Knowledge Frontiers: Shaping African Futures Through the Square Kilometre Array

This chapter elaborates on the notion of knowledge frontiers as liminal spaces where visions of African futures are negotiated and contested, in ways that both produce and reshape power and authority. It does so through the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope, a big-science astronomy project in South Africa that is articulating a particular vision of the role of science and technology in shaping knowledge production in Africa. The chapter engages with three overlapping dimensions of this vision: the SKA as a global scientific project that is reframing representations of “Africa”; the North–South relationships the SKA embodies and the continental leadership ambitions of post-apartheid South Africa it has engendered; and the significant land-use changes the SKA represents in a particularly marginal region of South Africa. It is emphasized that African engagements with the global knowledge economy do not involve a linear trajectory of change.