Education critical to save man from self-destruction

Fifty years ago, on Sunday, July 20, 1969, the world experienced pure magic. Man landed on the moon. We were curious youth, opening up our minds to the marvels of science. For four days, we had waited keenly for news about the Apollo 11 spacecraft. It had been launched into outer space on July 16. We gaped about the reality of Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. We were a part of this New World. We were flying beyond science fiction. With our Apollo 11, we were defying the rules of gravity. Armstrong was our man.

Growing up then around mushrooming public libraries – variously under the Macmillan and Kenya National Libraries aegis – we knew about Jules Verne well in primary school. By the time the Americans were realising their dream of the moon, we had sampled such mouth-watering offerings as Around the World in Eighty Days, A Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Journey to the Centre of the Earth – all by Verne. H G Wells of The Invisible Man and Time Machine made equally fascinating reading. Later, you would encounter John Whyndam with The Kraken Wakes, Mary Shelley with Frankenstein, Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four and a whole whale of scientific literary mind-bogglers.