In the collection of National Archives in Harare, a curious series of documents detail accounts of historical astronomical discoveries, celestial phenomena, meteor showers, and alien encounters across several countries in Southern Africa. These accounts take us to the height of white minority rule in settler colonial Southern and Northern Rhodesia, and successive waves of global trade, migration, and colonization of the continents’ southernmost tip at the Cape in South Africa. Working one’s way to the surface, the records bring us closer to the present day, through independence movements to the new countries, subjectivities and postcolonial landscapes which emerge; at first, Zambia (1964), then Zimbabwe (1980), and South Africa (1994).
Dispersed in journals, pamphlets, oral archives, and more, meticulously logged on hand-typed index cards in the archive’s wooden cabinets, stories about space might at first appear out of place in an analysis of colonialism and the imaginaries of anticolonial movements in these countries. Like many similar pieces of colonial infrastructure still working today in Zimbabwe, the cabinets are a little weary and worn, yet nonetheless feel special. Once beautifully made and clearly still tended to by the people who show similar care for the collections in their charge, they are a portal to an enormous repository of knowledge about settler coloniality on Earth and in space, and the many chimurengas that have and continue to fight it.
There are also aliens at every turn. When I present my Zimbabwean identity card at the reception, two digits—00—a legacy of colonial era racial profiling demarcate me as an “alien,” having “no village of origin” in the country of my birth.1 Anxieties about aliens and the terrifying things they might do to white settlers abound, as does the surreal confidence with which alien sightings are relayed in the archive. Sifting through these archival fragments, astronomy and space sciences appear central to the business of settler coloniality. The archives’ wooden cabinets hold the threads of their co-production, on the ground under our feet.
Good Hope
The archivist hands me an annotated bibliography on “The History of Astronomy and Observatories in South Africa” by a librarianship scholar at the University of Cape Town from 1970.2 Helene Anne Fisher’s research goes on a journey from 600 BCE to 1968. It begins with Phoenician sailors (recorded by Herodotus) landing at the Cape of Good Hope, and following some 2099 years where apparently nothing happens, astronomical science in South Africa resumes in the fifteenth century with the landing of Portuguese navigators.
In 1685, two centuries after those Portuguese navigators, Father Guy Tachard, a French Jesuit missionary and mathematician in the court of Louis XIV, landed at the Cape to take astronomical observations to determine its precise longitude en route to “Siam.”3 Celestial mapping and terrestrial conquest proceeded in tandem. Tachard’s recordings would go on to facilitate journeys eastwards, leading to the French control of Mergui and Bangkok. A brief posting of a German astronomer, Peter Kolbe, to the Cape in 1705 yielded few results as he produced observations of “not much value.” Instead, he allegedly succumbed to “lax living,” an accusation still made of Capetonians today.4
Abbé Nicolas-Louis De la Caille landed shortly after in 1751. In his two years at the Cape, De la Caille built an observatory on the beach and produced the first telescopic survey of the southern sky, giving many constellations and some of the most incredible phenomena to ever be observed by humans the banal names by which they are still known today. Among them are the Sculptor’s Chisel (Caela Sculptoris), Draftsman’s Compass (Circinus), Chemical Furnace (Fornax Chemica), Carpenter’s Square (Norma), Hadley’s Octant (Octans Hadleianus), Painter’s Easel (Equuleus Pictoris), Sculptor’s Workshop (Apparatus Sculptoris), Microscope (Microscopium), and Telescope (Telescopium). Speaking of De la Caille’s star charts, the American astronomer Heber D. Curtis remarked, “It looks like somebody’s attic!”5
From the Cape, De la Caille established the field of astronomical geodesy: the Earth/astronomical science of measuring and understanding geometric shape, size, and orientation in space and gravity. His diaries record these scientific developments alongside measurements and drawings of the business of colonial administration and control. He undertook reviews of the “Militias” of Stellenbosch and Drakensberg. He mapped Hout Bay at the request of the Governor, remarking on the beauty of one Mr. Le Sueur’s nearby farm Kronendal (the first settler farm in the area, now said to be haunted).6 He was invited to visit the Governor’s “pleasure-house” and gardens in Newlands. He recorded detailed observations of fish (“This one was full of maggots, which is why I did not bring it back. I have made an exact drawing of its shape”), animals (“He was male and seemed old. He had the shape of a middling basset hound”), and people (“I have measured the height of a bushman aged about 25 years: it was six feet seven inches and ten lines (2.16 m); he was bare foot and bare-headed”).7 A few months later, he was accompanied by “six blacks” who undertook the labor of taming the landscape under his direction to make a “beacon” at Kasteelberg, which he later triangulated against a summit at Kapokberg to produce a measurement that suggested that the Earth was pear-shaped.8
