‘It’s a Pan-African story’: the artists telling the amazing true tale of Zambia’s mission to reach space

The nation’s audacious 1960s rocket programme was met with ridicule. Now, more than 60 years on, this curious episode is inspiring film-makers, playwrights and a circus show at the fringe

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In February 1960, Harold Macmillan, the UK’s Conservative prime minister, gave his seminal “wind of change” address to the Parliament of South Africa in Cape Town, announcing the end of the age of colonial rule on the African continent. He had given the same speech in Ghana a month earlier but the South Africa speech received significantly more press attention because of its perceived confrontation with the apartheid regime. The speech began a chain reaction: four years later, the British Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland was dissolved, establishing a newly independent Zambia.

Amid the hopeful energy of the nation’s birth emerged Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, the father of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, with an announcement that the young country would officially join the space race.