The geopolitics of space exploration in Africa: South Africa and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project

Over the past two decades, African states have rapidly expanded investments in outer space. Attracted by low-cost earth observation and access to global astronomy networks, many have founded national space agencies and mobilized resources for a new ‘space age’. At the centre stands the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international effort to build the world’s largest radio telescope. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in South Africa, I analyse the SKA’s geopolitics as a planetary object that condenses layered histories and relations. Hosted in the semi-arid Karoo, the infrastructure links metropolitan nodes in Cape Town and Johannesburg, connects knowledge networks across southern, eastern, and western Africa, and plugs into investments, data flows, and expertise tied to astronomy hubs in Europe, Asia and North America. Framed by a modernist vision that casts outer space as a frontier for African development, industrialisation and global repositioning, the SKA simultaneously materialises spatial legacies of segregation and infrastructural logics of extraction. As it aspires to de-link from historical marginalisation and leapfrog into a high-tech future, it also reinscribes contestations over land and resources, refracting colonial and apartheid histories of appropriation within contemporary struggles over world-making amid geopolitical turbulence.