Read together, these celestial and terrestrial measurements constructed an epistemology of space, matter, and being in positivist, racializing terms that reinforced European claims to superior, objective knowledge. Alongside the constructed disavowal of the humanity of African people (to be understood as measurable commodities alongside fish, animals, land, and sky), De la Caille’s project of celestial observation produced limitations of the imaginary potential of the southern sky, framing it in the language of European tools (chisel, compass, square . . .), in terms of its usefulness for colonial forms of mapping and knowing.
When Britain violently took control of the Cape of Good Hope Colony in 1815, one of the first acts of the British government was to establish the Royal Observatory at the Cape, in 1820. In drawings from the time, the observatory appears as an imposing building in a seemingly empty landscape onto which a white Georgian beacon of science and progress has landed.
The observatory served multiple colonial functions. In addition to the processes of mapping sky and land invisible from Europe begun by De la Caille, the astronomers employed there extracted data to support British control at sea, knowledge of weather patterns, territorial landscapes, and mining operations, where the production of knowledge about our planet and colonial expansion on earth became concurrent processes. The astronomers who staffed the facility embodied the ideal of both space scientists and settler colonialists—European, educated, methodical—in contrast to Indigenous knowledge systems and people dismissed as undeveloped, primitive and superstitious.
W. Hammond Tooke, Cape civil servant and self-taught anthropologist, exemplified this colonial mindset. Writing in 1886, he contrasted Greek astronomical traditions with “Bushman” and Bantu cosmologies of the time. He expressed surprise that amongst “apparently the most degraded type of humanity existing,” these people had remarkable “pictorial talent” and “acquaintance with the ‘starry heavens above us.’” He praised, in his view, a superior understanding amongst lighter skinned “yellow races,” and characterized darker skinned Bantu understanding as poor and limited.9 Using a racial slur, he wrote; “The K***** knows and names Sun, Moon and Star, but he has no legends as to their creation. 'These things,' to adopt [Xhosa journalist] Tiyo Soga's words, 'seem to have baffled his imagination.'"10
Tooke's own research, however, undoes these characterizations. He describes extensive Indigenous celestial knowledge systems and rich cultural practices centered around celestial bodies, including how the KhoeKhoe celebrated lunar cycles with dancing and singing through the night. He also recounts how it was already observed as far back as 1761 that "that the Namaqua religion then consisted in worshipping and praising the New Moon."11 Tooke records how Southern African people structured their agricultural and ritual calendars around celestial movements. The Pleiades (IsiLimela in Xhosa and Zulu) marked "the breaking-up time" or "ploughing time" and the beginning of spring. Similarly, the Basotho word for summer, selemo, was connected to their name for the Pleiades, Selemela, demonstrating how celestial observations were integrated into seasonal time-keeping, processes of understanding and working the land.12
Southern African astronomical traditions encompassed complex understanding of celestial movements which informed social and cultural life and supported sophisticated navigational and chronological systems. Precolonial Basotho and Tswana people had a navigational rule: "if you want to travel west, keep the Southern Cross on your left hand, and Selemela (the Pleiades) on the right."13 The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds were called Tlala (famine) and Kgora (plenty) in Setswana, and Tswana people understood that when the Small Magellanic Cloud appeared more clearly than the Large Magellanic Cloud, drought would follow.14 Zulu knowledge of planets understood them to be distinct from fixed stars, referring to them as "stars which travel, and which die like the moon." The Basotho recognized the phenomenon of planetary retrograde motion, calling Jupiter "Moliana," derived from the word lieha meaning "to delay," directly referencing its apparent backward movement in the sky.15
