung from ropes to explore the sensation of free fall. Water exercises were used to practise splashdowns. Their equipment was constructed from barrels, ropes, metal, timber and whatever else was available.
It had an almost Heath Robinson quality, but beneath it was intelligence, invention and determination.
It is easy to laugh at those images from the comfort of countries with immense wealth, established universities, industrial infrastructure and governments prepared to spend billions reaching space.
But laughter misses the point.
The United States and Soviet Union had resources.
Nkoloso and the Afronauts had ingenuity, tenacity and imagination.
They also had the conviction that Africa possessed as much right as anyone else to reach for the stars.
Who is permitted to imagine the future?
The Zambian programme never launched a rocket. It lacked the money, technology and official government support necessary to do so. Zambia was never technically close to beating the United States or Soviet Union to the Moon.
That reality should not be disguised or romanticised.
But neither should the programme be dismissed as a foolish failure or reduced to a comic footnote.
Western journalists frequently portrayed Nkoloso as an amusing eccentric. Some described him in openly condescending and racist terms. His intelligence, education, military service and involvement in the struggle against colonial rule were largely pushed aside.
The image that remained was of an African man playing at science.
That tells us as much about those reporting the story as it does about Nkoloso.
When wealthy and powerful countries announce that they will reach the Moon, we call it vision.
When a man in a newly independent African country makes the same declaration, history calls it madness.
Nkoloso understood the political power of imagination.
At the moment Zambia was freeing itself from colonial rule, he refused to accept that independence meant simply inheriting the limited future others had prepared for it.
He imagined Zambia not at the margins of world history, but at the centre of humanity’s next great adventure.
The Afronauts’ story is not simply about whether an improvised rocket could have reached space. It is about who is permitted to dream, whose ambitions are treated seriously and who gets written into our shared understanding of the future.
The Africa we were shown
I arrived at the workshop knowing none of this, and I felt embarrassed.
I am widely read and well educated. I have spent much of my life working in education, psychology, theatre and community development. Yet I had reached almost 60 without ever hearing about Edward Mukuka Nkoloso or the Afronauts.
How could an entire strand of the history through which I had lived have remained invisible to me?
The answer lies partly in how my generation was taught to see Africa.
We were not educated within an African context. What little we encountered was filtered through a deeply Western and often colonial lens.
Africa was famine, poverty, conflict and charitable appeals. It was “darkest Africa” and images of “poor black babies” waiting to be rescued. It was presented as a place to be pitied, helped or civilised.
It was rarely shown as a vast and diverse continent of intellectual life, political thought, science, creativity and imagination.
We learned that the United States and Soviet Union were reaching towards the future.
Africa was portrayed as struggling to catch up with the present.
The Afronauts disrupt that comfortable version of history.
The histories we were never taught
This encounter has left me wondering what else is absent from the history I think I know.
How many discoveries have been attributed only to the people who later repeated them in Europe? How many great centres of learning have been diminished or forgotten? How many inventors, thinkers, artists and movements have been excluded because they did not fit the story the West told about itself?
This article begins a series exploring some of those stories.
It will not attempt to replace one narrow history with another or turn complex people into uncomplicated heroes. It will be an act of curiosity: an opportunity to look beyond the version of the world we inherited and listen to histories told from somewhere other than its supposed centre.
More than sixty years after Nkoloso assembled his Afronauts, the artists of Circus Zambia are reclaiming their story through performance.
In Afronauts, circus, theatre, dance, music and acrobatics become ways of recovering a history too often dismissed or forgotten. A new generation of Zambian artists is asking what happens when you have an extraordinary dream and the world tells you that you are ridiculous for imagining it.
We cannot know the histories we were never taught.
What we can do is question why they were excluded. We can listen when someone brings them into the room. We can reconsider what else may be missing from the history we think we know.
A group of extraordinary Zambian performers brought Edward Mukuka Nkoloso and the Afronauts into a theatre in Derry.
They reminded me of the power of theatre, the necessity of imagination and the human refusal to accept that the future belongs only to the powerful.
The rocket never left the ground.
The idea is still travelling.
And it has opened the door to other histories waiting to be heard.