In 1964, Edward Makuka Nkoloso announced that Zambia would beat the Americans and Soviets to Mars.

Nkoloso had twelve astronauts in training, including a teenage girl named Matha Mwamba and two cats. His spacecraft was a converted oil drum. This is where most accounts of this story stop taking it seriously. The global press laughed. And Nkoloso is mainly remembered as the Zambian eccentric, one of the strangest characters of the Space Race.

But what if we were wrong? What if Nkoloso's story wasn't about whether Zambia could actually reach the Moon at all?

Imagine with me for a minute.

DELUSION OR THEATER?

First, Nkoloso was, by all measures, a highly educated man. A schoolteacher, a freedom fighter, and critically, a man who had watched the Cold War space race with full comprehension of what it actually was:

The space race was a geopolitical performance dressed as science.

Two superpowers spending obscene resources to claim symbolic dominance of a cosmos neither could commercially exploit, while other countries and peoples of the world were subtly told to wait their turn at modernity. Viewed in this context, Nkoloso's response was not delusion but design.

The oil drum. The cats. The teenage astronaut. These were not signs of a man who didn't understand aerospace engineering. They were the work of someone who understood theater and who recognised that the space race was, at its core, theatre too. Nkoloso held up a mirror. And the world laughed at the reflection instead of examining it. This is the distinction that matters. Seen in this light:

Nkoloso was not attempting to win a technical race. He was contesting the narrative architecture of who gets to imagine the future.

AFROFUTURISM BEFORE IT HAD A NAME

The term "Afrofuturism" was coined by cultural critic Mark Dery in 1993, nearly three decades after Nkoloso's Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research, and Philosophy had already dissolved. But the intellectual DNA is identical: the assertion that African people are not passengers in someone else's future but architects of their own.

What made Nkoloso's act structurally significant was its timing. Zambia had gained independence on 24 October 1964, the same year he launched the programme. This was not a coincidence. The space programme was not only a declaration that a new sovereign nation had been born but also, perhaps more importantly, that political independence without epistemic independence is incomplete. That self-determination must include the right to define what counts as knowledge, what counts as ambition, and what counts as possible.

Nkoloso named his explorers himself: "afronauts." The world called it a joke. He called it a philosophy.

THE PATTERN REPEATING

Now here is what should concern you more than 60 years later: the same dismissal is happening now.

When African engineers, researchers, and founders engage seriously with modern technology, artificial intelligence, not as consumers but as architects of African-centred systems, the response from global institutions follows a familiar script. Benevolent condescension. Selective funding. The assumption that the appropriate role is adaptation, not origination.

The AI moment is this generation's space race. It is geopolitical performance dressed as technology. The nations that control the foundational models, the training data, and the compute infrastructure are not simply building products. They are encoding whose knowledge counts, whose language models think in, and whose problems get solved at scale. And again, African knowledge systems are largely absent from that encoding. Not because they are insufficient, but because no one has systematised them into a form that machines can operationalise. That is a structural problem with a structural solution.

WHAT NKOLOSO ACTUALLY DEMANDS OF US

All in all, the lesson from Nkoloso is not inspiration.

Inspiration is what you extract from a story and then leave behind. The lesson is method.

Nkoloso identified a dominant system, understood its logic, refused its terms, and constructed an alternative narrative: under-resourced, ridiculed, but coherent. And it is that coherence that has survived. The oil drum is gone. The argument is not.

The work now is to take African indigenous knowledge and build the infrastructure that makes it computationally legible, searchable, and globally deployable. Not to preserve them in a museum. To make them competitive.

Nkoloso understood that the future is not discovered; it is not given; it is designed. And now the design table is open. The question is who sits at it with a blueprint and who arrives hoping to be included.

Ultimately, Nkoloso's point back in 1964 was that Africans must stop waiting for permission to imagine at full scale.

Conversely, the cosmos Nkoloso pointed at is still there. And so is the work.

Watch Docuementary on: The Z Historian 

PART 1

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