Thebe Rodney Medupe writes how precolonial Southern Africans operated on a lunar year and developed methods to align this with a solar calendar, even adding a thirteenth month when necessary through collective decision-making.16 The Xhosa tradition of counting "years of manhood" from the appearance of isiLimela created a temporal framework resistant to colonial impositions of time-keeping, and conjoined the stars with the (now, celestial) bodies of Xhosa people in the process. Eyesilimela, the month of the “Digging Stars,” symbolized new life and it remains a practice for Xhosa men to count their years of manhood from this date.17
Despite this wealth of knowledge of Indigenous cosmologies, much of which was known at the time, colonial astronomical activities at the Cape helped establish what would become enduring associations: whiteness with proper scientific authority; European methods with legitimate knowledge production; and colonial management with proper stewardship of terrestrial, human, and celestial resources.
Rock painting found in South Africa near Fouriesburg depicting a comet or meteor, being observed by a San group. Drawing by and reproduced from Bert Woodhouse, “Bushman paintings of comets?,” Monthly Notes from the Astronomical Society of South Africa 45, no. 3–4 (January 1986): 33-35.
Rushing from the Sky
In October 1950, “a large meteorite of great brightness was observed high up over the Rhodesias.”18 Waking people from their sleep in the Mazabuka-Monze district with its extraordinary light, one witness, Sister Cocker, reported that it “lit up the entire countryside for miles around” and “seemed about the size of the sun as it passed overhead.”19 The meteorite ultimately exploded, creating a sound like “distant gunfire” that was heard approximately three minutes after it passed.20 Reverberations continued in the week that followed as “talk in the hotels, where the [white settler] farming community would normally discuss crops, the coming of the rains, local gossip, and the World Situation, changed for a brief period to discussion of the meteorite and what it was.”21 Presenting the District Commissioner with fragments of the meteorite, Chief Chongo requested, “Please send a piece of the star to my King, George, and tell him what has happened in my country and what has visited us, for I know that he will be interested.”22
Decades earlier, in 1934, the Mangwendi meteorite landed near the capital in Southern Rhodesia. Described by local witness accounts as “a sun [that] came rushing from the sky and buried itself in the earth,” a detailed write-up in the Journal of the Mineralogical Society is revealing about the conditions under which scientific understandings of such phenomena were being developed in, and alongside, settler colonial narratives.23 At Mangwendi, another missionary figure, Father Gits, was deployed to make sense of the condition of the meteorite and the circumstances of its landing. His findings present a seemingly objective analysis of the meteorite’s mineral composition and what it reveals about its possible journey. Preceding this, however, are a series of “native” eyewitness accounts. The “natives” confirmed that there are other pieces, though they could not be found, or, it is suggested, may be keeping those locations secret. The meteorite has “terrified the people” and they “feared to talk about it.” And despite the “natives” objection to the stones’ removal, it was gifted by the Government of Southern Rhodesia to the British Museum.24
Meteorites held great importance to the Indigenous people of the region. While I have struggled, so far, to find archival material about the Indigenous people living then in the Rhodesias, there is evidence for this among communities in neighboring countries. For the Nharo San, meteors were believed to be the "lion's eyes" of the healer’s trance state during which he could traverse the sky as a shooting star.25 Similarly, in Khoisan sky lore, meteors consistently represented creatures possessing supernatural potency—variously interpreted as antlions falling to earth in search of food, or as porcupines and hedgehogs. Their porcupine-skin bags are still today called "star skins," and hedgehog fat is worn when a healer dances, enters a trance, and travels the sky as a meteor, gaining power from ancestors to grant mastery over disease, control of animals, and influence over spring rains.26 Meteoric trance experiences such as these are documented in rock art across a vast area stretching from Zambia to Lesotho.27
In Mazabuka-Monze and Mangwendi, at the point of interaction between settler and Indigenous knowledge systems about space, the colonial order was at work, creating a context of African, primitive inferiority alongside the white settler noble pursuit of “science.” However, even in these accounts, perhaps the undoing of coloniality can still be found decades before armed struggles for independence would begin in earnest in the region, operating through secrecy, sleight of hand, and subtlety. The “natives” refuse to reveal the locations of all of the stones, potential fragments of ancestral connection, power gathering, and healing dance. Listen closely and Chief Chongo is an artful diplomat in his offer to King George. The meteorite may be a gift for “his king,” but he is careful to note that it fell on Chongo’s country.
