London-based Spanish documentary photographer Cristina De Middel self-published The Afronauts that explores a space program started in 1964 by a schoolteacher who dreamt of sending Zambians to space at the height of the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States. De Middel (whose photos are included in The Shadows Took Shape) writes,
“I respect the basis of the truth but allow myself to break the rules of veracity, trying to push the audience into analyzing the patterns of the stories we consume as real. Afronauts is based on the documentation of an impossible dream that only lives in the pictures. I start from a real fact that took place 50 years ago and rebuild the documents, adapting them to my personal imagery.” –Cristina De Middel
People who cannot envision themselves leaving their neighborhood or block will never be able to imagine themselves as space travelers (or scientists). To declare that the most likely future is one in which ‘we only have ourselves and this planet’ is the reason only fourteen space travelers are black. We need to imagine greater.
“What happens when third world youth gain increasing access to technologies that were practically unimaginable just a few years earlier?” asks the Ghanaian writer Jonathan Dotse on his blog. “What happens if this trend continues, say, fifty years into the future? And whose job is it to answer these questions? Science fiction writers, of course.”
Dotse notes that today it’s science fiction writers who are answering these questions. Tomorrow it will be astronauts and that isn’t fiction. 25 year-old South African DJ Mandla Maseko was picked to be one of 23 young people to board the Lynx Mark II space shuttle in 2015. Maseko was born and raised in a dusty township in South Africa and never dreamed his life would be as big as it has become.
"I'm not trying to make this a race thing but us blacks grew up dreaming to a certain stage. You dreamed of being a policeman or a lawyer but you knew you won’t get as far as pilot or astronaut. Then I went to space camp, and I thought, I can actually be an astronaut.” – The Root
Cristina De Middel writes,
"The beautiful part of it and the part of the story that I really focus on is not what they actually did, because their training was very rudimentary," De Middel told SPACE.com. "I don't know, but I don't think they were really, really serious about going. Everything happened in 1964, that is when Zambia gained independence, and they wanted to show the rest of the world that they were a big country, as big as the ones that were doing the space race at the time."
It is because Mandla Maseko watched the science fiction series Star Trek and films such as Armageddon and Apollo 13 that he could imagine what it would be like to be an astronaut. Maseko told the Guardian, "I thought, that looks fun," but he never imagined that one day that would be him. I believe that being able to see ourselves in the future is half of the battle.
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