Thebe Medupe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article or section may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. Please help improve this article or replace this tag with a more specific message. This article has been tagged since September 2005. (help, talk) |
Thebe Medupe is a South African astrophysicist and founding director of Astronomy Africa. He is perhaps best known for his work on the Cosmic Africa project that attempts to reconcile science and myth.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Thebe Medupe grew up in a poor village outside Mmabatho, without electricity, lights or television, where he sat near the fire under the African sky, listening to the elders tell traditional Setswana stories. But his family sacrificed to send him to a fine, modern high school in Mmabatho, where modern western science and mathematics captured his imagination. Halley's comet inspired Thebe to build a crude telescope with a cardboard tube and lenses donated by a school lab technician. On an unforgettable chilly, windy night, he pointed his telescope at the moon, and found himself looking at mountains, plains and craters on another world.
What disturbed Thebe in his last year of high school and afterward was that so many of his friends believed that the African way of life was inferior, that learning western ideas meant Africa had little to offer. Later, after winning the regional Science Olympiad, studying at UCT and in Denmark, and becoming a researcher at the SAAO, his interest in Africa's heritage led him to join the Cosmic Africa project in exploring the ways that the lives of Africans past and present intersected with the heavens; he is presenter and associate producer of the feature film Cosmic Africa.
He received his doctorate in astrophysics at the University of Cape Town that involved theoretical understanding of stellar oscillations in the atmospheres of stars. In particular, he investigated the interaction of radiative transfer and pulsations in the atmospheres of stars by solving non-adiabatic pulsation equations numerically. He works as a researcher at South African Astronomical Observatory and teaches at the University of North West where he leads the recently formed theoretical astrophysics programme in the Physics Department. His other interests involve a study of African ethno-astronomy with a view to use this to attract black students into astronomy and science in general.
[edit] Cosmic Africa
[1] "Not long ago, Africa was a land without borders and fences. The earth, water and sky were its natural boundaries. There was power in the sky, a time when ancient skywatchers looked to the heavens for meaning, guidance and inspiration ... In many parts of Africa today, the sacred alliance between the earth and sky is still replayed ..." From the Cosmic Africa project summary
Africa's traditions, legends and stories about the sky are about to begin reaching a world audience. Dr. Thebe Medupe of the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) and the University of the North-West worked with filmmakers Craig and Damon Foster (known for their award winning The Great Dance), together with project originator Anne Rogers and her co-worker Carina Rubin of Aland Pictures, to produce a panorama of Africa's mythic and practical interaction with the cosmos.
On Monday 13 January 2003, Medupe and others in the project flew to Washington DC for a special preview showing on 16 January. Later this year, invited guests will attend a South African preview of Cosmic Africa at a special screening in Cape Town.
[edit] African Skies, African People
Anyone who has been stunned by a starfilled Karoo night will have no trouble seeing why Africans paid attention to the sky, and made it part of their story. People who lived close to the earth and the changing seasons naturally used the stars, the sun and the moon to keep track of time and times: the time to plant, the time to hunt, the time for ritual that renewed the ties between people and nature.
Africans told stories about the sky, and saw giraffes, lions and zebras among the stars as naturally as people elsewhere saw bears and horses. It was also in Africa that the pyramids and the far more ancient Nabta stones were painstakingly aligned with the heavens, tying the cosmos and man together.
To sample the richness of African traditions and achievements, Thebe Medupe and the filmmakers travelled around South Africa and to Mali, Egypt and Namibia, learning from the local people and sharing modern perspectives.
[edit] Backing and Prospects
Initial seed money for a promotional video came from the South African departments of Arts and Culture and Science and Technology. Backing from American-based Cosmos studios (best known for Carl Sagan's documentary series, Cosmos) made it possible for Anne Rogers and Carina Rubin to begin a research journey stretching from Namibia to the deserts and crocodile-infested lakes of northern Kenya, to the cliff dwellings of the Dogon of Mali, through the steamy coast and jungles of Ghana, to people's earliest astronomical monuments in the Egyptian Sahara.
Solid interest from possible distributors suggests that the filmed and completed Cosmic Africa will soon be introducing audiences worldwide to Africa's ancient perspectives on the cosmos.
