Has anyone seen "Cosmic Africa"

[IChing]

I saw it last night on DirecTv, outstanding and thought provoking.

In developing the film, the team's celestial quest put them in touch with chiefs, calendar specialists, diviners, healers, storytellers, nomads, shamans, sky lore experts, archaeologists, linguists and anthropologists from six different countries.

An African's journey
Medupe grew up in a poor village outside Mmabatho in North West province without electricity, lights or television, where he sat near the fire under the African sky, listening to the elders telling traditional Setswana stories. But his family sacrificed to send him to a modern high school in Mmabatho, where Western science and mathematics captured his imagination.

Halley's Comet inspired Medupe to build a crude telescope with a cardboard tube and lenses donated by a school laboratory technician. On an unforgettable chilly, windy night, he pointed his telescope at the moon and found himself looking at mountains, plains and craters on another world.

What disturbed Medupe in his last year of high school and afterward was that so many of his friends believed that the African way of life was inferior, that learning Western ideas meant that Africa had little to offer.

Later, after winning the regional Science Olympiad, studying at the University of Cape Town and in Denmark, and becoming a researcher at the SA Astronomical Observatory, Medupe's interest in Africa's heritage led him to join the Cosmic Africa project in exploring the ways that the lives of Africans intersect with the heavens.

It was on 523 and I hope I am able to see it again

[cprise]

1. This is my kind of programming

I doubt I will ever see it on broadcast (non-subscription) TV though :(

If you have an interest in technology and Africa, you should take a look at the "Go:Open" series, which is about opensource software in Africa. You can download the shows with bittorrent from http://www.legaltorrents.com