While astronomers are providing new knowledge of the stars daily, ancestral star knowledge is fading. For humans around the world, the stars were not mere objects of esoteric curiosity but guides to time and place that dictated the rhythm of life, and new research indicates that indigenous people in South Africa may be losing certain elements of that cosmic lore.
In a recent paper published in the Journal of Science Communication, South African researchers demonstrate that many of these old stories have disappeared from indigenous consciousness over the last century because of colonization and modernization in Africa.
Intriguingly, the investigation of ancient indigenous beliefs takes place against the backdrop of some of humanity’s most advanced scientific work exploring space today.
Indigenous Star Knowledge
As humans moved from a roving hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a stationary way of life reliant on agriculture, they gained a new level of appreciation for the stars. Those glittering celestial objects always provided direction, but with a new focus on growing food, they now dictated when to begin planting.
When considered in this light, our present astronomy is just a continuation of the stargazing that predates the modern conception of science. The new work looks back on ten years of conversations between San indigenous knowledge holders and South African researcher Anton Binneman.
While Binneman was investigating traditional indigenous ways of knowing about the stars, South Africa was building the highly advanced MeerKAT and SKA-Mid telescopes, highlighting the dichotomy between the old and the new. His work was directly related to the telescope construction, as part of an environmental and social impact assessment required for such large-scale projects. Binneman found those beliefs were changing with time, as the modern world seeped into traditional lives.
Investigating Indigenous Knowledge
“Stories are not frozen in time. Language evolves, the way people relate to the sky changes, and our knowledge of the universe changes too. Indigenous narratives also evolve together with the communities that tell them,” explained Binneman, a specialist in engagement, communication, and stakeholder management.
Rather than trying to uncover the original versions of the local lore, Binneman works in a Dialogical Knowledge Renewal Model, combining archives, community memory, and modern science into something with local meaning. The result informs local astronomy guides and astrotourism, connecting modern initiatives like SKA with the indigenous culture.
“It restores dignity to people,” Binneman concludes. “The first astronomers were not those who built MeerKAT or the SKA.”
At seven sites, Binneman interviewed 52 elders and knowledge holders from local Indigenous communities in a series of workshops. He focused on ethnoastronomical knowledge and how it changed over time.
In the workshops, Binneman showed participants images of celestial objects and asked what they saw and what knowledge they had of them. The researchers then compared these responses to stories recorded in the late nineteenth century, which now reside in the Bleek and Lloyd archive.
Star Stories
Over the course of a century, the indigenous understanding of the cosmos had changed considerably. Some stories loosely survived, while others appeared to have been completely erased from cultural memory.
“We could not simply use the archive as it was, partly because it is strongly shaped by the beliefs of the white researchers who created it at the time. Instead, it served as a starting point for dialogue with the communities,” Binneman explains.
The researchers discovered that the elements most relevant to modern life had the greatest staying power, such as Venus being known as The Farmer’s Clock because it marked the beginning and end of the workday.
The local people had once told a story of a girl who wanted to make light, so she threw a handful of ashes into the sky and commanded them to become the Milky Way. While the story of a girl throwing a cloud of dust is largely forgotten, the Milky Way is still called the Hemelstraat, meaning “road in the sky.”
“Older generations still remember these stories, whereas among younger people they are no longer part of living, practised knowledge,” Binneman said. “They continue to exist, but their form has adapted in response to colonialism, industrialisation and Westernisation.”
Preserving these stories in the public consciousness will now fall to local astronomy guides and the astrotourism industry, as they celebrate indigenous ways of knowing.
The paper, “San Ethnoastronomy and Cultural Memory: Reclaiming Indigenous Cosmologies in the Square Kilometre Array Construction Area,” appeared in the Journal of Science Communication on August 31, 2026.
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds an MA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.