The Story of AFRONAUTS: From Zambia to the Edinburgh Fringe

How an extraordinary story from Zambia’s past inspired Circus Zambia and Wake The Beast to create AFRONAUTS — and take it to audiences around the world.

In 1964, Zambia became an independent nation.

At almost exactly the same moment, an extraordinary plan was capturing imaginations.

Edward Mukuka Nkoloso — teacher, activist and self-appointed director of Zambia’s National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy — announced his intention to send a Zambian astronaut to the moon.

While the United States and Soviet Union poured extraordinary resources into the Space Race, Nkoloso assembled his own group of young would-be astronauts — the Afronauts.

The international press treated the idea as a joke.

But more than sixty years later, the story raises a much more interesting question: Who gets to dream?

Finding AFRONAUTS

The journey towards AFRONAUTS began in Zambia.

Zambian theatre-maker and Circus Zambia Artistic Director Gift Chansa had been fascinated by the Afronaut story for years. Gift brought the idea to his long-term collaborator, theatre-maker and Wake The Beast Artistic Director Adam McGuigan, and together they began exploring how a new generation of Zambian performers might reclaim and reinterpret this extraordinary moment in their country’s history.

The collaboration grew out of relationships stretching back many years.

Circus Zambia and Wake The Beast share roots in Zambia’s performing arts community and in a long history of collaboration between artists in Zambia, Ireland and the UK. Chansa and McGuigan had previously worked together through Barefeet Theatre, Circus Zambia and Wake The Beast, including taking the production Empire to Ireland in 2019.

AFRONAUTS became their most ambitious collaboration yet.

Telling the story through circus

From the beginning, the team knew AFRONAUTS shouldn't simply be a historical reconstruction.

The Afronaut story is about bodies attempting the impossible: gravity, flight, falling, risk and the desire to escape the limits of the Earth.

Circus therefore became part of the language of the story itself.

Combining contemporary African circus, acrobatics, theatre, dance, live music, projection and spectacle, AFRONAUTS looks back at Nkoloso’s extraordinary experiment through the eyes of a new generation of Zambian artists.

The production asks what inspired the original Afronauts, how their story has been remembered — and sometimes ridiculed — and what their ambition might mean today.

At its heart is a simple idea: What do you do when you have a dream and the whole world laughs at you?

From Zambia to the world

AFRONAUTS was developed through an international collaboration between artists in Zambia, South Africa and the UK.

The production was performed in Zambia before travelling to South Africa’s National Arts Festival in Makhanda, where the company continued to develop the work and its distinctive fusion of circus and theatre.

In 2026 came its biggest journey yet.

A company of Zambian artists travelled to the UK to perform AFRONAUTS at festivals and venues before undertaking an extended season at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

At Edinburgh, the production introduced the story to thousands of new audience members and attracted extensive press attention and critical acclaim, including numerous five-star reviews and coverage in The Guardian, The Stage, The Scotsman, Starburst Magazine and other publications.

For the company, however, bringing AFRONAUTS to Edinburgh was about considerably more than reviews.

It was about placing Zambian artists — telling a Zambian story — on one of the world’s largest international cultural stages.

Looking again at the Afronauts

For decades, accounts of Nkoloso and his Afronauts were frequently framed through the amused gaze of Western journalists.

AFRONAUTS deliberately looks again.

It doesn't ask audiences simply to decide whether Nkoloso's plan was realistic.

Instead, it asks why some nations' enormous dreams are remembered as ambition while others are remembered as absurdity.

The production places the story alongside the optimism of Zambian independence and asks what it meant for a newly independent African nation to imagine itself not simply participating in the modern world, but travelling beyond it.

There is humour in that story.

There is absurdity.

But there is also something profoundly moving about the refusal to accept the limits other people have set for you.

The journey continues

Following its Edinburgh season, AFRONAUTS continues its 2026 international tour across the UK, Ireland, Europe and Africa, bringing this remarkable piece of Zambian history to audiences around the world.

More than sixty years after Nkoloso looked towards the moon, another generation of Zambian artists is carrying the story forward.

AFRONAUTS is ultimately not a story about whether Zambia made it to space.

It is about something much bigger: the audacity to imagine that you might.

AFRONAUTS: Created by Circus Zambia and Wake The Beast

Written and directed by Gift Chansa and Adam McGuigan

Discover AFRONAUTS, reviews, tour dates and future performances →