Cafeteria Science

That one boss who always put my interests first 🥇 Understood my madness and created talent and career orientation off of it when people saw nothing but a confused young person with crazy ideas and no direction.

Edward Festus Mukuka Nkoloso (1919–1989) sounds like a character invented by a science-fiction writer who drank too much optimism and not enough caution—but he was gloriously real. A veteran of Zambia’s resistance movement, he later turned his gaze from earthly politics to the stars and founded the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, a title so ambitious it practically needed its own launchpad.

Nkoloso announced plans for a space programme complete with trainee “Afronauts,” a cosmic dream that mixed Cold War bravado, homemade engineering, and philosophical swagger. Decades later, that audacious leap of imagination has refused to fade, inspiring artists, filmmakers, and documentarians who remain enchanted by the moment Zambia briefly looked at the night sky and said, quite seriously, why not us?

We think of color as something that belongs to the world. The sky is blue. Grass is green. Blood is red. But none of these colors actually exist in the objects themselves. What exists are wavelengths of light, bouncing, scattering, and entering the eye. Color only begins when the brain decides how to interpret that light. In this sense, color is not a property of reality. It is a story the mind tells about reality.

Two people can look at the same sunset and see different reds. Even if they use the same word, the inner experience may not match. There is no bridge between my red and your red. Language pretends there is agreement, but experience never confirms it. We walk around assuming we share the same world, while each of us quietly inhabits a private spectrum.

This raises an unsettling question. If something as simple and immediate as color is constructed by the mind, what about everything else we think we see directly. Beauty. Danger. Calm. Even truth. Perhaps these too are filtered, adjusted, and gently edited before we ever become aware of them. The eye does not simply open onto reality. It negotiates with it.

Color also reminds us that perception is not passive. The brain is not a camera. It is an interpreter. It guesses, corrects, fills gaps, and smooths over uncertainty. Under different lighting, the same object changes its color, yet we still call it the same thing. Our mind prefers consistency over accuracy. It chooses coherence instead of honesty.

There is a quiet humility in realizing this. We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. Our biology, memories, expectations, and language all participate in the act of seeing. Color becomes a mirror more than a window.

And yet, this does not make color meaningless. It makes it intimate. The blue of the sky is not less beautiful because it lives in the mind. It is more beautiful because it lives there. It means that every color we see is partly a collaboration between the universe and ourselves.