Whizz-kid Mark Shuttleworth has come up with the notion of appointing himself First African in Space.
When Yuri Gagarin was launched into the atmosphere on April 12 1961, the Soviet Union was able to proudly herald him as “the first human in space”.
When Alan Shepherd made a similar journey less than a month later, the United States, slightly miffed that the Red Russians had beaten them in the race, were nevertheless able to console themselves with banner headlines that proclaimed him “the first American in space”.
Gagarin did not need to be proclaimed “first Russian in space” or even “first European in space”, because he was the first human being of any kind to get up there anyway. As a consolation prize you could say that the US description of “first American in space” did nevertheless have a grandiose ring about it, since the term “America” is descriptive of both a country and a continent. The first American in space was quite an awesome thing to be.
From then on, the space race became a two-horse thing, a neck and neck, nationalistic gambling game between the world’s two great superpowers: spy vs spy, American vs Russian. It wasn’t about continents, it was about national pride, played out on an ideological battlefield.
But what do we make of the description “First African in Space”? Bold, to say the least. But then Mark Shuttleworth is a bold sort of guy.
Whizz-kid Shuttleworth was not exactly born in a manger in a barn behind an obscure inn, but his biography makes it seem as if he came pretty close. We are consistently told of how he built a world-beating company producing Internet security systems in the garage of his parent’s Cape Town dwelling (whether this was a shack, an inn or a mansion is never made clear).
His one-man enterprise rapidly grew into a company employing 37 people, who were all finally able to move out of ma and pa Shuttleworth’s garage when an American company bought his brilliant patents for a very reasonable $575-million (that’s right, I said dollars) in 2000.
From then on, the sky was the limit (if you’ll pardon the pun) for young Shuttleworth. The then 26-year-old rand billionaire gave each of his long- suffering employees a R1-million handshake for their loyalty under cramped conditions and then tried to figure out what to do with the rest of his fortune.
In those days (not so long ago, mark you) the R37-million he had handed out to his helpers would have amounted to about $5-million. What is a young man to do with the $570-million loose change left after such an act of generosity?
Well, last year he bought himself a $50-million executive jet as a Christmas present. That still left quite a lot of money.
In the year after his windfall, he had been talking excitedly about building a South African version of California’s Silicon Valley, home of the American computer hardware and software revolution – a dream that was right up his street, you might say. And one that would bring phenomenal levels of employment, and a burgeoning infrastructure of intellectual and capital resources to his native land to boot.
As the months rolled on, however, the voice of financial reason started ringing in his ears. Maybe it wouldn’t be so good to put all his eggs in his South African basket (as he had initially insisted he would) but spread them around the key global markets instead. He put his plan to the Reserve Bank who turned him down flat.
Shuttleworth was waking up to what it really meant to be a South African. Even worse, as a billionaire he was finally learning what it was like to be at the bottom of the pile.
“Our regulations are too restrictive,” he told the Sunday Times. “For today’s entrepreneurs, our foreign exchange laws feel similar to what the pass laws felt to black South Africans [under apartheid].”
Like Yoko Ono a few decades before him, Shuttleworth was waking up to what it was like to be “the nigger of the world”.
So he took the rest of his money and went into exile, vowing not to return until his country woke up to the wrongs it was busy committing against its own people.
But Shuttleworth is not one to sit around for long. Even having your own private aeroplane can get boring after a while. He hit on the idea of buying a passenger ticket on a Soyuz space shuttle for a very reasonable $20-million, becoming the second civilian ever to schmooze into space. But second civilian is not enough. Which is presumably why Shuttleworth came up with the notion of appointing himself First African in Space.
Now, I have a few problems with this. First of all, it ignores the fact that other Africans have made very serious attempts to get into space, but have been hampered by the lack of the kind of resources Shuttleworth is able to whistle up at the drop of a hat.
Take my old friend Edward Mukuka Nkoloso for example. A veteran of the Zambian liberation struggle, who announced his appointment as director general of the Zambian National Academy of Space Research in 1964, he posed for the cameras of the Times of Zambia with three young men who had supposedly volunteered to be Zambia’s first astronauts.
There they stood on the open veld, the young men wearing old army helmets, taking turns to climb into an empty 44-gallon petrol drum to be launched from a platform attached to a tree, thence to the ground and roll to the bottom of the hill. “This gives them the feeling of rushing through space,” Nkoloso told reporters.
Ambitious as his project was, Nkoloso never claimed to be attempting to send “the first African into space”; he was simply doing his duty to his country. “I’ll have my first Zambian astronaut on the Moon by 1965,” was his modest claim.
Shuttleworth is free to do what he pleases with his hard-earned fortune. But to hawk his private junket as a patriotic enterprise not just for the country of his birth (even if that were to be acceptable in his current emigre persona) but of a whole continent that has no idea of the wild claims he is making on its behalf, is something else.
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