“We are because we were. And the stars have always known our names.”
Before there was a Hubble Space Telescope, before there was a James Webb, before Western science had language for what it was observing — African people were reading the sky.
At Nabta Playa, in what is now southern Egypt, Nubian astronomers arranged massive stones in precise alignment with the stars more than 7,000 years ago. This calendar circle, older than Stonehenge by two millennia, tracked the summer solstice and the rising of Sirius — the star that announced the Nile flood, that marked the turning of the year, that the Kemetic people called Sopdet and understood as a portal between death and renewal. In ancient Kemet, Orion’s Belt was the earthly reflection of the divine. The pyramids at Giza were not monuments to human ego — they were coordinates. Instruments of cosmic alignment. That same star-reading lineage carried forward into what the West would later name astrology, and its own journey from dismissed superstition to serious study echoes the same pattern of erasure and quiet vindication.
The Dogon people of Mali carried knowledge of a star system so complex — Sirius and its dense, invisible companion — that French anthropologists who arrived in the 1930s could barely believe it. Here was a community charting a star the human eye cannot see, without Western tools, from a knowing that ran far deeper than what colonialism recognized as science.
I say all of this not to make a museum exhibit of our ancestors’ brilliance. I say it because the universe is now doing something that has Western cosmology genuinely rattled — and the ancestral record matters.
The Mystery
The universe is expanding. This much we know. Since the Big Bang approximately 13.8 billion years ago, galaxies have been moving away from one another — not because they are flying through space, but because space itself is stretching. Cosmologists use something called the Hubble constant to describe the speed of that expansion: how fast, per unit of distance, the universe is pulling itself apart.
The problem is that two different ways of measuring this constant keep giving two different answers.
When scientists study the cosmic microwave background — the oldest light in the universe, the afterglow of creation itself — they calculate a Hubble constant of roughly 67–68 kilometers per second per megaparsec. When scientists instead measure the distance and movement of nearby galaxies and stars using tools like Cepheid variable stars, they consistently land around 73 km/s/Mpc.
That gap — small by everyday standards, enormous by cosmological ones — is what scientists are calling the Hubble tension. For a clear look at what the data actually shows, new findings on the universe’s expansion rate lay out just how genuine this mystery has become and what it may mean for our most fundamental cosmological models. And the newest data from the James Webb Space Telescope, the most powerful observatory humanity has ever built, has not resolved it. Webb confirmed that Hubble’s measurements were accurate. The tension is real. Something does not fit.
“The Webb data is like looking at the universe in high definition for the first time,” said Siyang Li, a Johns Hopkins graduate student working on the study. Nobel Prize-winning cosmologist Adam Riess, also at Johns Hopkins, put it plainly: with measurement errors now ruled out, the possibility remains that we simply do not understand something fundamental about the universe.
The tension is real. Something does not fit. With measurement errors ruled out, the possibility remains that we simply do not understand something fundamental about the universe.
What That Possibility Holds
Western science describes this moment as a crisis. I want to offer a different frame.
When two measurement systems — one looking back toward the beginning of everything, one observing the present motion of living galaxies — give different answers, that is not failure. That is the universe refusing to be flattened into a single story. That is the cosmos doing what the most honest traditions of human knowing have always done: holding multiplicity.
Our ancestors held this. Kemetic cosmology was not a primitive guess at what Greek science would later formalize. It was a complete epistemology — a way of knowing that understood the stars as relatives, that tracked Sirius not merely as data but as a presence with spiritual consequence, that built architecture as a form of conversation with the universe rather than domination over it.
Ubuntu teaches us: I am because we are. The universe, it turns out, works this way too. Galaxies do not expand in isolation. They move in relationship — influenced by dark matter we cannot see, propelled by dark energy we cannot explain, shaped by something in the early universe we have not yet named. The cosmos is not a collection of objects. It is a web of interdependence stretching back to a moment before time.
The cosmos is not a collection of objects. It is a web of interdependence stretching back to a moment before time. That is Ubuntu.
The Opening
The leading theories now suggest that the Hubble tension points to something new in the physics of the universe — a form of “early dark energy” that gave the cosmos an unexpected burst of speed shortly after the Big Bang, or exotic particles, or primordial magnetic fields that our current models cannot account for.
What strikes me is the language cosmologists reach for when they run out of physics: mystery. Dark. Unknown. New.
This is where indigenous knowledge has always lived. Not in ignorance, but in the humility of knowing that the universe is larger than any single framework can contain. The Dogon were not confused by the complexity of Sirius; they incorporated it into a living cosmology that held the known and the unknown together without crisis.
The James Webb Space Telescope is doing something profound. It is showing us the universe in deeper resolution than we have ever seen — galaxies forming at the edge of time, light that has traveled for billions of years to reach us. What scientists find with it may require a complete rethinking of the standard cosmological model.
That rethinking is not a defeat. It is an invitation.
Indigenous knowledge has always lived in the humility of knowing that the universe is larger than any single framework can contain.
What This Means for Us
Ubuntu Village works at the intersection of community, healing, and the long memory of people who have survived everything the world has thrown at them. We talk a lot about public health, about policy, about the material conditions of Black and Brown life. We don’t always talk about cosmology.
But the stars are not separate from the struggle.
When enslaved Africans in the Americas used the North Star to navigate their way to freedom, they were practicing the same star knowledge their ancestors encoded in stone. When Harriet Tubman said “I never ran my train off the track,” she was speaking in relationship with the cosmos. The sky was not backdrop. It was guide.
The universe is still expanding. We are still here, looking up — not as passive observers, but as the descendants of people who understood that the sky is a living text.
Western science is catching up to a mystery our ancestors held with grace. There is something clarifying about that. And something worth celebrating.
When enslaved Africans used the North Star to navigate their way to freedom, they were practicing the same star knowledge their ancestors encoded in stone.
As they say in the tradition: We are because we were. And the stars have always known our names.
—MM
A Note to Our Donors
If you support Ubuntu Village, you are part of this reckoning too. The same colonial framework that dismissed African health knowledge also dismissed African star knowledge. Reclaiming both is the same act.
We do not ask you to fund us as curators of a lost past. We ask you to invest in communities who have always known that science and spirit are not opposites — that the cosmos and the community are one long, unbroken story.
The universe is still unfolding. So are we.
Ubuntu Village Inc. is a 501(c)(3) rooted in East Harlem, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. We work at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power. Learn more at ubuntuvillageusa.org.
Sources
- Li, Siyang, et al. “Hubble Tension and the James Webb Space Telescope.” Johns Hopkins University, December 2024.
Johns Hopkins Hub — Webb Telescope and Hubble Tension - European Space Agency. “Webb and Hubble confirm Universe’s expansion rate.” ESA, 2024.
ESA — Webb and Hubble Confirm Universe’s Expansion Rate - Gregersen, Erik. “The Expanding Universe: From the Big Bang to Today.” Space.com.
Space.com — The Expanding Universe - Smithsonian Magazine. “James Webb Telescope Confirms the Universe Is Expanding Faster Than We Thought.” 2024.
Smithsonian Magazine — James Webb and the Hubble Tension - Malville, J. McKim, et al. “Megaliths and Neolithic astronomy in southern Egypt.” Nature 392 (1998): 488–491.
This is the knowing that African lunar traditions encoded in ceremony long before telescopes named what the ancestors already tracked — the moon’s cycles, the stars’ movements, and the cosmic order that holds all living things in sacred relation.
Related Reading
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.
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