Reframing Cultural Astronomy in Africa

Last Updated on March 4, 2026 by Tsiyon Hone

A few days ago, during a small presentation on how different Kenyan cultures interpret the sky, a foreigner asked me a striking question. “Did anyone have a story about Saturn?”

The immediate answer was no. For most Kenyan communities, Saturn was not recognized as a planet, nor understood it as a celestial body orbiting the Sun. It was simply another bright point of light, perhaps used as a navigation marker but not central to mythology.

That question, however, has stayed with me. Kenya has 42 tribes, each with rich traditions of sky lore. How is it that none of them created a story about Saturn? We have myths about the Moon, detailed narratives about the Pleiades, tales of Orion, and explanations of the Milky Way yet Saturn, Jupiter and even Venus remain largely absent from our traditions.

In the 17th century, Galileo through his telescope saw Saturn’s rings. That single observation fundamentally shifted humanity’s understanding of the cosmos, even though Galileo himself faced punishment for his ideas. This is not to compare African ethnoastronomy to Western astronomy, but the contrast is striking. Why don’t we approach African cultural astronomy with the same perspective? Why don’t we see our stories and traditions as equally significant windows into how individual humans have always tried to understand the universe?

As a child I was always drawn to the sky. My father once told me he had wanted to be an astronomer but decided that would be a future for his children to explore. That hope half fatherly promise, half quiet surrender is always with me. Still, people often think it’s peculiar that my fascination is in the sky, as if the sky is an odd needless preoccupation. Sometimes I wonder where my fascination came from. Did it grow out of evenings spent watching documentaries and reading books imported from the West or is it something older a thread of my ancestors’ curiosity reawakened in me, pushing me to ask the same questions under a different sky?

I grapple with my own distance from culture. I barely speak my native language. So, if it is the latter why doesn’t everyone have the same curiosity as me and my peers. If now its hard for people to be fascinated by the stars did everyone in the past really get the same fascination? Did every Samburu person genuinely see the Moon as a father and the stars as its wives and children?  Was there someone like me who had an incredible interest in the sky and made stories out of the sky and only shared them with a few of their peers or family?

These questions may seem pointless, but they matter deeply when we talk about cultural astronomy. To me, the problem is not just that cultural astronomy in Africa lacks written records or lost information with our great grandparents, it is also that we have narrowed our understanding of culture, history and even ourselves.

Often when African cultural astronomy is explored it is explored in a generalized understanding that everyone from this tribe/ community believed this. When doing research on different communities and their beliefs about the sky , I was informed by someone that the Kikuyu tribe believed that  souls after death would go into the milky way to be with Ngai ,the kikuyu god, but when I shared this with my friend he told me Kikuyus never believed in a heaven and that lost souls were believed to be reconnecting with the Earth after they passed away. However he made a comment that there are some communities that had different beliefs among the Kikuyu and if there’s already contrast in what communities believed in their own communities why would we generalize that a whole group believed a specific belief?

Another issue is how we confine cultural astronomy and culture more broadly to the past. In most conversations, culture is framed as something static, tied only to traditions and practices that existed before colonialism. Even when we talk about the “loss of culture,” it is almost always in reference to what our ancestors did, not how culture continues to evolve today.

I once asked a Samburu friend whether the checked Samburu shuka we see today was truly a pre-colonial garment. He told me that, in fact, their people traditionally wore skins from their herds. Yet when Kenya is represented abroad or even within the country, we proudly display the checked fabric as if it were ancient and authentic. We wear it, sing and dance in it and convince ourselves that we are connecting to our ancestors, even though the cloth itself was introduced from a colonial land.

If only we could accept that culture changes. We do not have to freeze it in our ancestor’s lens to validate it. What we live, create and practice now is also culture. And perhaps recognizing that fluidity can help us see cultural astronomy not as a lost relic, but as a living way of engaging with the sky. This can diversify how we approach research in cultural astronomy. One of my favorite artists is Nabalayo a Kenyan artist (notice how I did not say she’s my Kenyan artist but one of my favorite artists) that creates folk music with different Kenyan sounds merged with electronic sounds that are dreamy. Feels like a modern connection with the ancestors. This is my concept of how we should approach cultural astronomy, an intertwined modern understanding of cultural astronomy and ancient astronomy ideology.

Now that I am concluding this, I feel this was less of a scientific write up but I also believe that it can expand how we scientifically study cultural astronomy apart from the obvious challenges we face when studying it. I hope this will expand your thoughts on what cultural astronomy and maybe even contribute to future studies on cultural astronomy.