They demanded payment,” Nkoloso told the A.P. “My spacemen thought they were film stars. “We have tied ropes to tall trees and then swung our astronauts slowly out into space.” Nkoloso had considered launching the shuttle with a catapult system that turned out to be “much too primitive,” and referred to “turbulent propulsion” as an area for future investigation.Īs you may have guessed, the Zambian Space Program never got off the ground. This produces the feeling of freefall.” The mulolo (swinging) system, he hinted, was itself a potential means of space travel. “When they reach the highest point, I cut the rope. “I also make them swing from the end of a long rope,” he told a reporter. He rolled his cadets down a hill in a forty-gallon oil drum to simulate the weightless conditions of the moon. “Our spacecraft, Cyclops I, will soar into deep abysmal space beyond the epicycles of the seventh heaven,” it proclaimed, before gesturing toward how much the space race was about race. “Our posterity, the Black scientists, will continue to explore the celestial infinity until we control the whole of outer space.” Nkoloso was also happy to demonstrate his D.I.Y. Embassy: a “Space Aids Mankind” calendar, and the Zambian Space Program Manifesto. Yet Nkoloso welcomed reporters into his headquarters, which changed location according to his day job, and were cluttered with space-related volumes donated by the U.S. “Some of our ideas are way ahead of the Americans and the Russians and these days I will not let anyone see my rocket plans.” “You cannot trust anyone in a project of this magnitude,” he said. (One saw “piles of letters from foreign well-wishers containing plenty of advice-but no money beyond a 10-rupee note sent by a space-minded Indian schoolboy.”) Despite Nkoloso’s indifference as to which side of the Cold War would fund his space program, he insisted on keeping its details secret. Newspapers also reported the large sums of money, ranging from twenty million to two billion dollars, that Nkoloso requested from Israel, Russia, the U.S., the United Arab Republic, and UNESCO. When the pilot refused to stop the plane so that he could get out and walk on the clouds, Nkoloso made up his mind to enter the space race. The other cadets carried a Zambian flag and a staff in the shape of “a crested eagle on a dinner plate atop a sawn-off broomstick.” Nkoloso said he had been inspired by his first airplane flight. Nkoloso’s dog, Cyclops, was to follow in the paw prints of Russian “muttnik” Laika. Matha Mwamba, sixteen, was headed for Mars. (They were quick to explain that these were not space suits: “No, we are the Dynamite Rock Music Group when we are not space cadets.”) Godfrey Mwango, at twenty-one, had been tasked with the moon landing. His astronauts sometimes wore green satin jackets with yellow trousers. Nkoloso wore a standard-issue combat helmet, a khaki military uniform, and a flowing cape-multicolored silk or heliotrope velvet, with an embroidered neck and festooned with medals. “But I’ll be laughing the day I plant Zambia’s flag on the moon.” “Some people think I’m crazy,” Nkoloso told a reporter for the Associated Press. Others wondered if it was “a semiserious space program” or “a useful publicity stunt.” Their interviews with Nkoloso did little to clarify whether his space program was serious, silly, or a sendup.
“We do not know whether to take the announcement of this news from Lusaka seriously, or whether to conclude that Zambia somehow has been victimized by a Madison Avenue type,” one confessed. Time’ s whimsical footnote prompted a flurry of interest from foreign reporters. Already Nkoloso is training twelve Zambian astronauts, including a curvaceous 16-year-old girl, by spinning them around a tree in an oil drum and teaching them to walk on their hands, “the only way humans can walk on the moon.” He is Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, a grade-school science teacher and the director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, who claimed the goings-on interfered with his space program to beat the U.S.
One noted Zambian failed to share in all the harmony.
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