The documents I read suggested starkly conflicting versions of what happened next. Nkoloso claims that an officer “deliberately, and willfully, grabbed and took me by the neck and thrust me into the river pool with his full intention to drown me.” Black kapasus injured him, he writes, when they shaved his head and beat him “with sticks on the lumbar side of my body causing internal batteries and very injurious internal maims, lacerating the nerves.” The colonial administrators deny these accusations, saying that the cuts to his head and his tumble into the water were accidental, and that he had merely fallen into “a state of collapse.” They call Nkoloso “well-educated but unbalanced” and a “puppet dictator.”

Nkoloso’s letters from prison display both his education and his flair for rhetoric. (In one, he reports that the district commissioner, “unlike the pure English blooded Englishman,” had commanded a group of school children “to sneer, and jibe, and jeer” at him, enacting “a political mockery drama like that of, ‘Ecce. Homo—Behold the Man, behold your Congress Chief!’ ”) He made sure that these reports of his arrest reached Kaunda, who was in England at the time, sponsored by the British Labour Party to learn about the parliamentary system. The A.N.C. telegrams that arrived on Kaunda’s desk in London alleged that Nkoloso had been taken in “nearly dead,” his parents “beaten to death,” and his female supporters physically and sexually assaulted. His aunt, who was arrested alongside him, had died in prison about two weeks after her arrest. Kaunda placed these reports, with all their incendiary details, into the hands of British officials in London. A rebellion in a small African village had exploded across the world and landed messily in the lap of the Empire.

Kaunda told his friend’s story in his pamphlet “Dominion Status for Central Africa?,” published in 1958 by the left-wing Union of Democratic Control. Soon after, Kaunda founded the new United National Independence Party (UNIP) responsible for the so-called Cha-Cha-Cha uprising (“we will make the imperialists dance to our tune”), a civil-disobedience campaign involving protests, arson, and road blockages. During this contentious period, the British repeatedly arrested UNIP leaders, including Nkoloso. Mukuka told me that, during one stint in prison, his father had dumped a bucket of urine and ashes on a prison guard’s head. Nkoloso became the self-anointed “camp kommandant” for UNIP’s meetings in the bush to plan the new government. Later, he was appointed the party’s “National Steward,” serving as a kind of hype-man for Kaunda at rallies as the country moved toward independence.

Mukuka had been a member of the UNIP Youth Brigade in the early sixties, and said that his father had started recruiting his space cadets from this organization, as well as from local schools. Mukuka had briefly participated in the space program as a teenager and remembered rolling downhill in an oil drum. “I was scared because you feel sometimes you can suffocate,” he told me. He seemed to take his father’s program seriously: “People were saying no, he’s mad, exaggerating. But, no, he’s a scientist, this is science.” Mukuka claimed that his father wasn’t just training the cadets for space travel, though; Nkoloso was also testing their “readiness for independence” in a political sense. “He was teaching for the program, but hidden from the British government. Teaching the youth so they could be active.” Before they had become astronauts, Mukuka said, Matha Mwamba and Godfrey Mwango had travelled to Tanzania to broadcast political propaganda when it was censored during Cha-Cha-Cha. “The Youth Brigade, you’d find in the morning ‘Vote UNIP’ written in paint on the tarmac,” Mukuka said. They even used explosives: “making bombs, burning bridges,” using “black cloth—they would put it in a sack, then they would mix it with petrol or paraffin, then they burn it.”

Describing all this subversive political action, Mukuka grew animated. “Miss Burton,” he said, snapping his fingers. “In Ndola, she was killed.” He was referring to one of the most famous moments of the Cha-Cha-Cha campaign. On May 8, 1960, a group of UNIP cadres in the Copperbelt had attacked a white British expatriate, Lilian Margaret Burton, by stoning her car and setting it on fire. Despite her deathbed appeal against retaliation, the accused were hanged for murder. “You know who killed her?” Mukuka said. “The astronauts, the scientists, the people who made bombs and some other things.” He imitated the sound of an explosion. “A bomb in her car. So when you wanted to jump in the car? Explodes!”

The space program, Mukuka seemed to suggest, was both a real science project and a cover. After independence, Nkoloso served as President Kaunda’s “Special Representative” at the African Liberation Center, a safe house and a propaganda machine for freedom fighters in other still-colonized nations on the continent: Angola, Southern Rhodesia, Mozambique, and South Africa. His son said that, beyond his management duties, Nkoloso gave military training to “those freedom fighters, they used to call them guerrillas,” in Chunga Valley—the erstwhile headquarters of the Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy. Zachariah Zumba, a colleague of Nkoloso’s at the Liberation Center, confirmed that freedom fighters had been trained “in the bush,” and that the astronauts had been drawn from the Youth Brigade. Zumba hinted that they may have served as bodyguards for Nkoloso, who was “a very feared man.”

Andrew Sardanis, a Greek-born journalist and businessman who participated in the independence movement, remembered Nkoloso differently. In the early sixties, Sardanis said, “everybody loved him, but at that stage, he was not being taken seriously . . . He was insane. Not a normal person.” Sardanis attributed this to what happened in Luwingu. “He was arrested and tortured. The Northern Rhodesian police tortured him. And after that, he lost it.” The Zambian ambassador to the U.N. at the time, Vernon Mwaanga, recalled that the reporters who flocked to interview Nkoloso “looked at him more in jest than in seriousness.” But he felt that the older members of UNIP respected Nkoloso as a veteran freedom fighter, and that the younger ones were inspired by his passion. “He was a very intelligent man,” Mwaanga said. “He was not a fool. He knew what was happening. He knew what was going on. Although my wife still thinks that he was crazy.” Mwaanga had a notion that Nkoloso had been invited to visit a NASA base, which lent some credence to a 1974 letter I’d found in the archives from Nkoloso, thanking the government for sending him “to witness the launching of Appollo [sic] 16.” (In the margins of the letter, there is a hand-scrawled note saying that his words appear “conceived in the realms of fantasy and imagination.”)

Last June, I interviewed former President Kaunda in his personal office, in the Leopards Hill neighborhood of Lusaka. Kaunda, who is ninety-two years old, was dignified and sharp, if a little hard of hearing. Nkoloso had been “quite politically active when we were fighting for independence,” he said, and “a useful servant to the nation.” When I mentioned the space program, Kaunda laughed. “It wasn’t a real thing,” he said. “He wasn’t a scientist, as such. But he used to do some—I can’t say ‘funny things,’ but many people enjoyed themselves in what he was talking about . . . It was more for fun than anything else.”

Once UNIP was established as the ruling party of the new nation, Nkoloso was gradually relegated to the outskirts of government. “He was supposed to be Minister of Defense in the new government,” Mukuka said. “Now, unfortunately, they sidelined him.” Nkoloso drifted through what amounts to a series of sinecures. In his sixties, he went to law school at the University of Zambia, but the degree he earned, in 1983, did not yield better circumstances.

A year later, Nkoloso was working as the chief security officer for an industrial-development company outside of Lusaka. “It is too low for me and I don’t want to talk about it,” he told a Zambian reporter in one of his last interviews before his death, in 1989. He was more eager to discuss his “scientific madness” for space travel. “I have not abandoned the project,” he said. “I still have the vision of the future of man. I still feel man will freely move from one planet to another.”