Noble Eagle in its Flight: 'Afronauts' as Alternate History

[Gary Oswald]

Discuss this Article by @SpanishSpy here

 

[Alex Richards]

A NAP Space Programme sounds like an interesting situation, particularly as that could easily see Europe and China pushing for their own independent ones earlier.

 

[Charles EP M.]

There's an interesting look at the space programme by Namwali Serpell, looking at how it was seen at the time abroad* and in Zambia, and if this was a mad vanity project or satire or what. Serpell believes this was mostly satire, but interviews Nkoloso's son, and he definitely thinks this was serious. But the son also claims it was cover for something else:

He seemed to take his father’s program seriously: “People were saying no, he’s mad, exaggerating. But, no, he’s a scientist, this is science.” Mukuka claimed that his father wasn’t just training the cadets for space travel, though; Nkoloso was also testing their “readiness for independence” in a political sense. “He was teaching for the program, but hidden from the British government. Teaching the youth so they could be active.” Before they had become astronauts, Mukuka said, Matha Mwamba and Godfrey Mwango had travelled to Tanzania to broadcast political propaganda when it was censored during Cha-Cha-Cha. “The Youth Brigade, you’d find in the morning ‘Vote UNIP’ written in paint on the tarmac,” Mukuka said. They even used explosives: “making bombs, burning bridges,” using “black cloth—they would put it in a sack, then they would mix it with petrol or paraffin, then they burn it.”

Describing all this subversive political action, Mukuka grew animated. “Miss Burton,” he said, snapping his fingers. “In Ndola, she was killed.” He was referring to one of the most famous moments of the Cha-Cha-Cha campaign. On May 8, 1960, a group of UNIP cadres in the Copperbelt had attacked a white British expatriate, Lilian Margaret Burton, by stoning her car and setting it on fire. Despite her deathbed appeal against retaliation, the accused were hanged for murder. “You know who killed her?” Mukuka said. “The astronauts, the scientists, the people who made bombs and some other things.” He imitated the sound of an explosion. “A bomb in her car. So when you wanted to jump in the car? Explodes!”

The space program, Mukuka seemed to suggest, was both a real science project and a cover. After independence, Nkoloso served as President Kaunda’s “Special Representative” at the African Liberation Center, a safe house and a propaganda machine for freedom fighters in other still-colonized nations on the continent: Angola, Southern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and South Africa. His son said that, beyond his management duties, Nkoloso gave military training to “those freedom fighters, they used to call them guerrillas,” in Chunga Valley—the erstwhile headquarters of the Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. Zachariah Zumba, a colleague of Nkoloso’s at the Liberation Center, confirmed that freedom fighters had been trained “in the bush,” and that the astronauts had been drawn from the Youth Brigade. Zumba hinted that they may have served as bodyguards for Nkoloso, who was “a very feared man.”

Nkoloso was still talking about it in his last year alive, so this can't have just been a gag or alleged cover for guerilla training. And both gag and cover mean that if the actual money or resources turned up, something would be done, and once you start...

* He quotes A.K. Chesterson in 1965 saying Nkoloso's space plans show "the masquerade of the African in the guise of a politician able to take over the running of a modern state"

 

[Thande]

There's an interesting look at the space programme by Namwali Serpell, looking at how it was seen at the time abroad* and in Zambia, and if this was a mad vanity project or satire or what. Serpell believes this was mostly satire, but interviews Nkoloso's son, and he definitely thinks this was serious. But the son also claims it was cover for something else:



Nkoloso was still talking about it in his last year alive, so this can't have just been a gag or alleged cover for guerilla training. And both gag and cover mean that if the actual money or resources turned up, something would be done, and once you start...

* He quotes A.K. Chesterson in 1965 saying Nkoloso's space plans show "the masquerade of the African in the guise of a politician able to take over the running of a modern state"

I remember the Zambian space programme being a punchline in I think the Reader's Digest in the 1970s.

I remember a thread on the other place about the country potentially looking into a nuclear programme at one point as well.

 

[Charles EP M.]

I remember a thread on the other place about the country potentially looking into a nuclear programme at one point as well.

Imagine if it managed both! Zambia, technological and military power of the continent, present at the G20 and ISS!

 

[Coiler]

Egypt was mentioned in the article, so I feel obligated to bring up that they had a substantial domestic rocket program . IOTL, it only succeeded in making a few V-2 esque missiles that were used up in the 1973 war.

 

[Time Enough]

I’m reminded of OTRAG in Zaire which happened because it’s leader liked the idea of being an African nation with a functioning space program. Part of it’s stopping was French/Soviet fear of Zaire having intercontinental rockets I believe.

 

[M_Kresal]

I'm glad someone covered this. I remember hearing about it originally in a BBC World Service documentary a couple of years back and being like "Really?" I've toyed with the idea of writing something up about it a couple of times as it was certainly within some range of plausibility to do something akin to BIS MEGAROC proposal.

 

[OHC]

This is fascinating. I've heard of Afrofuturism as a cultural movement (Sun-Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic) but never of this real life story.

