Abayudaya cov.sketch2

A B AY U D AYA
The Jews
of
Uganda
PHOTOGRAPHS AND
TEXT BY
RICHARD SOBOL
M U S I C C D A N N O TAT E D
BY J E F F R E Y A . S U M M I T
A B AY U D AYA
The Jews of Uganda
A B AYU DAYA
The Jews of Uganda
PHOTOGRAPHS AND TEXT BY RICHARD SOBOL
M U S I C C D R E C O R D E D A N D A N N O T A T E D B Y J E F F R E Y A. S U M M I T
ABBEVILLE PRESS PUBLISHERS
N E W YO R K LO N D O N
Page i: Detail of the front wall at Putti Synagogue.
Frontispiece: Hezekiah Bumba holds the small seven-branched
menorah that he made. This is one of the few decorative ritual objects
that the Abayudaya have created.
CONTENTS
The Hidden Tribe: The Story of the Jews of Uganda
  
© data TK

Abayudaya Music of Worship and Celebration
         .      

INSIDE UGANDA: MBALE AND THE SURROUNDING
HILL COUNTRY

P O R T R A I T S O F T H E A B AY U D AYA

E V E R Y D AY L I F E : S U N R I S E T O S U N S E T
A UNIQUE JEWISH LIFE


Bibliography 
Index 
Notes to the Songs on the Compact Disk          .       
THE HIDDEN TRIBE:
THE STORY OF THE JEWS OF UGANDA
By Richard Sobol
“We are Africans who have chosen to observe the
Torah, which was given to Israel. By that fact
we have declared ourselves Jews and a part of the
community of Israel.”
—Rabbi Gershom Sizomu
Sabbath morning prayers at
Moses Synagogue
n August  a graduate student in anthropology at Boston University gave me a recording of
Hebrew prayers chanted by the Abayudaya, a
community of Bantu Jews from a remote region of Uganda.
The melodies were a haunting blend of traditional Hebrew
songs and rich African harmonies. I played this recording again
and again, puzzling over its origins. How could this group of
African Jews come to be? And how could an isolated community, without recognition or support, infuse these prayers with
such depth and passion? Were they perhaps an offshoot of the
Lemba, a group in southern Africa who carry a genetic link
that ties them to Aaron, the brother of Moses? I couldn’t make
sense of this. I could not place this music coming from the
Uganda that I had visited in the s, when I spent two weeks
there taking photographs for a book on conservation work
in Queen Elizabeth National Park. Living with rangers
and local villagers and sharing communal meals and long walks
together, I thought that I had a fairly good sense of Uganda
and its people. That music, and those questions, inspired me
I
A traveler along the Bufumbo Road,
which connects Mbale, Uganda’s third
largest city, to the Moses Synagogue and
Semei Kakungulu High School.
to undertake another journey, this time to the rolling hills of
eastern Uganda.
During my previous visits, I had found Uganda’s people to
be friendly and open. On buses or in restaurants I observed
that they easily made casual conversation. They were particularly eager to chat with foreign visitors and inquire into
their health and well-being. Once a comfortable rapport was
established, eventually the topic of religion would come up.
For me this turned into a little game. Here is how it would go.
My new friend would ask, “So, what religion are you?”
“Jewish,” I would respond, looking straight back into his open
eyes, waiting as I watched him think—but the only answer
would be a blank stare. I would milk the silence for several minutes and then say, “the Hebrews.” Still, there would be no
response until, inevitably, the Ugandan would say something
like, “I am not familiar with that one. You mean, like with
Buddha?”
“No,” I would reply. “No Buddhas here.” Now, hoping to
move things along, I would say, “Like in Israel. The children of

