Meeting my protagonist

What if an African country could surpass America’s most ambitious achievement? Ever since high school, when I learnt about the space race, I have been fascinated by the United States’ struggle to beat the Soviet Union to land a manned mission on the moon’s surface. The original “moonshot” grew out of a geopolitical rivalry that […]

What if an African country could surpass America’s most ambitious achievement? Ever since high school, when I learnt about the space race, I have been fascinated by the United States’ struggle to beat the Soviet Union to land a manned mission on the moon’s surface. The original “moonshot” grew out of a geopolitical rivalry that cost an estimated $107 billion in today’s dollars. The money probably could have been spent on education, roads, or health care, but most Americans took pride in Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon.
I am half-Nigerian, so like many second-generation Americans, my gaze was also turned to the other source of my heritage. Why couldn’t Nigeria have a space programme? In 2006, I had travelled to the capital of Abuja with my father, who was helping to found a technology village that had been envisioned by the minister of the federal territory (FCT), Nasir El-Rufai. El-Rufai was a visionary who wanted to tap into the skill sets of Nigerian scientists in the diaspora and create a hub with a university and tech firms like the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
I was nearly silenced by the absurdity of our encounter.
After my visit, I was so affected by El-Rufai’s ambition that I wrote ‘Nigerians in Space,’ a thriller about a Nigerian scientist who emigratedto the United States to work for NASA and pursue his dream of going into space. Without spoiling the plot (this happens in the first chapter), the scientist is tempted back to Nigeria by a smooth-talking government minister to develop his space programme with a guarantee of a high salary and unlimited resources to accomplish the project. In the end the character decides to take the minister’s offer, and then all hell breaks loose.
There’s also an abalone smuggler from South Africa, and a Zimbabwean freedom fighter, and some sci-fi hocus pocus, but the crux of the plot centres on this concept-Nigerians going into space.
Imagine my shock when I discovered that the programme was indeed real-and it has been around for more than a decade. A few weeks ago, I returned to Abuja for work, and a lot had changed since I visited in 2006. The kernel of an idea for the technology village had blossomed into the African University of Science and Technology, which is now recruiting talented graduate students from around the continent to pursue PhDs in engineering on its growing 200-acre campus. Smartphones were as prevalent as they are on the streets of New York. Indeed, I was in the country to help design legislation to promote Internet freedom on behalf of PEN American Centre, something unimaginable in 2006. On my last day, I met with Dr. OlufemiAgboola, the director of engineering and space systems at the National Space Research and Development Agency.
Now I should back up. In my novel, my main character was a Nigerian émigré who had received his PhD in lunar geology and then worked for NASA. In reality, Agboola received his PhD in engineering from an American university and then worked for NASA. He was then invited to lead engineering for the nascent space agency in Nigeria-and what he discovered when he arrived was not how the programme had been pitched to him.
Olukotun is the Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Centre
Source: www.slate.com