Zambian ‘Afronauts’ who were destined for the moon, Mars

 Searching within Africa, one stumbles over the fanciful space programme of the early 1960s in Zambia. Zambian born Edward Makuka Nkoloso embarked on an ambitious space programme in an attempt to propel his country, then called Northern Rhodesia, to the fore of space technology. He vowed to beat both the United States of America and the Soviet Union in placing human beings and two cats on Mars.

In 1960, Nkoloso, a former World War 2 combatant, who later became a high school science teacher, founded what he called the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. He headed this organisation himself.

Later, he groomed a female astronaut, Mata Mwamba, to send to the moon first and later to Mars. Accompanying Mata to Mars would be two cats and a missionary, the latter to preach to the heathen Martians. He had a warning for the missionary though: he was not to force the Martians to accept Christianity against their will.

In a newspaper article appearing in a Zambian newspaper in 1964, Nkoloso claimed: “We have been studying Mars from our telescopes at our headquarters and are now certain Mars is populated by primitive natives.

“Our rocket crew is ready. Specially, trained girl Mata Mwamba, two cats [also specially trained] and a missionary will be launched in our first rocket. But I have warned the missionary he must not force Christianity on the people if they do not want it.”

Besides Mata, Nkoloso recruited other young people to be trained as astronauts. Being Africans, they were called Afronauts. With these he hoped Zambia would conquer space like no other nation had so far done.

“I feel the Zambian Government should help now if we are to become controllers of seventh heaven of interstellar space,” wrote Nkoloso in the newspaper article referred to above.

Nkoloso’s Afronauts, 12 in number, were receiving special training at a location about 11 kilometres from Lusaka. The training centre was an abandoned farmhou s e . Among other things, Nkoloso’s Afronauts were trained to get acclimatised to weightlessness, which they would encounter enroute to the moon or to Mars. The weightlessness training was administered by placing the trainee in a 200 litre empty oil drum, which would then be rolled from the top of a hill.

An important module in the training of the Afronauts was for them to learn how to walk on their hands. It was Nkoloso’s reckoning that hand walking was the only way humans could walk on the lunar or the Martian surface.

Nkoloso’s rocke t , christened D-Kalu 1 after Zambia’s first State president, Kenneth Kaunda, was made of copper and aluminium. According to Nkoloso, it was space worthy and was scheduled to deliver Mata and her crew first to the moon and later to Mars. The newly constructed independence stadium in Lusaka was chosen as the launch site. The launch date was going to be Zambia’s independence day, October 24 1964.

Unable to get the money required for his project locally, Nkoloso wrote to Unesco, requesting for 7 million Zambian kwachas. He never received any response from Unesco but he, nonetheless, remained resolute to train his Afronauts in preparation for the eventual launch.

Despite Nkoloso’s immense enthusiasm, his dreams were shattered when he failed to secure an approval from the government to conduct his scheduled launch from the Independence Stadium on October 24 1964.

He quickly pointed an accusatory finger at the US and USSR, claiming that they were the agents that had orchestrated the government’s refusal to grant him permission for the launch. The two superpowers were scared that Zambia would outdo them in space exploration.

B l a m e w a s a l s o apportioned to his Afronauts, who, according to him, had lost their concentration on the project, turning to casual lovemaking instead. In fact, his main Afronaut, Mata, fell pregnant and was withdrawn from the project by her parents, who took her back to the village.

Nkol o s o and his Afronauts were ridiculed by many people, not least the foreign media. A BBC reporter who visited the training site described the participants as a bunch of “crackpots”. Most of the mockery in the foreign media had some racial overtones.

Readers may have their own opinion on Nkoloso and his doomed space programme but this column would side with Eryk Salvaggio who, writing on a cybernetic forests website in 2021, summarised the programme as “a gesture toward cultivating the imagination that fuels science and technology”. For all its hilarious moments, it was a programme that would help in the inculcation of scientific concepts in the minds of young Zambians