Kampala

Before addressing the Zionist episode, it is important to situate Kampala within its geographical and political context. Kampala stands on the historical site of the Buganda kingdom, one of the most powerful interlacustrine kingdoms of pre-colonial East Africa. Its name is thought to derive from the expression kasozi k'empala, "the hill of the impalas," in reference to the herds of antelopes that the kabaka, sovereign of Buganda, had graze on these heights. The city is traditionally organized around seven hills, each bearing an institution of power: royal palace, cathedrals, mosque, colonial forts.

The British protectorate of Uganda was proclaimed in 1894, progressively incorporating the kingdoms of Buganda, Bunyoro, Toro, and Ankole. It was at Entebbe, not far from Kampala, that the colonial administrative seat was established, while Kampala remained the commercial and customary center. The construction of the Uganda Railway, linking Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast to Kisumu on Lake Victoria between 1896 and 1901, transformed the region's economy and made these territories accessible to imperial designs. It is within this context of British colonial expansion in East Africa that the proposal made to the Zionists takes its place: the territory offered fell under the administration of the British East Africa Protectorate, of which Uganda constituted the generic designation in the diplomatic language of the era.

It is worth highlighting a persistent geographical confusion, which historical research has since largely dispelled: the territory actually envisaged for Jewish settlement was not located in Uganda proper, nor in Kampala, but on the Uasin Gishu plateau (also known as Guas Ngishu), situated in present-day Kenya. The name "Uganda" nonetheless prevailed in common usage and in Memory, to the point of definitively designating the entire episode. Thus Kampala, symbolic capital of the region, inherited a Jewish renown that, by strict adherence to the facts, extended beyond it.

The origin of the project traces back to the Kishinev pogroms of April 1903, which shook the Jewish consciousness of Europe and gave Theodor Herzl a sense of absolute urgency. Herzl, founder of political Zionism, had been seeking for several years a territorial charter guaranteeing a refuge for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe. After the failure of negotiations over the Sinai Peninsula and El-Arish, his dealings with the British government — and notably with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain — led to an unexpected proposal: the offer of a territory in British East Africa [Jewish Virtual Library].

This proposal must be understood within the broader framework of Jewish political thought at the beginning of the twentieth century, marked by an intense debate between those who favored an immediate territory of refuge and those who advocated for national restoration in the Holy Land. As Sylvie Anne Goldberg has analyzed, Jewish historical reflection of this period was shaped by the question of how to reconcile the urgency of the present with the deep time of tradition [Goldberg, 2000]. The British offer posed precisely this dilemma in stark terms: should one accept an available and safe land, at the risk of severing the sacred bond with Zion?

The offer itself provided for the concession of a vast territory, generally estimated at some five thousand square miles, on the relatively temperate highlands of East Africa, deemed suitable for European settlement on account of their elevation. The British government saw in it a means of populating and developing spaces considered vacant within its empire; Herzl saw in it a temporary shelter — a Nachtasyl, a "night asylum," as the expression then in circulation had it — for a people in distress, without this calling into question the ultimate aspiration toward Palestine.

It was at the Sixth Zionist Congress, convened in Basel in August 1903, that the proposal was put before the delegates. Herzl presented the offer not as a substitute for Palestine, but as a provisional relief measure. The assembly was immediately torn. The delegates who came from the very regions where persecutions raged — the Russian Empire, Poland, the Pale of Settlement — were, paradoxically, among the most fierce opponents of the project, for they saw in it a betrayal of the messianic and national ideal attached to Eretz Israël.

The consultative vote to send a study commission to East Africa was carried by a majority, but provoked the ostentatious walkout of a faction of delegates as a sign of protest. This split foreshadowed the birth of the territorialist movement, led by the writer Israël Zangwill, who would found the Jewish Territorial Organization (ITO) in 1905, resolved to seek a territory for settlement wherever it might be found. The Basel debate thus marked a major bifurcation in the history of modern Jewish ideas, between a Zionism attached to Zion and a pragmatic territorialism. This tension between rootedness in a singular land and the necessity of collective survival runs, moreover, throughout the entire history of Jewish communities in the diaspora, from medieval Spain to the shores of the Maghreb [Barnavi, 1992].

The premature death of Herzl, in July 1904, deprived the project of its most eminent advocate. An exploratory commission was nonetheless dispatched to the Guas Ngishu plateau in 1905. Its report, unfavorable, described a mountainous, isolated country, populated by local peoples and wild animals, poorly suited to the rapid establishment of Jewish agriculture. At the Seventh Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1905, the proposal was definitively rejected, and the Zionist Organization reaffirmed its exclusive attachment to Palestine.

If the Zionist project never gave rise to a Jewish settlement in Uganda, history reserved for the country a Jewish presence of an altogether different nature, born not of European immigration but of indigenous conversion. On the hills of eastern Uganda, around Mbale, the community of the Abayudaya emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century — a term meaning "people of Judah" in Luganda.

The tradition transmitted within this community attributes its founding to the military chief Semei Kakungulu. This dignitary, initially close to British Christian missionaries, gradually distanced himself from them to adopt, around 1919, an observance based exclusively on the Hebrew Torah: circumcision on the eighth day, observance of Shabbat, dietary laws. The account holds that when a missionary reproached him for wanting to "become Jewish," Kakungulu replied that he was henceforth fully so. This founding narrative belongs to the register of transmitted community Memory, yet it is corroborated by colonial and missionary documentary traces that attest to Kakungulu's break with the established churches. Tradition and archive respond to one another here, without entirely overlapping — a configuration in which remembrance precedes and exceeds the written record, as Yerushalmi demonstrated for Jewish memory in general [Yerushalmi, 1984].

Isolated from world Jewry for decades, the Abayudaya developed an original practice, blending prayers in Hebrew, Luganda, and English, along with locally inspired songs. Over the course of the twentieth century, the community came into contact with Jewish travelers, and then with rabbis, which led to formal conversions recognized by certain religious authorities. Their faith survived even the persecutions of the Idi Amin Dada regime in the 1970s, when the public practice of Judaism was forbidden and many of them were forced to take refuge in clandestinity. This perseverance under duress evokes, in distant echo, the memorial tenacity of diaspora communities in the face of adversity, as observed in the rabbinical registers and archives of the Maghreb [Registres du cimetière juif de Tlemcen].

Parallel to the history of the Abayudaya, a small Jewish community of foreign origin settled in colonial and post-colonial Uganda, primarily in Kampala. It was composed of merchants, artisans, professionals, and civil servants, often of European or Near Eastern origin, drawn by the commercial opportunities of the protectorate and by Kampala's position as a crossroads in British East Africa [Jewish Virtual Library].

This presence, always numerically modest, was part of the vast movement of Jewish dispersion in the colonial era, comparable to the one that saw small communities form in the major ports and administrative centers of the Mediterranean basin and beyond. Like the Séfarade and Maghrebi communities that, from Sousse to Tlemcen, linked their fate to trade and the economic transformations of their time [Rubinstein-Cohen, 2011] [Schwarzfuchs, 1997], the Jews of Kampala lived to the rhythm of colonial fortunes and then the upheavals of Ugandan independence proclaimed in 1962.

The history of this community was profoundly affected by the dictatorship of Idi Amin Dada, who came to power in 1971. His regime, marked by a policy of expulsion of minorities — most notably the large Indo-Pakistani community expelled in 1972 — and by an openly hostile rhetoric toward Israel following the severance of diplomatic relations, made organized Jewish presence untenable. Most foreign Jews then left the country. It was only after the fall of Amin, from the late 1970s onward, and especially in the following decades, that Jewish life could resume, driven above all by the renewal of the Abayudaya and by Uganda's reopening to international Jewish networks. The reconstruction of this Memory remains fragile and incomplete, belonging more to careful deduction than to continuous archival record — hence the probable status that must be accorded to it.

Beyond the facts, Kampala and Uganda occupy a particular place in the Jewish imagination, as a symbol of the "road not taken." The rejection of the Uganda Scheme became, in Zionist Memory, one of the moments when the Jewish people solemnly reaffirmed their attachment to Zion against the temptation of a substitute refuge. Sometimes invoked in debates and literature is the counterfactual hypothesis of an "African Israel" that might have emerged on the highlands of East Africa — a speculation belonging entirely to the realm of Memory and imagination, not of History.

This memorial dimension illustrates a phenomenon dear to Yerushalmi: the manner in which a people selects, from its past, those episodes that become bearers of collective meaning, even at the cost of simplifying their historical complexity [Yerushalmi, 2012]. Thus the name of "Uganda" — and by metonymy that of its capital Kampala — became charged, in Jewish consciousness, with a significance far greater than the geographical and political reality of the episode. The very fact that the territory actually under discussion was located in Kenya did not alter this memorial association: Memory has its own maps, often quite distinct from those of geographers.

To this memory of the aborted project is added today the living memory of the Abayudaya, whose history fascinates by its unique character: a Jewish community born on African soil, without Jewish ancestry, through pure spiritual adherence. The construction of this identity, its negotiations with world Jewry around recognition and conversion, partake of the same dynamics of national and cultural "construction" experienced by other Jewish renewals, in very different contexts [Bechtel, 2002]. Kampala and its surroundings thus remain the site of a double memory: that of a door which never opened, and that of a faith which, against all expectation, took root on the African hills.

The Jewish history of Kampala reads like a meditation on the gap between project and reality, between Memory and archive. On one side, the Uganda Scheme of 1903, a British offer of a territory in East Africa to the Zionist Organization, which provoked at the Sixth Congress of Basel one of the founding controversies of Zionism and ended, after the death of Herzl and the unfavorable report of the exploration commission, in a definitive rejection in 1905 [Jewish Virtual Library]. On the other, an effective yet discreet Jewish presence — a foreign community in Kampala, tested and then dispersed under the regime of Idi Amin, and above all the indigenous community of the Abayudaya, born of conversion and strengthened by perseverance.

These two histories, one diplomatic and symbolic, the other lived and rooted, rarely intersect in fact, yet converge in Memory. They remind us that Jewish History cannot be reduced to its grand narratives nor to its archives, but is born of their fertile tension, as the great thinkers of Jewish memory have taught [Yerushalmi, 1984] [Goldberg, 2000]. Kampala, city of hills and antelopes, remains for the Jewish world the name of a bifurcation in History — and the unlikely site of an unexpected fidelity to the Torah.