Reaching for the Stars: The Zambian Space Programme and Alternative Imaginaries of Space Travel

Abstract

Discourses of space travel have long been acknowledged as imbricated in the logic and language of colonial expansionism. Despite the dangerous uses to which romantic framings of these have historically been put, there is nonetheless a lingeringly aspirational quality to imaginaries of space travel whose emancipatory potential exists in strange tension with its discursive complicity in coloniality. A related tension reverberates in newer revisionings of postcolonial science or speculative fiction that point to the utopian possibilities of imagining otherwise, in the face of traditional science fiction’s embeddedness in colonial discourses of science and progress. In this essay, I explore this tension by way of an engagement with some lesser-known perspectives on and interventions in the Cold War space race. This entails an analysis of the Zambian space programme as refracted in a number of texts: A. K. Chesterton’s The New Unhappy Lords, Edward Nkoloso’s article, “We’re Going to Mars! With a Spacegirl, Two Cats and a Missionary”, Frances Bodomo’s short film Afronauts, and Namwali Serpell’s novel The Old Drift. I propose that irony, satire, and the theatricality of space travel have provided entry points for the critiques of inequality and oppression manifested here, and argue that this has been used to undercut coloniality and white supremacy, albeit in very different, and often disjunctive and profoundly ambivalent ways. Though at times confounding, this ambivalence warrants nuanced exploration as it reveals both overlapping and incongruent strategies for resistance, and serves to contextualize appropriations, aspirations, and imaginaries of space travel today.