UFOs: African Encounters
Jonathan Jacob Moore describes how, with the exception of Barney Hill, no Black Americans have been abducted by aliens.28 It is almost exclusively a condition of whiteness. Moore notes how this is attributed to early American “colonial captivity narratives” which depicted the kidnap, murder, and rape of settlers, taking them against their will across frontiers and forcing on them the experience of another culture.29 (A condition Black Americans already know all too well.) So terrifying were these fictional visions of colonial captivity on the white settler imaginary, their circulation supported the justification of genocide of Indigenous populations.30
When I learned about Moore’s work on twitter, I excitedly tweeted him to look up Cynthia Hind, whose work I had encountered in those days at the National Archives. Hind was the Continental Coordinator for Africa at the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and meticulously recorded alien encounters in Zimbabwe. One such incident included the infamous Ariel School incident of 1994, shortly after independence, in which sixty-two children at an elite private school in Ruwa, a farming community outside the capital Harare, claimed to have seen a spaceship land during their break time.31
Hind encouraged them to sketch what they had seen, and the children, who were predominantly from white families, drew remarkably similar depictions of black, thin aliens. Half of the children’s accounts focus on the aliens’ enormous eyes; “black,” “like a cat’s eyes,” “thin and tall.”32 Moore notes the importance of eyes in American abductions too, quoting Fanon: “I am being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed. Having adjusted their microtomes, they objectively cut away slices of my reality. I am laid bare.”33
The Ruwa children describe varying encounters with the aliens who visited break time that day. Sometimes there are three of them on top of their flying saucer. Sometimes just one far away, or two holding hands. They are always described as black, and frequently as men, or in the case of one drawing: “It was a person … alien.”34 Sometimes the children were unclear what they saw, confusing a potential alien sighting with the school’s black maintenance staff: “I saw a black man, he was just in black, and he had big eyes … I thought it was an alien … and then I thought maybe it was the gardener or someone.”35
Aliens land even earlier in Zimbabwe's potential history. When British colonizers first encountered the ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the late nineteenth century, they found themselves in a quandary. The existence of sophisticated stone structures challenged their narrative of native primitiveness. Rather than acknowledge the architectural capabilities of Indigenous kingdoms, some colonial archaeologists crafted alternative explanations. One theory suggested that these stone ruins near Masvingo could be explained as having been built by extraterrestrials of far superior intellect and capability than the locals, and who had since left the planet.
Hind wrote about the anxiety that UFO encounters and theories repressed: the possibility that Black technological and architectural skill could be on a par with whiteness, and what that recognition might entail for the unbuilding of coloniality. “What a frightening indictment of our society that when we are confronted by something we don't understand, we don't even attempt to open our minds to the event,” she writes.36 In Ruwa, narratives of aliens echoed this racist anxiety again. In a newly independent, socialist Republic of Zimbabwe, the potential of a liberated Blackness was so counter to the comfort, reality, and rules of established white settler life, that it was to be cast as something unearthly, impossible, and inhuman; alien.
The ‘New’ Hotspot for Space Business
Space-based economies in Africa were valued at approximately $20 billion in 2021 and are projected to rise to $23 billion by 2026.37 This growth reflects not only increasing investment in local space capabilities but also the continent's strategic importance in global space operations. Underlying these figures is a developing local space industry with burgeoning national and regional African programs, as well as companies and startups in the private sector. Alongside these, external interests in the African space sector continue to pursue predatory interests and colonial world-making on a planetary scale with roots over hundreds, if not thousands of years.
In 2022, a conference was held in Nairobi, Kenya, gathering government officials, academics, and private sector agencies under the theme of “Making Africa the New Hotspot for Space Business.” A similar conference was supposed to have been held by the African Union the previous year under the banner of “Africa Space Week” before it ran into delays and was scuppered by the ongoing pandemic. Now rebranded and convened by the commercial news and research platform Space in Africa, tickets ranged from €300 for virtual attendance to €800 to attend in person. This conference was the first of an annual event that has been held since, landing in the Ivory Coast in 2023 under the banner of utilizing “Space for Africa's Socio-Economic Transformation,” and in Angola in 2024 as addressing “The Role of Space in Closing Africa's Poverty Gap.” In 2025, delegates will gather in Cairo with a view to “Empowering Africa's Economy through Space-Driven Innovation.” These conferences present a glimpse into the opportunities, and opportunists, that the space industry in Africa surfaces today, where military players have tended to dominate the agenda (many space programs on the continent are operated as an arm of defense forces, run by scientists-become-colonels and vice-versa) alongside global aerospace corporations and defense contractors.
Counterbalancing these influences, at the Nairobi conference in 2022, the African Union's space working group presented its continental policy framework emphasizing Indigenous technological development and regional sovereignty. It was built around two key goals: to build an African space program responsive to the continent’s socio-economic and environmental needs, and to develop a regulatory framework that ensures the continent is a responsible and peaceful “user” of outer space.
The African Union’s Space Policy represents a radical departure from dominant space paradigms, centering financial independence as a cornerstone of sovereignty. “Africa should not rely on external donor funding to subsidize its space ambitions,” it declares, arguing that “the continent will be able to compete internationally (including in the African space market) only through its own committed space efforts.”38 This move challenges donor-recipient dynamics, underpinned by colonial legacies of center and periphery. By insisting that “financial support from African governments should be the main funding source for space activities,” the policy attempts to intervene in the systems of control that structure colonial and neocolonial relations through corporate and state actors.
The framework creates space for multiple ways of knowing and experiencing celestial phenomena. Its call for “communities of practice” that facilitate “space applications at grass-roots level” suggests an openness to a more democratic approach to space science. The policy's explicit commitment to “ensuring gender equity and the involvement of young people in space-related activities” represents a significant break from the white male astronomers who dominated colonial observatories and the complex, often exclusionary institutions which followed after independence. By centering the “promotion of the political, economic and social status of women and youth [as] a critical precursor for advancing the development of the African continent,” the policy has the potential to transform space from an exclusive domain of colonial power into a potential site of emancipation and diversified knowledge production, with ramifications far beyond space research itself.39
It is notable that these innovative aspirations unfold against a backdrop of centuries-long exploitation of African sky and land for the benefit of others. From Tachard's longitude measurements that enabled French colonial expansion to the meteorite fragments Chief Chongo was moved to surrender, the continent has long been treated as a laboratory, observatory, and resource extraction site for external interests. The most recent rush to make Africa “the new hotspot for space business” represents less a novel development than a reconfiguration of established patterns. Where once European astronomers named southern constellations after workshop tools to render them familiar and useful within colonial frameworks, today’s dominant corporate and state actors map African land for data extraction, surveillance, prospecting and market penetration. The tensions visible in the Nairobi conference—between military use and civilian need, between corporate capture and imaginaries of Indigenous development and the potential for a liberatory emancipation on the continent through space—are indicative of the ongoing work of the settler colonial project, and those who seek to work against it, and its harms.