Abraham,” and finally there would be a nod of understanding
because of my reference to the Bible. Each time the conversation ended there, and the subject was changed. Jews seemed to
be too foreign or exotic, certainly not part of mainstream
Ugandan society.
And yet, just four hours after leaving Kampala on my journey to eastern Uganda, my insides still reeling from being
tossed about on mud-slide roads, I discovered five tiny enclaves,
each with its own mud-walled synagogue nestled amid banana
and bean fields.
In the Jewish community on Nabogoya
Hill, women and children carry empty
water jugs and dirty laundry down to the
water hole.
Rabbi Gershom Sizomu and his
daughter Daphne light the Sabbath
candles on Nabogoya Hill.
Discovering the Abayudaya
Rural Africa has a remarkably consistent look and feel. From
region to region, whether in the Congo or Cameroon, Zambia
or South Africa, Kenya or Uganda, one can see the same mud
huts, the same golden light and dusty haze, the same barefoot
children and scrawny chickens running in each other’s tracks.
Settlement after settlement dominates the landscape. Women
and children with water jugs on their heads walk along the narrow dirt tracks, passing by well-built men carrying garden hoes
or machetes. The wild animals that once roamed free have long
since retreated to the national parks and game reserves. Few
local tribal customs remain intact. Lulled into a sense of sameness on my long journey through the bush, I found it all the
more remarkable to behold, standing in the shadow of Mount
Elgon in eastern Uganda, the villages of the Abayudaya, the
Jews of Uganda. (Literally, Abayudaya means “the Jews” in
Luganda, the local language.) Here, this tight community con-
tinues to practice a set of traditions that date back three
thousand years, traditions once observed by followers of
Moses in North Africa. In effect, the Abayudaya have reconnected Judaism with its African roots.
The -plus members of the Abayudaya community in
Uganda lead a life devoted to Jewish observance. Like observant Jews around the world, they keep kosher households.
Each week they read from scriptures in the Torah (the Five
Books of Moses), and they follow the strict laws of the Shabbat
(the Sabbath). They circumcise their sons on the eighth day
after birth. Abayudaya women obey traditional laws concerning purity and abstinence during their menstrual period. The
Abayudaya observe the same holidays, rules, and commandments as Jews in other communities. In fact, having created
their religious identity in virtual isolation and remaining steadfast to their beliefs through Idi Amin’s reign of terror, when
synagogues were closed and prayers had to be held in secret,
they are even more observant than most Jews.

Semei Kakungulu,
the Abayudaya’s First Rabbi
There is spirited debate among historians as to why
European nations rushed to colonize Africa in the s and
s. Certainly the slave trade and the promise of mineral
riches and natural resources were strong motivating factors,
but some, including a leading Ugandan scholar, have theorized
that East Africa was colonized for strategic reasons.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in , the British sea
route to their fertile commercial empire in India was shortened
by over , miles. This gave the British a strong incentive to
control the canal, and they hastily moved to colonize Egypt in
. Due to its dry desert location, Egypt is reliant on the flow
of the Nile River to provide it with a steady supply of fresh
water. To protect their base in Egypt the British military had to
look beyond the boundaries of Egypt; a hostile military presence in the upper Nile might have been able to divert the flow
of the river into the Indian Ocean and render Egypt, and subsequently the Suez Canal itself, worthless. The protection of this
crucial strategic resource was one of the factors that led the
British to colonize Uganda, the source of the Nile, and then
Sudan, the neighboring country through which it surged.
When the British committed to their campaign to colonize
Uganda in the final decade of the s, they recognized that
success required the goodwill and support of the local people.
Semei Kakungulu, one of the first local personalities the British
enlisted to help win over the native population, had gained
fame as a fierce warrior and spiritual leader. His reputation as
an elephant and buffalo hunter was widespread, and he was
held in reverence by the local people, who lived in fear of crop
raids and confrontations with the wildlife. This made him a
welcome visitor wherever he traveled.
Kakungulu allied himself with the British in the hope that
ultimately he would become the king of eastern Uganda. By
the turn of the century, working together with the colonial
powers, Kakungulu controlled large tracts of territory. By 
he had almost ten thousand square miles of northeastern