I wonder whether Terry Bisson was inspired by the Zambian space program when he had New Afrika be the first ones to Mars in that book I mentioned in my Utopian AH article.

Also by sheer coincidence my clock radio was playing Space is the Place when I woke up this morning

 

[Coiler]

After a lot of thought, I've felt like the best you can do is have a talented administrator leverage Zambia's quixotic space program into a more achievable "subcontracting", for lack of a better word, part of the launch industry in general (like, say parts involving the plentiful resource there of copper, or lower-wage English-speaking engineers)

 

[Charles EP M.]

After a lot of thought, I've felt like the best you can do is have a talented administrator leverage Zambia's quixotic space program into a more achievable "subcontracting", for lack of a better word, part of the launch industry in general (like, say parts involving the plentiful resource there of copper, or lower-wage English-speaking engineers)

Not the grandest of AH dreams but it'd be bloody impressive to be the country in a continent that's the launch industry player.

 

[Coiler]

I’m reminded of OTRAG in Zaire which happened because it’s leader liked the idea of being an African nation with a functioning space program. Part of it’s stopping was French/Soviet fear of Zaire having intercontinental rockets I believe.

It was more than that.

-The funding being shaky to begin with.
-Legitimate political fears about it being used in the wrong hands (that OTRAG's next test base was Gaddafi's Libya didn't exactly reassure the opposition)
-The rocket itself being an asparagus monstrosity with literally dozens to hundreds of failure points.

 

[Hendryk]

Zambia in the 1960s after its independence from the British was a poor, underdeveloped country (as imperialists were wont to leave behind them in Africa)

A not unnecessary reminder, considering how often one comes across the canard that African countries would have been better off if they had remained under the colonial yoke longer, both in the AH community and outside of it.

 

[Japhy]

A not unnecessary reminder, considering how often one comes across the canard that African countries would have been better off if they had remained under the colonial yoke longer, both in the AH community and outside of it.

Glass Houses there, Chief. You wrote a book about China not being capable of handling democracy.

 

[Hendryk]

Glass Houses there, Chief. You wrote a book about China not being capable of handling democracy.

Really? Because I put in writing years ago--all the way back when I was still working on the first version at the other place--that WIAF's China would become a liberal democracy in the 1970s. Feel free to check.

 

[Japhy]

Really? Because I put in writing years ago--all the way back when I was still working on the first version at the other place--that WIAF's China would become a liberal democracy in the 1970s. Feel free to check.

Yes, really. Your Orientalist nonsense about how China needed a strong hand to get ready for liberal democracy was there then, then and when you published. You're not different at all from the "A few more decades of colonialism" crowd.

 

[Hendryk]

Yes, really. Your Orientalist nonsense about how China needed a strong hand to get ready for liberal democracy was there then, then and when you published. You're not different at all from the "A few more decades of colonialism" crowd.

For years you contributed plenty of ideas to WIAF, for which I remain grateful, and in the nearly 200 times you posted in the dedicated forum you never once called it "Orientalist nonsense" or anything to that effect. I'm curious as to what has prompted this belated epiphany. Did you just pick up a copy again and go "My God, this was staring me in the face all along and I never saw it?"

If you are going to double down on your claim, then I in turn am going to ask for substantiation. I needn't remind you that learning about China has been a big part of my life for over two decades so this is an accusation I take personally. I also think you owe it to @Bruno and @Talwar (not to mention Pablo Portillo) to explain how they have participated in spreading "Orientalist nonsense".

 

[Japhy]

Did you just pick up a copy again and go "My God, this was staring me in the face all along and I never saw it?"

More or less that, and partaking in your forum did in fact teach me that, which is why I stopped partaking. For all of your love of early Chinese Aviation or Cinema, the work treats the death of any democratic experiment in China as something to wave away and push on with. I'll admit the initial end of my involvement came from the fact that you were trying to outsource writing the thing to me and others, but yeah, your ends justify the means moral planning of the work was uncomfortable.

You fundamentally have a timeline where the idea is that China can't handle Democracy in the 1910's, and needs an autocratic state to get it ready for that. That is not different then the racists who defend Colonialism in Africa by saying Africa just needed more time under the yoke. I wish that I'd recognized that for what it was years ago, but I didn't.

But though all of your rewrites and updates over the decade the essential fact is that you frame it not as "Democracy in China could have worked if things had gone differently" but "A Pro-Democracy Revolution has to be coopted into Autocracy for China to achieve anything." And yeah, that is nothing but a pretty bigoted idea to me. How important studying China has been to you doesn't, to me, change that.

 

[Hendryk]

OK this is an interesting point, obviously I reject your claim that my approach is bigoted, let alone comparable to an endorsement of colonialism, but you are making a substantive critique and I am fine with discussing it further. Perhaps not in this thread though, which is about another work altogether.

If you want, we can continue either in this thread or this one.

 

[Japhy]

OK this is an interesting point, obviously I reject your claim that my approach is bigoted, let alone comparable to an endorsement of colonialism, but you are making a substantive critique and I am fine with discussing it further. Perhaps not in this thread though, which is about another work altogether.

If you want, we can continue either in this thread or this one.

I'm not talking to you about any of this further. Take care.