Thebe Medupe grew up in a poor South African village near Mafikeng, about four hours north-west of Johannesburg. He went on to gain a doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Cape Town, and was presenter and associate producer of 鈥淐osmic Africa鈥�, a feature documentary about traditional African astronomy released in 2002. He is a researcher at the South African Astronomical Observatory, where he is participating in a programme to encourage black South Africans to take up astronomy. He is writing a book, in the Setswana language, on ethno-astronomy
How did your love of astronomy develop?
In 1986, when I was 13, Halley鈥檚 comet came to our part of the sky. It made big news and our school, Mmabatho High School in Mafikeng, organised an astronomy theme week. I remember our English teacher asking us to write essays about living on another planet. I was inspired to want to know more. Later that year I came across a book in our library on how to make a small telescope from materials you can find at home. I built myself a 2-inch refracting telescope from cardboard boxes and lenses I borrowed from the school. I remember the first night I pointed my telescope at the moon. I was captivated. I started mapping the moon, and enjoyed looking at the moons of Jupiter and the phases of Venus. I also learned from my grandparents how to appreciate the night sky. We used to sit around the fire and look at the sky and listen to all kinds of stories.
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What kind of stories did they tell you?
My grandfather used to tell me about an important star called Naka. Naka is quite bright and marks the beginning of winter. When people see it in the early mornings they know it is time for young boys to leave their mothers and fathers to attend initiation schools. Naka in Setswana means horn star, and it is called this because long ago people used to blow cow horns to announce its first sighting, and there were celebrations in the village. I later learned that Naka is known by astronomers as Canopus, the second brightest star.
You recently spent months travelling among the Bushmen of the Kalahari desert and the Dogon people in Mali, listening to their astronomical legends. What were you doing?
In 1998 I was approached by film makers from Cape Town who wanted to make a documentary on traditional African knowledge of the night sky. We signed a co-production deal with Cosmos Studios, an American film company owned by Ann Druyan, the widow of the astronomer Carl Sagan. The film is called Cosmic Africa. It is a documentary partly about my journey as a young boy growing up in a village in South Africa and how I developed an interest in astronomy that led me to build my first telescope. But mostly it is about my journey throughout Africa searching for Africa鈥檚 relation to the cosmos. It was released in 2002, and has been showing in South African theatres and film festivals in the US.
What made you choose the Bushmen and the Dogon?
The aim was to film living societies that still depend on stars in their daily lives. The Dogon were especially good for this because their culture has changed little in the past few hundred years. The same with the Bushmen, who are Africa鈥檚 oldest people.
What did they tell you?
The Bushmen have many stories. For example, they believe the Milky Way was made by a Bushman girl who wished for a little light and threw wood ashes into the sky. She created different coloured stars by throwing different coloured burning roots into the air.
There鈥檚 another one about two of the stars of the Southern Cross, Alpha and Gamma Crucis. It goes like this. The creator had two sons called Khanka and Khoma. One day the two boys went hunting with a family of lions, but the treacherous lions ate the boys. In his anger and despair, the creator made fire and hid it in a meteor disguised as an eland鈥檚 horn. The creator called down the meteor and it hit the lion and killed it. His heart was calmed and there was fire for everyone. Khanka and Khoma are Alpha Crucis and Gamma Crucis.
The Bushmen have many other stories. For example, that seven daughters of the sky god (Pleiades) were married to a hunter. One evening the hunter went hunting the zebras (the three stars of Orion鈥檚 Belt). He was such a bad hunter that his arrow missed, and because he was afraid of the nearby lion (Betelgeuse) he left the arrow where it lay (now known as Orion鈥檚 sword). The unlucky hunter was too embarrassed to go back home to his wives because he did not have meat to bring to them, so he stays out there in the cold as the star called Aldebaran.
What did you learn from the Dogon?
It is striking how integral the stars are to their daily life. They use them to predict the coming of the rainy seasons and to work out when they can start planting. Their knowledge of the stars is extremely precise. I was with an old man in a Dogon village who told me about the positions and times of the rising of the Pleiades cluster in great detail. When I checked what he had said with the sky software on my laptop I found he was spot on. To these people, knowledge about the movement of the stars is a matter of life and death.