Uganda under his control, and his vast holdings alarmed the
British authorities. He had done a much better job than they
planned on, and they began to withdraw their support of him.
As a result, Kakungulu pursued new territories outside the
sphere of British control, moving further eastward toward
Mbale, a trading post on the border with Kenya. Once there,
he built the first navigable roads and planted vast expanses of
banana and corn. The nervous British authorities followed
closely behind; establishing their own office for a new “provisional commissioner,” they drained power away from
Kakungulu’s administrative offices. In an effort to appease him
they bestowed on him the ceremonial title of “county chief
for Mbale,” a poetic title, perhaps, but one with absolutely no
practical value. Kakungulu saw this as a clear signal that he
and his large following threatened the British, who were now
actively working to undermine him. The tension continued
to build for several more years, as Kakungulu grew more and
more frustrated by the control of the British and the rising
prominence of European Christian missionaries, who were
asserting a strong influence over native daily life. Kakungulu
had believed that his twenty years of service to the British
would be rewarded with land and power. When he realized
that he had been deceived and that the British were abandoning
him, he broke completely with the colonizers and all that they
represented.
In  Kakungulu went into seclusion, studying the Bible for
hours on end. What he knew at that time as the Bible included
both the Hebrew ( Jewish) Bible of the Old Testament and the
Christian writings of the New Testament, translated into
Luganda and bound together. A key element of the
message that the white European Christian missionaries had
preached to black Africa came from the powerful Old
Testament stories of good and evil and power and might.
Kakungulu found himself very much at home with the Old
Testament and was intrigued by the view of God as a supreme
force in charge of mankind, who also permitted individuals to
influence their lives. He felt drawn to the rituals and concepts
of God’s commandments that were laid out before him. As he
looked around, he was troubled and confused that the British
and French Christians whom he had met had abandoned the
basic principles of the Hebrews, and inspired to return to
what he felt was the authentic message of the Bible as it was
given to the Jews. After several days in seclusion he emerged
and ripped the missionary Bible in half, discarding the
New Testament and beseeching his three thousand followers
to adhere to Moses’ commandments. Declaring that the act of
male circumcision was the first visible testament to accepting
the “One Almighty God,” he circumcised himself and his sons
to set an example. The leaders of the breakaway Protestant
church of the Bamalaki, of which he was then a member,
reacted with scorn; this “barbaric” circumcision ritual, they
told him, was only practiced by Jews, the very people who
rejected the New Testament and Jesus. Kakungulu stood tall
and replied, “If this is the case, then from this day on, I am a
Jew—call me Mayudaya.” (Mayudaya is the singular word for
“Jew” in Luganda.) He appealed to his followers to break with
the church and the British powers that it represented, and
thousands took his words to heart. With complete devotion to
the words of the Old Testament, they collectively separated
from their Baganda tribal roots, which strictly forbade any
mutilation of the body. Accepting Kakungulu as their teacher,
they took their first steps toward becoming Africa’s first
organic Jewish community, a tiny seed sprouting up from the
parched earth.
With the Old Testament as his only guide, Kakungulu
instructed his followers to accept the laws of Moses. He
compiled a spiritual guidebook in Lugandan, Ebigambo Ebiv u
Mu Kitabo Ekituvo (Quotations from the Holy Book). This
ninety-page handwritten volume, which demanded complete
devotion to the words and commandments of the Torah,
became the community’s first manual for the original practice
of Judaism in Uganda.
Building a religion alone in the wilderness was a gradual undertaking. In addition to the circumcision of all males, the observance of the Sabbath on the seventh day became an important
and symbolic early ritual that set the Abayudaya apart from all
others around them.
This en masse “conversion” was a cause for anxiety among
the local missionaries, who had never seen anything quite
like it. Wholly unprepared to deal with such a phenomenon,
they aggressively pursued Kakungulu and his fellow Jews in a
desperate attempt to turn them around. Ever confident, rediscovering the strength he had commanded in his early days as a
hunter, Kakungulu would calmly face his adversaries and recite
from Genesis :–: “And on the seventh day God finished the
work which He had been doing, and he ceased on the seventh
day from all the work which He had done. And God blessed the
seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from
all the work of creation which He had done.” As they continued to pursue him, he would further argue that they should
look again at Exodus :–, where it says: “Remember the
Sabbath day and keep it holy.” He held firmly to his reading of
the Old Testament and asked them directly, “Since God himself
has made this day, the seventh day, holy for us, how can it be
that we could violate his very own commandment?” Here as
well Kakungulu set himself apart from those around him. As it
is often said, “If you ask a Jew a question, he will respond with
a question.”
In  Kakungulu built his first synagogue, a simple brick
room dedicated to prayer and study, on a hillside near his home
outside Mbale. Every Shabbat he would teach and hold great
feasts for his followers and their large families. The centerpiece
of the Sabbath service was a long chant that Kakungulu
adapted from Deuteronomy , the Song of Moses. In deep
tones the congregation would sing the story of Moses as he
stands on the border of the Promised Land and celebrates the
future of his people. He sings a song of hope to the Children
of Israel that they will be strong in spirit as well as in body.
After this chant they would read from the Psalms and discuss
the teachings of the Torah. Although the British had stripped
him of his political and administrative powers, Kakungulu
remained a man of wealth and extensive landholdings. For the
customary Shabbat kiddush (Sabbath meal) he would spare no
expense. Food was prepared on Friday in accordance with
Jewish law and then kept tightly wrapped in soaked banana

Boys praying during a service at Moses
Synagogue.


A UNIQUE JEWISH LIFE
“Abayudaya in Luganda is the word that means
Jew. And I believe, that by virtue of the fact that I
am an Abayudaya, I have declared myself to be
in the service of Adonai and to the observance of
the Torah. I am directly serving in the line of Jacob.
And I believe that I am a grandson of Isaac and
Abraham.”—Rabbi Gershom Sizomu
Nehemiah, the Treasurer of the
Abajudaya Community Association,
holds the Torah during a service at
Moses Synagogue.

A boy carries a folding chair from his
home to the Putti Synagogue.

Jews arriving to pray at the Namanyoni
Synagogue.

“On the High Holy Days this synagogue is filled to
capacity. Some people will even have to sit in the
windows. This shows that the spirit is still within
them.”—Samson Wamani
Left: At the Nomahtumba Synagogue
shoes are removed in remembrance of
Moses removing his sandals in front of
the burning bush.
Pages ‒: Samson Wamani leading
prayers at the Pallisa Synagogue.

Above: Elders at prayer in the Moses
Synagogue.
Left: A father and son are waiting
for Sabbath services to begin at the
Namanyoni Synagogue.

