THE AFRONAUTS

Curtis Abraham

Edward Nkosolo

It was serendipity; just pure luck. That's how the award-winning, Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel describes her discovery of one Zambian's ill-fated ambition of launching his own space program during the 1960s. In 2011, De Middel was researching another story that she has since postponed, but chanced upon archival video footage of the project.

"It was certainly a very exciting moment as the story had everything I needed," says de Middel, one of four finalists for the 2013 Deutsche Borse Photography Prize for her book “The Afronauts”, a fictionalized photographic documentation of the Zambia space program story.

She added:

"It has a lot of inherited imagery that lives in our collective memory. For instance, the man on the moon´s images, the African clichés, and all the 1960´s imagery. It was just a question for me to combine these three very strong image sources and tell the story adding the surprise and the fact/fiction game that I experienced the first time I saw the video footage."

Zambia's unofficial space program was the brainchild of Edward Makuka Nkoloso.

According to Wikipedia, Nkoloso was born in 1919 in the northern part of what is today Zambia. When World War II broke out, he was drafted into the Northern Rhodesia Regiment, a British Colonial Auxiliary Forces, where he served as a sergeant in the signal corp. After the war, Nkoloso is said to have become a translator for the colonial government and later still a grade school teacher. Unfortunately for him, the new school he established was closed by the British. In the mid-1950s, he was arrested and imprisoned for being a member of the resistance (Northern Rhodesia, as it was called at the time, was still under colonial rule).

Upon his release from prison (we don’t know how much jail time he did), he was appointed as a security official of the United National Independence Party (UNIP). But later he founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy.

Throughout the 1960s, perhaps wanting to beat the Soviets and Americans in the space race as well as his desire to demonstrate the ambitions of independent Zambia, Nkoloso had visions of epic space travel including to other planets.

In the 1972 book "CAN YOU SPEAK VENUSIAN: A GUIDE TO INDEPENDENT THINKERS", Sir Patrick Moore, the late English amateur astronomer and broadcaster, writes about the Zambian's fantastic dream. Nkoloso wanted to fly to the moon and then to Mars using some type of catapult system and a 10x6 rocket, constructed out of aluminum and copper, with twelve astronauts aboard including one missionary (to civilize the primitive Martians);a seventeen year old “spacegirl” named Marta Mwambwa and several cats. The launch site would be Zambia's Independence Stadium on the country's Independence Day in 1964; effectively beating the United States and the Soviet Union in the space race.

Nkoloso would surely have known about Werner von Braun, the German-American rocket physicist, astronautics engineer and space architect and his idea of a manned mission to Mars. In 1952, von Braun, called the "father of space exploration", published THE MARS PROJECT (Das Marsprojekt), where he discusses his ideas for exploring the red planet. Nkoloso, who claimed to have studied Mars for some time from telescopes at his “secret headquarters” outside Lusaka, the Zambia capital, believed that there was life on Mars, but that Martians had a primitive culture.

The training of Nkoloso's astronauts seemed more fitting for a circus than space travel. The makeshift training facilities were located seven miles from Lusaka, the Zambian capital. To simulate the feeling of weightlessness, one of the flight crew, dressed in faded overalls and British army helmets, would climb into an empty 44 gallon oil drum which would be rolled down hill, bouncing over rough terrain. Nkoloso also taught his team to walk on their hands, which he believed was the only way humans could walk on the moon.

Nkoloso's space program never materialized. He lacked financial support and Matha Mwambwa, the 17-year-old “|spacegirl” (described as curvaceous in a TIME magazine story) became pregnant and was taken back to her village. The government newly independent government of Kenneth Kaunda did not share Nkoloso's dream and distanced itself from his endeavors (the late Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda said in a 2016 interview that Nkoloso’s space program “was more for fun than anything else”).

In 1983, the African space visionary received a law degree from the University of Zambia. Nkoloso was also awarded the Russian Jubilee Medal “Forty Years of Victory in the Great Patriotic War 1941-1945”, a state commemorative medal of the Soviet Union (by decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR) to denote the fortieth anniversary of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War. He also served as president of the Ndola Ex-servicemen's Association and was made an honorary army colonel.

Nkoloso died on 4 March 1989, and was buried with presidential honors.

Most people today regard Nkoloso as a crackpot. But in this African fairytale Cristina de Middel saw an opportunity to make her audience think twice about popular perceptions of Africa. It was also therapeutic; a chance for her to restore lost belief in negative attitudes about the continent and also in her profession.

Like some open-minded Westerners exposed to African life, de Middel grew wary of condescending Western stereotypes of Africa (she worked for a decade as a documentary photographer and freelance photojournalist for a variety of publications and international NGOs including Medecins sans Frontieres.

"The Afronauts project was for me the perfect opportunity to give my opinion on how Africa is portrayed in the [Western] media," says de Middel. "I wanted to play with the audience and make them ask themselves if the story was real or not, and then ask themselves again why they were being suspicious, which is what happened to me when I first saw the video. If it had been a German space program there would have been no doubt and therefore no fact-fiction game but with prejudicial expectation towards Africa is where the tension is based.”

