Rotsler gave Uhura’s birthplace as Nairobi, and several other sources have established it as her home. Star Trek: The Lost Era—Catalyst of Sorrows by Margaret Wander Bonanno established that she lived in Mombasa as a child and vacationed with her grandfather in the country. I’ve tried to reconcile these different origins. Mombasa is a major port city (and home to a space elevator terminus in the HALO game universe), so it made sense to establish it as a center of interstellar travel and commerce.

The premise that Uhura’s father was lost in space when she was twenty comes from the 1978 Bantam Star Trek novel The Starless World by Gordon Eklund, though I have disregarded other elements from that novel (such as her father later turning up alive at the center of the galaxy). Uncle Raheem was established in the untitled issue 18 of IDW Publishing’s Star Trek Ongoing by Ryan Parrott and Claudia Balboni; though that series was set in the Kelvin Timeline, Raheem would have been born well before the timeline split and thus should exist in both realities. Ironically, in Kelvin, he was the one lost in space.

Of Uhura’s previous starship postings, the Azrael comes from Rotsler, the Ahriman from Tears of the Singers by Melinda Snodgrass, and the Potemkin from the video game Star Trek: Starship Creator. The starbase posting is my own innovation, just to mix things up.

M’Umbha Uhura’s job as a legal advocate for elephants was loosely influenced by the Afrofuturist novel Blue Remembered Earth by Alastair Reynolds, as well as by the growing scientific evidence that elephants are conscious, intelligent beings. Star Trek has shown us the sentience of humpback whales in The Voyage Home and alluded to dolphin personnel on starships in The Next Generation and Lower Decks, so it stands to reason that the Federation would also do its best to respect elephant personhood and rights.

The ancestor who changed the Kenyan family name Uhuru to Uhura to “soften” it is an allusion to how Gene Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols devised the character name, according to various sources. I tried to come up with a more Afrocentric justification for the vowel change, but there’s no basis for such a thing in Swahili as far as I could determine.

The Earth colony on Altair VI was established in Star Trek: Enterprise—Kobayashi Maru by Michael A. Martin & Andy Mangels. The native population on Altair III was alluded to in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Encounter at Farpoint” and depicted (vaguely, as robed and hooded humanoids) in DC Comics’ Star Trek: The Next Generation issues 67–70 by Michael Jan Friedman and Deryl Skelton. I’ve attempted to reconcile them with the mention in “Amok Time” of a peace settlement at Altair that would send ripples as far as the Klingon Empire.