Imaginaries of outer space from Africa. Astronomy infrastructure in South Africa and Madagascar

In this chapter, we contribute to the emerging field of space anthropology by addressing the surge of earth-based space infrastructures in southern Africa. We use our ethnographic encounter with the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope in South Africa and Madagascar to interrogate the stratified layers of politics and history that inform Africa’s current move to space. Engaging with the field of anthropology of infrastructure, we show how scalar relations from the local to the cosmic are produced. We first address the hypervisibility of space infrastructure as symbols of modernity and post-colonial nation building and show how they become the grounds for land and resource contestations. We then discuss the poetics of space infrastructure, addressing how aspiration and desire of infrastructure articulate Africa as an epistemic object of hope for a better future. We contend that the methodological intersection between historical and ethnographic research of outer space affords new forms of critical analysis.