We are all familiar with the attempts by previously colonised nations to get back treasures and culturally significant objects that were looted by the colonisers.
According to the Africa is a Country website, up to 90% of Sub-Saharan Africa’s physical cultural heritage is held outside Africa. My online efforts to verify that figure came to nought, so we’ll have to take this on trust: a huge proportion of Africa’s cultural artefacts and national treasures (and I’m rounding up the whole continent here) is held abroad in the grubby paws of collectors, national institutions and state-sanctioned hoarders.
Here are just a few of the marquee objects: Egypt’s Rosetta Stone, which has been in the British Museum since 1802, when it was seized by the British from the French, who had originally stolen it; Nigeria’s Benin Bronzes, more than 3,000 of which were looted during an 1897 British military expedition — some have been recently returned, but the largest single collection remains at the British Museum; ivory, bronze and gold regalia from Ghana and the Ashanti kingdom; ceremonial masks and jewellery from Senegal, Gambia and Mali; and San and Zulu cultural treasures from South Africa. The list seems endless.
Still, all these injustices have at least a whiff of the historical about them. While the injustice of it is ongoing, the original thefts occurred in the past. So I was intrigued to read about an investigation that Niger has just launched into the sale of a Martian meteorite, originally found in Niger’s remote Agadez region in 2023 by an anonymous meteorite hunter, that was auctioned for $5.3m at Sotheby’s in New York in July.
According to CBS News, pieces of Mars are rarely found on Earth — just 400 of the more than 77,000 officially recognised meteorites on our planet are from Mars. In volume terms, the Agadez meteorite represents about 6.5% of all recorded Martian material on Earth, and is the largest piece of Mars ever found, weighing 24.5kg — 70% heavier than the next biggest Martian meteorite discovered.
According to international law, you cannot just take something that is important for a country’s cultural heritage – whether it is a cultural object, a physical object, a natural object or an extraterrestrial object – out of the country
— Paul Sereno
Palaeontologist Paul Sereno, a professor at the University of Chicago and founder of the organisation Niger Heritage, told the BBC a crime has been committed. “According to international law, you cannot just take something that is important for a country’s cultural heritage — whether it is a cultural object, a physical object, a natural object or an extraterrestrial object — out of the country. We have moved on from the colonial era when all this was OK.”
But have we moved on from this colonial era? In one way, obviously not, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s attempted obliteration of Gaza springing to mind. And though we might be living in a time when the more overt forms of colonisation have been forced to rebrand themselves when it comes to extracting value from Africa, theft has just been replaced by other forms of slightly more subtle exploitation. However, the colonising mindset remains, and Africans have to ask themselves: are we going to be collateral damage in the new enterprise of would-be empires — the colonisation of space?
The US is gung-ho (a word whose etymology is worth looking up) about a plan to build a 100KW nuclear reactor on the moon by 2030. This is seen as a crucial step towards establishing a sustainable lunar base and paving the way for future Mars missions. It’s also, unsurprisingly, a strategic response to the lunar ambitions of those other imperial wannabes, China and Russia. Nasa’s interim administrator Sean Duffy, Wired magazine tells us, says being first to install a lunar nuclear power station is a must-win contest.
“Since March 2024, China and Russia have announced on at least three occasions a joint effort to place a reactor on the moon by the mid-2030s,” Duffy told Wired. “The first country to do so could potentially declare a keep-out zone, which would significantly inhibit the US from establishing a planned Artemis presence.” Nasa’s Artemis programme aims to land humans on the moon again.
Wired, describing the US lunar nuclear ambition as “speculative”, points out that a 100KW reactor represents “a dramatic power boost” compared with the nuclear generators that fuel Mars rovers and space probes. These, it says, typically operate on just a few hundred watts, “equivalent to a toaster or a light bulb”.
It’s all very exciting for space nerds and astro-conquistadors, and the implications have been described as transformative, “not just for the moon, but for the entire solar system”, Wired quotes a former Nasa chief technologist, Bhavya Lal, as saying. Placing a nuclear reactor on the moon is “the same leap that occurred when Earth-based societies moved from candlelight to grid electricity”, Lal says.
The joint China-Russia initiative that Duffy refers to is the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which is aimed at constructing a lunar base by the 2030s, with long-term expansions through 2045. South Africa is part of China’s network of international partners on the ILRS, along with a number of other smaller countries, all there to bolster geopolitical reach and to provide political legitimacy. Through its Artemis accords, the US has formed partnerships with about 30 nations, including recent signatories Finland, Bangladesh, Norway and Senegal.
Senegal, which earlier signed a co-operation agreement with the ILRS, has clearly decided to attempt that most dangerous of Cold War tropes, playing both sides. And there are reasons for that.
By decisively joining one bloc, a country could potentially limit collaboration with the other, and be subjected to punitive measures such as export controls (tariffs!), security rules, or political pressure mirroring Cold War dynamics, with space partnerships tied to military and economic alignments.
And when the race to colonise the moon becomes more openly adversarial, as it surely will, African countries will risk being pulled into proxy competition, as happened when the continent became a Cold War arena for great power aspirations.
Lunar governance is still a fluid concept. Theoretically (ignoring the age-old rule of possession being nine-tenths of the law), no-one owns the moon, and with rules for resource extraction still under debate, African nations become new diplomatic players when it comes to setting those rules.
Lal has described the lunar nuclear reactor that the US wants to build as being “roughly equivalent to sending a couple of adult African elephants to the moon with a fold-out umbrella the size of a basketball court, except the elephants produce heat and that umbrella isn’t for shade, it’s for dumping heat into space”.
I can’t help thinking this is a perfect metaphor, though not in the way he intends it. As with Niger’s Martian meteorite, Africa’s access to the mineral resources of the moon is going to be subject to the whims of the lunar colonising powers.
It really is scarily similar to the Cold War dynamic — two superpowers looking for allies offered aid, technology and the occasional overthrow of a regime so as to capture influence. Now, two space coalitions are doing pretty much the same thing, the difference being that the contested territory is 384,000km away. Whichever of the coalitions gets to colonise the moon, it will also be colonising any stake Africa might have had in what used to be our moon too.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.