Earth to Mars: Lately I’ve been dreaming of speaking Swahili to little green women...

Tanzania’s proposed new education policy has fired up an excellent debate about language and the role of Kiswahili, say, versus English in the future not only of the country but of the region and potentially half the continent too.

In following the debate, with credible points made by proponents and detractors of the Kiswahili-first suggestion, a question popped up in my mind: What would it take to put an East African on Mars?

Because that would make this whole issue infinitely more interesting from, say, a futuristic scenario that posits Africans (well, specifically East Africans) in a technologically empowered future.

The trouble with big ideas is that they need to be slightly unattainable and impossibly romantic to overcome the natural inertia of bog standard human life. I have been looking for the things that could make the East African Community project a little sexier for a while now. With apologies to people who get excited about port construction projects and trade tariffs, so far so meh.

It’s not that our slice of the pan-African dream has lost relevance, it just needs a buff and polish and something that feels more contemporary and perhaps dynamic.

What lies beyond the 1960s dream of a united continent, why federate, what could be on the other side of all that collectivism? How would we speed that up and sell it to a generation that is increasingly unburdened by the recent past because we’re all invested in futurism?

Putting a citizen of East Africa on Mars, thereby increasing the chances that the spread of genetic and linguistic diversity over the arc, the trajectory of human history will not exclude us? Why not, as an open-ended goal. If homo sapiens started up here and managed to spread across the world, the least she can hope to do is aim for the stars.

To be fair, there may be a moral consideration here: Investing in the potential to live in space takes away resources that could be used, arguably, to improve the quality of life of people living here and now.

There are more important things to worry about than kamikaze journeys inspired by no small amount of science fiction. On the other hand, though, it is arguably this kind of endeavour that has delivered so much of the technology that makes life what it is today.

If the ambition were to catapult a modern-day Lucy or three onto Mars from where she came from, what basic things would we have to achieve together? I suspect that the physical resources aren’t nearly as important as the human ones.

Evidently, to put a Kiswahili-speaker on that rock, our education systems would have to be revolutionised. Investing in systems that are designed to promote human potential, able to produce a viable cosmonaut with the competence to take on a no-return mission alongside people from very different places. Could that be done in, say, Kiswahili alongside English in the space of 30 years or so?

That could only be achieved on a foundation of peace and stability. Not necessarily in the way our governments mean it — that oppressive fear of genuine political competition that gives too much power to people with guns. Which seems to suggest that on a societal level, we may also want to examine our various approaches to government, with some serious meditation needed on the quality of the leadership class with a view maybe to avoiding the usual problems that afflict them.

And that would be the beginning of a to-do list. In case you are wondering, why of all things space travel when there are port projects and trade tariffs to worry about? Well.

The Mars One project (yes, that’s a real thing) started recruiting potential Martians two years ago. That would be 2013, right around the deadline for the original plans to politically federate the East African Community.

So far, Mars One — a collective of public and private dreamers who are throwing considerable resources at the idea of colonising space — are about three years away from their first unmanned mission to the red planet.

Meanwhile, the East African Community remains unfederated. It is an interesting proposition, to think that we could very easily have extra-planetary human colonies before we have a United States of East Africa.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]