They also use a lunar calendar. Their month is subdivided into six weeks, and each week into five days. Their month actually consists of 29.5 days, meaning that each year is short of 11 days compared with the solar calendar. After three years this accumulates to 33 days or about a month and some societies intercalate 鈥� for example, they add a 13th month to their calendar.
Was it hard to get the Dogon to share their knowledge?
The way Dogon society is structured sometimes made it too time-consuming to find information. They have a caste system whereby each member of the society has a particular role to play in the village. This means that, for example, a blacksmith cannot say anything about music because that is not his role. So when we first met the village elder and wanted direct answers about how connected they are to the stars, he just told us to go and study how the villagers live their daily lives, and that way we would get our answer. It turned out he was correct. But it meant we had to follow their pace.
Was there ever conflict between you and these traditional African communities?
There was one time when we planned to film the Bushmen at the time of the partial eclipse in June 2001. We were interested in how they would react to the eclipse and whether they had stories about previous eclipses. We wanted to record their reactions to what was for them an unpredictable event. But we made the mistake of talking to them about it a couple of days before it happened. The Bushmen regard eclipses as bad omens. On the day of the eclipse, they were quite unprepared for it and were clearly alarmed that we had previously been asking questions about it. 鈥淪omething has eaten parts of the sun,鈥� they said. 鈥淗ow could this happen? It must be these film people, it must be Thebe and his telescope which he was pointing at the sun.鈥�
We realised we were in trouble, and at the least we owed these people an explanation of what was going on. I explained to them that we could not control cosmic events, that our telescope was just a fancy magnifier. They appeared to understand this, and all the tension was released with a dance in the evening. I believe that some of them internalised our scientific explanations of cosmic events. We were driving down from the village on our last day, and we asked the village leader what the sun and the planets looked like up close. He answered that they were round balls.
What is the value of bringing traditional knowledge and beliefs to a wider audience?
It is important because it makes young African children aware that our ancestors were keen observers of the sky. It is a way of demystifying science and bringing it closer to our people. During apartheid the whites commonly said that black Africans had always been dependent on them. One commonly used propaganda myth said that our ancestors were incapable of harnessing nature for our own benefit and survival. We were told that we could never dream of becoming anything other than gardeners and maids for white South Africans. Cosmic Africa clearly shows traditional societies basing their lives on observations of movements of stars. It aims to instil some pride in our youth, using African history to show that science, and astronomy in particular, belongs to them as much as anyone else, and that it鈥檚 OK for them to make careers in science.
鈥淭o these people, knowing the movement of the stars is a matter of life and death鈥�
One of the things that really got to me was the belief among western astronomers that black people are somehow different from the rest of humanity in that they have no interest in astronomy. That was a typical response when they were asked why there aren鈥檛 more blacks in astronomy. I wanted to prove this stereotyping wrong.
There have been papers on the cosmic beliefs of African societies in the University of Cape Town library since the early 20th century. Why has it taken so long for this knowledge to become public?
I believe it was part of the effort of the old regime to deny black South Africans knowledge of their past that could liberate them. Remember that it was everyday policy to limit our aspirations. We could not even imagine ourselves in careers that would advance our economic and spiritual position. They understood very well that if they allowed black people to use their history and culture to believe in themselves, then it would be impossible to control us and apartheid would no longer be sustainable.
What was the reaction to the film in the US?
I think it has reminded African Americans of their bond to Africa, and they have seen how history can be used to attempt to heal wounds. Some of them mentioned how much they identified with my quest to reconcile my career with my African heritage. The film starts with my quest and my visit to various African villages, and ends with me teaching schoolchildren how to make telescopes, and using these to observe the moon. This last part is very positive and emotional. It gives me hope that we can use our heritage to answer a serious question that prevails in Africa, America and the Caribbean: 鈥淗ow do we attract black kids into science and technology careers?鈥�
