Uganda

Gershom Sizomu is the charismatic rabbi of the Abayudaya, who live outside Mbale, Uganda. Tablet publishes the first of a two-part long piece on the community, its founding, its survival under Amin, and its prospects for becoming part of global Judaism.

Election
The Abayudaya of Uganda have been Jewish since a colonial-era chieftain decided to follow the five books of Moses. A century later, a descendant of those African Jews became a rabbi and ran for parliament. Part 1 of 2.

It is election time in Uganda, and the boxy plastic television set in my room in the provincial city of Mbale, four hours east of Kampala, is humming with ads, nearly all of them for Yoweri Museveni, the president for the past 24 years. Museveni is up for another five-year term in office, and his ads mimic the slow-mo camerawork of a Ken Burns documentary—pans and zooms of images of the besuited leader flipping the switch at power plants and pumping wells and unlocking medicine cabinets, all backed by Louis Armstrong’s version of “What a Wonderful World.” His signature flourish is a light khaki boonie hat with a drawstring and a wide brim, which gives his shiny oval head the aspect of a haloed icon. He’s been telling his supporters at campaign rallies across the country to “vote the old man with the hat.” The country and its capital have been plastered with yellow posters of his beatific smile and watchful, unblinking eyes.

What a wonderful world indeed! More than half of Uganda’s 34 million people have known no other leader. The other half knew Idi Amin. A local newspaper declares, straight-faced, that “Spirits predict 87 percent victory” for Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. His TV ad closes on the slogan “Why change?”

The mototaxi boda boys sitting under a frangipani tree on a median in Mbale had just finished something resembling a conference on the pitcher’s mound about the location of the people I had come to see: a small community of Ugandan Jews who live in the hills outside Mbale and who call themselves the Abayudaya. Some of the boys pointed me one way, some in the opposite direction. Then I placed my palm on my head to make the universal sign for Jew. “Oh!” said a boda in a striped Oxford shirt that—like most of Uganda’s clothes—used to belong to an American. “People of the very small hats!” Off we went on his Chinese-made motorcycle down the last of the town’s tarmac, past the municipal town council, and onto red dusty roads rising through coffee and plantain patches, in search of the Abayudaya and their leader, a man who in what can be seen as a late fulfillment of one early version of the Zionist dream, is the first native African-born rabbi to run for parliament in Uganda.

Read the rest of part 1 here. Tune in tomorrow for part 2.