Circus Zambia Brings Afronauts Story to Edinburgh Fringe
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- Edward Mukuka Nkoloso founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy after independence in 1964, vowing to beat the US and USSR to the moon with handpicked 'Afronauts' trained on a farm outside Lusaka.
- Nkoloso's training regimen included swinging trainees on ropes that were then cut to simulate freefall, dunking them in rivers for splashdown practice, and rolling them down hills in barrels as a centrifuge substitute.
- Nkoloso sought £7m from Unesco and funding from Israel, the Soviet Union, the US, and the United Arab Republic; all requests were denied and the programme was quietly abandoned, with Nkoloso later pivoting to politics.
- First president Kenneth Kaunda told Zambian-American academic Namwali Serpell the space mission 'wasn't a real thing,' fuelling a theory that Nkoloso was satirising superpower space spending rather than genuinely competing.
- Zambia installed its first ground-receiving station in 2024 and joined the African Union's African Space Agency formed the year prior, advancing space ambitions Nkoloso first articulated six decades ago.
- Circus Zambia and Wake the Beast, co-directed by Gift Chansa and Adam McGuigan, perform 'Afronauts' at Edinburgh's Underbelly through 31 August, then tour the UK and Ireland from 4 to 12 September with support from the Irish embassy in Lusaka.
Why it matters: The Edinburgh Fringe run and a November Royal Court premiere show the Afronauts story migrating from academic curiosity into mainstream international theatre, giving Zambia a rare self-authored narrative on a global stage. Chansa's framing of the show as 'made for Zambia, by Zambia' deliberately flips the historical ridicule — Western media once branded the programme 'a bunch of crackpots' — into a contemporary assertion of cultural authorship.
