A Discovery of Afrocentrism
I cannot remember the exact moment or encounter when I fell in love with science fiction—or when science fiction fell in love with me. What I do remember is discovering that first book that introduced me to the Milky Way and all her gilded companions. Through pixels and imagination, I met Neil Armstrong and shook hands with Yuri Gagarin in a video game now left behind on a Windows ’98 processor.
This was before the internet was anything more than a super weapon for world powers to claim they had more intelligence on their enemies than they would ever actually disclose. I stumbled upon Gene Roddenberry in the hushed corridors of a dimly lit, slightly damp library where I was the most frequent visitor, among hardcover volumes wrapped in shiny cellophane. Every 31st page bore a stamp in a foreign language, now familiar and foreboding: Hierdie boek is eiendom van Afrikaanse Laer Meisieskool, nie vir herverkoop nie . I am certain that these institutional markings found natural companionship beside the stark declarations of Slegs Blankes in a bygone era.
(Translation: This book is the property of Afrikaans Primary Girl’s School, not for resale).
Although my newfound friends were clearly a remnant of a time hostile to free exploration—a truth that would have been intimately known to those who survived harsh injustices chronicled on page 88—they were now my instruments of space pioneering. While I imagined away a future that embodied the maxim, “to boldly go where no man had gone before,” in another timeline, in another lifetime, another man had done the same, only his was struggling toward realisation.
In the aftermath of WWII, Edward Makuka Nkoloso returned to Zambia with an audacious vision: to take Zambia to the moon (page 60). While many acknowledge Zambia’s forgotten space programme, few grasp the significance of Nkoloso’s determination to place an African, a dark-skinned African, on lunar soil. Poised on the edge of independence, but not quite free, Nkoloso dared to voice such a revolutionary notion. Ridiculed by some, dismissed by many, his philosophies represent what may be among the earliest embodiments of Afrofuturism: a future that re-positioned African technology, science, and knowledge at the vanguard of human achievement—a position that, six decades later, new African generations are learning to embrace and reclaim.
Nkoloso’s Afronaut was not only a symbol of Zambia’s potential astronautical progression, but a bold declaration that indigenous knowledge and science deserved equal standing with global scholarship. His stance sought to transform the colonial perspectives and diminutive wordplay that framed African herbalism, medicine, and ancestral wisdom as primitive, into recognised pillars of scientific inquiry: powerful, significant, and contributing to the field of science worldwide.
As Zambia commemorates 61 years of independence, Nkoloso and every freedom fighter who has gone before serve as a reminder of that distinctive Zambian tenacity and survivalist spirit. There was once a time when people would exclaim in astonishment, “Is this real in Zambia?” by way of compliment. Today, however, there are no more surprises, but expectation: good things come out of Zambia. Sixty-one years of peaceful living, working in joy and unity, and building our country (page 70) are a testament to greater things to come.
Happy Independence, Zambia!
Shammah Phiri,
