Cape Canaveral of Africa

In 1974, an agreement between Orbital Transport und Raketen Aktiengesellschaft (OTRAG), a private German aerospace company, and General Mobutu, President of Zaire, was made public in Penthouse magazine. OTRAG had been granted rental of an enormous, mineral rich territory in the country, an area allegedly equivalent to the size of Great Britain or West Germany, to develop the first private space launching company. As the OTRAG founder wrote at the time, ‘General Mobutu, President of Zaire, was the fastest to react and to decide that he wanted a Cape Canaveral of Africa’. The agreement was remarkable in being almost universally disliked, a rare moment of unity in an otherwise highly polarised Cold War world.

This talk traces the history of OTRAG, their ambitions in Zaire, and the motivations underlying Mobutu’s extraordinary support of their project, and situates this agreement alongside colonial concessions ceding African land for Western Imperialist expansion. I discuss the contemporary work of the Développement Tout Azimut space programme, who have revived experiments with rocketry and satellites in the Democratic Republic of Congo and examine how they operate with an emancipatory, counter logic to those which have come before. Their work, uniquely Congolese, like the ‘random scream from somewhere off mic’ (Eyre) in a rumba song, provides an opening to an alternative world of celestial possibility. 

Thandi's talk will be followed by a small drinks reception. All welcome but please register to attend: https://arc-relaunch.eventbrite.co.uk