My heart turns my mind into circles / As I lie here all alone in my bed / The moon shines brightly through my window / And I wonder if it’s true what they say / That there’s a man . . . / A man on the moon / If there’s a man on the moon / Can you hear me calling you / Please save me from sharing my love for two / Dear man on the moon won’t you lend me a hand / Cause I can make my mind up today / What would you say / Man on the moon.”

If there is a singular South African song that evokes my seemingly carefree childhood memories like no other, with the possible exception of Tommy Oliver’s I wanna live, then it is musical group Ballyhoo’s Man on the Moon. Released in 1981, it spent 19 weeks on Springbok Radio’s charts.

I distinctly remember Ballyhoo’s record’s cover, which had a ginormous stamp of the Apollo 11, with Neil Armstrong about to step onto the surface of the moon. Part of the reason why I remember the image so clearly is that, at the time, I was an avid stamp collector, and, in an alley – in those days children could still walk down allies unconcerned and unafraid – there was a tiny little stamp shop. The shop was just off the then Smith street in the Durban central business district. In the window was a stamp of the moon landing. The stamp was unique in terms of size, being the size of a small envelope.

Of course, the stamp was priced way above my monthly pocket money allowance, and saving pocket money was, quite ironically, an alien concept. So, all I could do was admire the stamp and annoy my parents by pointing it out to them frequently. My father convinced me that a stamp of that size could not be the real McCoy.

That was long before China was even on the horizon; in those years, all I knew of the East was that there was a country called Japan and that Toyota motor vehicles were imported from that country as parts and assembled just outside Durban. The cars were generally referred to as Japanese junk. This was quite unfair, though. The motor vehicle body panels that were imported from Japan were coated in petroleum jelly, and the word on the street was that, as the jelly retracted with the sea breeze, it exposed parts of the body panels, making them susceptible to future rust.

On July 20, that song was front of mind as I pondered if a man, or men, had really been to the moon? If the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration is to be believed, 12 men landed on the moon from July 20, 1969, to December 14, 1972. The US is the only country that has landed men on the moon. But it was not the first country to land a spacecraft on the moon – that honour belongs to Russia, which, in 1959, performed the first ‘hard’ moon landing, intentionally crashing a spacecraft onto the moon. In 1966, both the US and Russia achieved ‘soft’ unmanned moon landings.

So, as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that one small step, does it mean that countries have moved on from the moon? Not quite – 2019 saw the Chinese making a ‘soft’ landing on the far side of the moon, on January 3, and the Israeli spacecraft launched on February 22 crashed onto the moon on April 11.

Is Africa up next? Could the South African National Space Agency, established on December 9, 2010, be a candidate? An African flag surely has a place on the moon, and it would be more memorable if it was to be planted by the first woman on the moon.