Responsible Behavior
A $1 billion spaceport is allegedly currently under construction in Djibouti, funded by China. Extending China’s Belt and Road Initiative off Earth, the spaceport would be in prime position for trade routes at the entrance to the Red Sea and as a space-launching site for its proximity to the Equator. Since being announced by President Ismaïl Omar Guelleh on Twitter in 2023, reporting on the China-Djibouti spaceport has been limited, but the announcement triggered a flurry of articles decrying this “worrying” development for the United States and “like-minded states.”40 Of concern was the opportunistic use of a “potentially rogue actor” by China to reconfigure global rules and expectations of “responsible behavior in space.”41 Djibouti is not a signatory to the Outer Space Treaty.
This rhetoric of “responsible behavior” echoes colonial taxonomies that sorted nations into categories of civilized and uncivilized, capable and incapable, trustworthy and untrustworthy. While the United States, Russia, and China have all engaged in activities ranging from anti-satellite weapons testing to aggressive orbital maneuvers, these actions are framed as legitimate security measures, where Djibouti’s are not. Continuing a thread begun with colonial astronomers who were seen as embodying proper scientific authority while Indigenous knowledge systems were dismissed as superstition, today's space powers continue to set the parameters of legitimacy in ways that maintain existing hierarchies of access and control.
From the Cape of Good Hope to Djibouti's contested spaceport, from the Monze meteorite to the Ariel School UFO sighting, celestial encounters in Africa have long been sites where power, knowledge, and sovereignty are negotiated. The ambitious vision set forth in the African Union Space Policy attempts to rewrite these colonial grammars by centering African needs and perspectives while challenging imposed relationships of control, the primacy of particular epistemologies, and the legitimacy of certain kinds of subjectivities over others in space research.
As African skies become increasingly crowded with satellites (and junk) owned by external powers, and as the continent's space ambitions grow alongside pressures to conform to predetermined notions of “responsible behavior,” the question remains whether Africa can chart its own course through the cosmos, informed by the rich histories of scientific knowledge and celestial relation born out of the continent, or whether its space endeavors will reproduce familiar patterns of extraction and control. What is certain is that the struggle for African sovereignty extends far beyond Earth, into orbit, the stars, the occasional passing meteorites, and, just maybe, alien life too.
The use of this code, once designed to defer preferential treatment, has since been abolished by the Ministry of Home and Cultural Affairs as having no place in the “Second Republic.”
Helene Anne Fisher, “The History of Astronomy and Observatories in South Africa, with Special Reference to the Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope: A Bibliography” (University of Cape Town Libraries, 1970), Bibliography.
Brian Warner, Astronomers at the Royal Observatory Cape of Good Hope: An Illustrated History—Mainly 19th Century (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema for University of Cape Town, 1979).
Warner, Astronomers at the Royal Observatory Cape of Good Hope.
Ken Croswell, “The Brightest Red Dwarf,” Sky and Telescope (July 2002), 38.
Ian S. Glass, “Notes about the Cape,” in Nicolas-Louis De La Caille, Astronomer and Geodesist (Oxford University Press, 2013). See also: Huda Tayob, “Unconfessed Architectures,” e-flux Architecture (June 2021), ➝.
Glass, Nicolas-Louis De La Caille.
Glass, Nicolas-Louis De La Caille.
W. Hammond Tooke, “THE STAR LORE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES,” Transactions of the South African Philosophical Society 5, no. 2, (1886): 304–312, ➝.
Tooke, “THE STAR LORE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES,” 307.
Tooke, “THE STAR LORE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES,” 306.
Tooke, “THE STAR LORE OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN NATIVES,” 312.