De Middel also lost faith in the power of photojournalism because she felt it didn't tell the whole truth. Documentary photography, on the other hand, gave her the opportunity to express her opinion in an honest way, something that's frown upon in photojournalism since it demands impartiality. De Middel see's herself as stretching the boundaries of photography, making it more freer, more creative and bringing it more in line with cinematography.

Apart from the opportunity to confront negative stereotypes of Africa, it is the unbelievable character of Nkoloso's story that is the basis of de Middel's fascination (an examination of the unbelievable through documentary photography is something she shares with one her idols, Diane Arbus, the late American photographer known for her black and white square images of people on the fringes of society and whose appearances seems grotesque or surreal; dwarfs, transgender, circus performers, etc..)

"In my personal projects I love to play with the audience. I am really interested in documenting facts that are unbelievable but true and other phenomenons that are completely false but people tend to believe," says de Middel

De Middel's “The Afronauts” was described as a re-imagining and re-contextualization of Nkoloso’s space fantasy. Perhaps the most powerful theme of her photo documentary is that of the dreamer. On one level the recurrence of the dreamer is an obivious metaphor for the dreams of newly independent African country such as Zambia. On another level, de Middel appeared to be encouraging her audience, African or otherwise, to dream regardless of how outrageous the dream might appear to others.

In one photo, a young Zambian man sits at a desk with a cardboard cut out of a rocket and a miniaturize plastic astronaut besides it. His eyes are closed, head cocked sky-wards, in total rapture of what he's imagining. In another image an old cement block house with wooden window shutters and wooden and iron sheet door is wide open.Two neatly separated columns of pinkish-red and orange colored light beams gently through sheer curtains. The image evokes some late night physics experiment. The photographs appeared to be saying that despite impoverished surroundings experimentation and innovation are possible.

De Middel's images are reminiscent of the 1950s and 60s American TV sci fi movies that were featured on Chiller Theater and Creature Features programs and had names like: “THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD” and “IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE”. One Afronaut seems part scarecrow with raffia around his neck, wrists, and knees complete with helmet and oxygen tubes, while straddling, what appears to be, two large, rusted rocket debris. The big glass bubble helmet of the Afronaut moving alien-like through a field of tall, dried grass and ascending a hill that looks other worldly.

Her lunar-like landscapes capture well the theme of her book. In another image, two baobab trees are the perfect representation of what an arboreal life form might look like on another Earth-like planet. In yet another image, what appears to be a giant human skull, bleached white by the passage of time seems to have fossilized into the side a cliff.

De Middel also has a talent for making the familiar look alien. For example, the texture and hairs of an elephant's trunk as Afronaut and pachyderm appearing to befriend one another. Or, the close up shot of three sting rays, all different sizes, on the sand. Their triangular arrow shapes and large vacant eye sockets make them appear unearthly.

A few of the photographs are not as they seem. Look again. The picture of what appears to be a "flying sauce" among the trees is actually an upside down image of an object floating on a pond. The photograph that illustrates the shape of the Big Dipper, the seven brightest stars in the Ursa Major constellation, is yet another de Middel deception. The image of the dirty blue wall was taken in Senegal and de Middel simply replaced these dead mosquito markings so that they appear the shape of the Big Dipper.

De Middel and Nkoloso were, in some ways, bonded in time and space. Both were financially constrained in spite of her having received a Humble Arts Foundation grant for the project. De Middel, however, never stepped foot on Zambian soil. Instead she shot many of the photographs near her home town of Alicante and in the suburbs of Madrid. Other pictures were shot in the Dead Sea and a couple images were archival of previous trips to Senegal. The costumes were put together with the help of her grandmother. The African models were found after de Middel appealed for models on Facebook.

In Africa, Nkoloso's space dreams die hard. Almost two generations later it lived on in the late Ugandan inventor and engineer Christopher Nsamba's ambition of wanting to be the first Ugandan to fly in space. The African Space Research Program, was a private volunteer group led by Nsamba, was developing ambitious plans for an eventual spaceplane. The 33-foot vessel was called the African Skyhawk and Nsamba hoped that one day it will travel the Earth's outer atmosphere. He also dreamed of sending a manned shuttle into orbit. His project, unlike that of Nkoloso's, had been sustained by donations from around the world, with some funding from the Ugandan government.

Africa generally is also heavily involved in multilateral astronomical/astrophysics initiatives. For example, in 2012, South Africa became co-host (along with Australia) of the ambitious Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, a radio telescope in development which will be the largest and most advanced radio telescope ever constructed. As the most powerful radio telescope the world has seen, the SKA will be able to peer into hitherto unexplored parts of space and, in so doing, gaze back in time to the early Universe.

Could Nkoloso have ever foreseen such a development on the African continent? Not in his wildest dreams.