SKA telescopes bridge Indigenous astronomy and modern science in South Africa

The sky has always been a text. For thousands of years, people have read it—not as an abstraction, but as a practical necessity. The stars marked the hours. The seasons announced themselves in the movement of Venus. Agriculture depended on knowing when to plant. What we now call cosmology and astrophysics are simply the latest chapter in a much longer story of humans looking up and making sense of what they see.

In South Africa's Karoo region, that history is being actively recovered and rewritten. When the construction of two major radio telescopes—MeerKAT and the planned SKA-Mid—began, the projects required environmental and social impact assessments. As part of that process, Anton Binneman, a researcher specializing in engagement and stakeholder communication, spent roughly a decade meeting with elders and knowledge keepers from San-descended communities in the area. What emerged from those conversations challenges a common assumption: that Indigenous knowledge is a fixed thing, preserved in amber, unchanging across generations.

The work began with a practical tool—the Bleek and Lloyd archive, a collection of astronomical narratives recorded by white researchers in the late 19th century. Binneman and his team organized workshops in seven locations around the telescope site, bringing together about 52 recognized elders and knowledge holders. They showed participants images of celestial objects alongside stories from the archive, then asked a simple question: What do you see? What stories do you know? Evening sky observations followed. When elders could not attend the workshops, researchers conducted home visits and interviews.

What they found was neither complete preservation nor total loss, but something more complex. Knowledge tied to daily life had endured. Venus remained boer se horlosie—the farmer's clock—because its rising and setting still marked the beginning and end of work. But the Milky Way, once called Hemelstraat, the road in the sky, had lost much of its narrative weight. The story of a girl who threw ashes into the heavens to create light survived mainly in the memory of older generations. Younger people no longer carried it as lived knowledge. Some stories had fragmented into pieces; others had vanished entirely.

Yet Binneman emphasizes that this is not simple forgetting. The narratives have transformed. They have absorbed the weight of colonialism, industrialization, and Westernization. They have adapted to new languages, new religions, new social structures. Indigenous knowledge, he argues, is not frozen in time—it evolves, incorporating contemporary elements, including science itself. The archive could not be used as a historical record to be recovered unchanged. Instead, it became a starting point for dialogue, a bridge between what was written down, what communities still remembered, and what they understand now.

This realization led to the development of what Binneman calls the Dialogical Knowledge Renewal Model. Rather than attempting to restore an imagined authentic tradition, the approach brings three things into conversation: historical archives, community memory, and contemporary science. The results are then returned to the communities themselves. In the Karoo, this has already supported the training of local astronomy guides and the development of astrotourism. But the deeper impact is symbolic. When a community recognizes that people in their region have been observing and interpreting the sky for millennia, the arrival of the SKA becomes something different. It is not the introduction of astronomy to a place where it never existed. It is a continuation—a new chapter in their own history.

"It restores dignity to people," Binneman says. "The first astronomers were not those who built MeerKAT or the SKA." That recognition matters. It means the telescope is not simply imposed on the landscape from outside. It is woven into a narrative that belongs to the people who live there, one that stretches back thousands of years and forward into a future they will help shape.