P. G. Alcock, “African Ethnoastronomy: The Sky and the Stars,’” Astronomical Society of Southern Africa: ➝.
Alcock, “African Ethnoastronomy.”
Rev Father Norton, “Native star names,” South African Journal of Science 6 (1909): 306–309, cited in Thebe Rodney Medupe, "Indigenous Astronomy in Southern Africa," in Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy, ed. Clive L.N. Ruggles (New York: Springer, 2015), 1031–1036, ➝.
Southern Africa here is defined by Medupe as covering the areas of Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe. Medupe, “Indigenous Astronomy in Southern Africa.”
H. Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu (Cape Town: C. Struik, 1970), cited in Medupe, “Indigenous Astronomy in Southern Africa.”
H. H. J. Lambert, “The Monze Meteorite,” Northern Rhodesia Journal 1, no. 4 (December 1951): 55–61.
Lambert, “The Monze Meteorite,” 55–61.
Lambert, “The Monze Meteorite,” 55–61.
Lambert, “The Monze Meteorite,” 55–61, emphasis original. In the context of 1950, reference to "the World Situation" here likely refers to early Cold War tensions, including the recently begun Korean War, escalating nuclear concerns between the Soviet Union and United States, and especially pertinent for the community of settlers in Rhodesia, colonial systems throughout Africa and Asia facing increasing pressure and beginning to fracture with independence movements gaining momentum.
Lambert, “The Monze Meteorite,” 55–61.
B. Lightfoot, A. M. Macgregor, and E. Golding, “The Meteoric Stone Seen to Fall in the Mangwendi Native Reserves, Southern Rhodesia, on March 7, 1934,” Mineralogical Magazine 24, no. 148 (March 1935): 1–12.
Lightfoot, Macgregor, Golding, “The Meteoric Stone,” 1–12.
Keith Snedegar, “Astronomical Practices in Africa South of the Sahara,” in Astronomy Across Cultures, eds. Helaine Selin and Sun Xiaochun (Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2000), 455–473, ➝.
Snedegar, “Astronomical Practices in Africa South of the Sahara,” 455–473.
Snedegar, “Astronomical Practices in Africa South of the Sahara,” 455–473.
Jonathan Jacob Moore, “Starships and Slave Ships: Black Ontology and the UFO Abduction Phenomenon," Qui Parle 31, no. 1 (June 2022): 143–158.
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000). Cited in Moore, “Starships and Slave Ships,” 143–158.
Michael Sturma, “Aliens and Indians: A Comparison of Abduction and Captivity Narratives,” Journal of Popular Culture 36, no. 2 (2002): 318–34. Cited in Moore, “Starships and Slave Ships,” 143–158.
I explored this history earlier, in 2023, in a performance at Somerset House, London, at the invitation of Rosa-Johan Uddoh. See: “Ye Olde Performance by Rosa-Johan Uddoh with Thandi Loewenson and Shola von Reinhold.”
Cynthia Hind, “The Children of Ariel School Ruwa, Zimbabwe, Case no. 96” UFO Afrinews no. 11 (February 1995): 19–23.
Moore, “Starships and Slave Ships,” 143–158.
Hind, “The Children of Ariel School,” 19–23.
Hind, “The Children of Ariel School,” 19–23.
Hind, “Ariel School Report,” 7–14.
Space in Africa, “African Space and Satellite Industry Now Valued at USD 19.49 Billion,” Space in Africa (blog), August 17, 2022, ➝.
African Union Commission (AUC), Department of Human Resources, Science and Technology (HRST), “African Space Policy: Towards Social, Political and Economic Integration” (Addis Ababa: African Union Commission, 2019).
AUC, HRST, “African Space Policy.”
Benjamin Silverstein, “China's Space Dream Is a Legal Nightmare,” Foreign Policy, April 21, 2023, ➝.
Silverstein, “China's Space Dream Is a Legal Nightmare.”