Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture by Ytasha L. Womack Page A

documentary
Black Sun
, which follows two African American astrophysicists traveling to Australia and Japan to monitor the solar eclipse. When she’s not researching or teaching cultural astronomy, Holbrook’s writing science fiction. The Astronaut Tribe series, a yet-to-be-published work, is her debut sci-fi venture and was recently optioned for a film.
    Holbrook began her career in African cultural astronomy by studying coastal groups and how they currently use the stars for navigation. She looked at sites in Tunisia in North Africa as well as Tanzania and Eritrea to the east and Gambia and Ghana in the west. Using the stars to navigate is a common practice, she says, adding, “I believe that, pretty much, you can walk around the coast of Africa and you can find people who navigate by the stars.”
    She continues, “I’m very interested in women’s relationship to the sky and how they often use the moon to regulate their fertility.” She notes that the book
Blood Magic
, edited by Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb, points to African groups that look to the moon to determine where they are on their cycles. The planet Venus is connected with a feminine deity in African societiestoo. Holbrook says, “In West Africa, they tie the women initiation ceremony for the Mande family with Venus. Before the ceremony, they watch Venus to determine when the ceremony should begin.”
    In 2006 Holbrook organized the first international conference on African cultural astronomy. The weeklong event was set to coincide with the solar eclipse on March 29 and brought the world’s African cultural astronomers together. Two years later she coedited
African Cultural Astronomy
with scholars R. Thebe Medupe and Johnson O. Urama, including essays on recent findings, research, and the conference itself. This body of work was a groundbreaking effort to bolster the study of African cultural astronomy and to integrate it into schools and universities. Research spanned the continent, looking to literature, art, lore, and anthropology. Holbrook hopes to catalog all of the cultural anthropological research and myths across the continent as well as the African scripts with sky symbols.
    However, much of what scholars know about African cultural astronomy comes from African art. This was one of the reasons Holbrook was excited about the “African Cosmos” show. She says, “If they put their art on a semipermanent medium like the cast iron of the Dahomey—or wood carvings, stone carvings—those that practice in that medium can survive the times. Certain cultures we don’t know [about], because they weren’t using materials that would last.” Most African cultures have an agricultural calendar that’s directed by the sky and a creation story in which either their ancestors or God is connected to the sky, says Holbrook. “They’ll have artwork that is connected to the sky. Popular things to depict are the Milky Way, Venus, the sun, and the moon.”
    Moreover, the animals used to describe groups of constellations reflect the region. “If you look at Pacific Island names for stars, you won’t find lions or bears, but you will find stingrays and fish. In Africa, you have giraffes, wildebeest, you have lions, and depending on where you are, you have leopards,” she says. She also says that because much of Africa is in the tropics, the constellations are arranged differently and follow tropical archaeoastronomy. “Not only does the sky look different and move differently, if you’re in the tropics, the sun, moon, and stars are directly overhead at some point. Outside of the tropics, stars are either south or north. When you live in the tropics, you don’t have stars that circle. Those in the tropics all see things move the same way.”
    Holbrook also works with the Timbuktu Astronomy Project, helmed by Medupe. “We’re looking at the translation of