Here is a lovely story about the Jews of Uganda, told through an interview with Jeffrey Summit, who is both a rabbi and professor of ethnomusicology and Judaic studies at Tufts University.

In Uganda, from the 1860’s until British rule was stabilised in 1914, the various European powers struggled to own the loyalty of the population through religion.

People who converted to Anglicanism, for instance, could send their children to school and became successful in business.

Around 1900, a great elephant hunter and powerful local leader named Semei Kakungulu converted to the English church and joined the British. They betrayed him, and he rejected them, but he and his followers from five different groups of Bantu people kept their loyalty to the Bible.

For a time they became members of a hard line Protestant sect called the Malakites, who shared and developed their interest in the Old Testament. In 1919, Kakungula’s people rejected the Malakites in turn, and began to practice a form of proto-Judaism, by which they finally stepped away from the British. Today, the community tells a story in which Kakungulu studied Christianity and Islam, and finally declared, “Why should I follow the shoots when I could have the root?”

They began to keep Sabbath, called their children after the Old rather than the New Testament, and ripped the Christian part of the Bible out of the sacred book. They also had themselves circumcised, appointed Rabbis and built synagogues for the three thousand members of the Abayudaya, which means “Jews of Uganda.” The process is what the technicians call a “self-conversion”. They were traditional people from rural Africa, who had no experience of the wider world. They had never seen a synagogue, or met a Jew.

Within a few years, Semei Kakungulu went to the courts in Kampala, and finally encountered some Jewish merchants.

“He went up to them and said, according to the community lore, “You’re Jewish? I’m Jewish too.” And he invited them back to his court in Mbale where he was very interested to learn mainstream traditions. And so these merchants taught him basic laws of keeping kosher, kosher slaughtering of animals, elementary blessings in Hebrew. These merchants presented the community with the first copy of the Bible, the Torah, written on both in English and in Hebrew, and over the years, the community has increasingly been interested in connecting to world Jewry and practicing mainstream.

The Jewish world opened up a little more to them after a another chance encounter some ten years later.

’”In fact, there’s a story, in 1937, the community met a Jew from Yemen, David Solomon, who was working on a water works project in Mbale. And the story is a good story. They say that David Solomon went out to hire people to work on this municipal project, and this one group of people came to him, and he said, “I want to hire you.” And they said, “Yes, we are happy to be hired, but we have to tell you, we don’t work on Saturday.”

He said, “You don’t work on Saturday? Why?”

And they said, “Because we’re Jewish.”

He said, “You are Jewish? I’m Jewish!”

Solomon sent them a calendar, which enabled them to discover that they had in fact been keeping the Jewish holidays accurately, timing them by deduction from the old rules in the Hebrew Bible.

They had a hard time for many decades, since their children could only go to school and participate in the larger society if they became Christian. Many families converted away, and the community today carries families who are still close but divided by religion. They heard about the establishment of the state of Israel on the radio.

’”.. the community gathered and scanned the horizon outside of Mbale, waiting for airplanes to appear to transport them to Zion, because they believed that all the exiles were being gathered, and they prayed to be delivered from their isolation. But no one came. No one even knew about them at this point.”

The larger Jewish community became more aware of them from 1962, after a visit from the secretary of the Israeli Embassy in Kampala, who helped them write to Jewish leaders in Israel and the US. Cartons of books arrived from America in the 1960’s.

From 1971, Idi Amin stopped the contact and made life even more difficult. Though they were far from Kampala and kept a low profile, synagogues were destroyed, and they worshipped in secret, sometimes in a cave. Numbers dwindled to 300, and they forgot rituals, even funerary rites.

Once Amin was deposed in 1979, the Abayudaya began to reclaim their synagogue land. A new generation of young leaders emerged, and the community grew again.

”Much of this transformation had to do with music. The leadership of the youth, among them Gershom, and J.J., and their brother Aaron, began to compose music to specifically encourage the community and the youth in the community to rejoin in worship and celebration. They started to compose our range of songs.

After Idi Amin was deposed, a number of the youth formed a group that they actually called the Young Jewish Club, and the Young Jewish Club began to compose music for about 15 psalms. In order to make this worship accessible and to draw other youth into their activities, they sang the songs primarily in Luganda, although the community was studying Hebrew at that point. Many of these songs use traditional call-and-response in order to make participation easier.

Gershom Sizomu became the Rabbi. He is a charasmatic leader, still only in his forties, who is “completing his rabbinic studies at the University of Judaism, one of the rabbinical schools of the Conservative movement.” He has helped to connect this isolated community to the mainstream of world Judaism, so now this “self-converted” community has been accepted into the faith by many branches of Judaism. He was the first and perhaps the only Ugandan Jew to visit Jerusalem.

Gershom’s brother, J.J.Keki, was staying with Jeffrey Summit, in 2001 – and this story is actually the reason for this post.

”…he headed down to New York on September 11 to visit New York, and he was literally walking up to with a friend who was going to show him the view of New York from the World Trade Center from the towers as the first plane hit the World Trade Center.

J.J. called me up and said, “Jeffrey, look at the picture of the black man with the kippah, the yarmulke, running away from the towers. That’s me!” JJ became the Ugandan on the scene of the World Trade Center disaster, and was interviewed by New Vision and The Monitor, the newspapers in Uganda.

And when he returned to Uganda, this notoriety helped get them elected to the position [in local government] when he ran again. That, and the fact that people believed that these contacts in the United States would be good for development, local development, which in fact they were.

This was very meaningful, because when J.J. returned to Uganda after 9/11, he felt very strongly in the importance of interfaith cooperation and communication. He saw the problems and the tremendous violence that could be caused coming out of 911, and when he went back, he continued to work in this area in Uganda, building strong relationships and connections between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian communities.

This led him to start the work of forming the Peace Kuomora, the fair trade coffee cooperative, together with the Thanksgiving Coffee Company in California. And now, there are more than 700 farmers that are part of this Muslim, Jewish, Christian, fair trade coffee cooperative in Nyamanyoni.”

Jeffrey Summit’s interest in the Abayudaya was started by ethnomusicology. Besides the sheer joyous quality of the material, music here is a central source of knowledge, and a tool for education, in which community messages are proudly embedded and explicitly stated.

Over 80 years, the Abayudaya musicians and leaders have adapted traditional forms, added a dash of Anglicanism and a touch of Malakite, and created a musical tradition of their own which is liturgical, secular, celebratory and dynamic.

Summit has organised two CDs, one of which was nominated for a Grammy, and taught the music to North American Jews, who have recorded it and sent it back to Uganda.

As a grumpy, Christian educated Australian coffee-drinking leftish atheist, I think all of this is just great.

Summit recorded a group of traditional Ugandan lullabies. One, called “Tulo, Tulo (Sleep, Sleep)” goes like this:

“Sleep, take this child. If you don’t take the child, you are a witch. I want to go dancing and change my life. You only live once.”

The whole article has much more detail, particularly about the music. It includes some excellent photos, and links to the CDs.

Thanks to the sharp-eyed and polymathic Danny Yee, who posted the link.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under history, ideas and society. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.