I’m Glenna Gordon, an American photographer and journalist, presently commuting between West Africa and Brooklyn. Previously, I lived in Liberia. And before that, I lived in Uganda. I’ve traveled and worked in over a dozen countries in Africa.
I found the scarlett lion on the roof of a friend’s house in Kampala back in 2006 when I went through a crate of discarded items he and a few other artists had gathered. On that day, I was looking for something and I found the lion: a discarded kid’s toy made in China on the cheap, that somehow found it’s way to East Africa. Something about the hollowed out, paint chipped figurine appealed to my understanding of this place: I’d never seen a real lion, after all.
All over the web, here’s one place, MSNBC….
Congolese refugee’s arrive on the back of a truck, Monday, Oct 29, 2007 at the Nyakabanda transit camp near Kisoro, a reception centre in Uganda, (10 miles – 15 kms) from the Congo border set up by the United Nations Refugee Agency. Violence in eastern Congo has reached new levels. The remote, vast and lawless land has become a playground for roaming militias and armed groups who terrorize civilians.(AP Photo/Glenna Gordon)
Karamoja disarmament campaign triggers violence
PHOTO: Glenna Gordon” name=”mainimage” border=”" height=”289″ width=”193″>PHOTO: Glenna Gordon
GLENNA GORDON
Latif Madoi got his scissors from an old lady who couldn’t pay for her daughter’s sewing and design lessons. The German Solingen size ten scissors are at least 50-years-old, a heavy steel with a dark patina – two thick shanks held together by a sturdy bolt.
They’re probably the only such pair in Kawempe, maybe in Uganda, probably an artifact of a colonial tailor left town.
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| AT WORK: Latif working on the outfits he is going to showcase in the Niger competition. |
“You sew what you’ve cut, so if you cut a wrong thing you stitch a wrong thing,” says Latif. “So to have a good design it has to come from the cutting itself.”
Latif has cut designs for all of Uganda’s top musicians and celebrities: Miss Uganda, Blu*3, Chameleone, Bebe Cool, Bobi Wine, and others from all over Africa, including the recently departed Lucky Dube.
These days his scissors rarely hang on the sturdy nail jutting out of the wall, their resting spot. Latif is busy cutting 10 outfits – five male and five female – for the FIMA, International Fashion Show in Africa, awards and competition next month in Niger.
Latif says the competition is about “recognition.” He’s already busy in Uganda: running a fashion and design school that churns out caps and jumpsuits aplenty, dressing every celebrity in town when they need something that suits his style, all the while promoting himself and refining his art.
FIMA, meanwhile, is “a framework to express beauty, as well as assert the leading cultural values in Africa and the world,” according to the chairman Seidnaly Sidhamed alias Alphadi. Latif is ready to cut through the competition and show off his goods.
“These scissors here, they cut any kind of fabric, any kind of material,” says Latif. The scissors, he says, are a godsend, since he isn’t just using cotton. His palette includes denim, canvas, suede, leather, bark cloth, and everything from velvet to goat hide. His urban hip-hop meets African cool look was exactly what they wanted in Niger, since this year’s theme is street fashion. Latif’s entries range from urban haute couture to sexy camouflage vixen to plush thug street wear.
In his studio in Kawempe, two small rooms covered in photos of his work, posters of musicians he has dressed, a goat head, a pink and gold metallic clock, and lots of tagging, he pulls out one of the fully finished outfits. It’s a green suit gone sexy rogue: short shorts in army green rimmed with brown camouflage and metallic studs, a matching fitted coat in green with huge flared cuffs in camo. A centrepiece belt shows Latif’s careful handiwork. It sits just below the chest, with two carefully stitched and symmetrical pockets, reverse embellish, and nifty hooks end in a cute corset.
“I used my perfect scissors to cut all this. They’re the strongest,” he says. “I’ve finished the females outfits,” which means he has a week left to finish the men’s outfits before he has to drop them off at the French Embassy in Kampala to be shipped to Niger ahead of the competition.
If he wins, he’ll get to take a three month fashion course in Paris, but regardless of how he places, all the competitors get to go to Paris for three days before the contest for a bit of instruction and the first press conference.
He’ll be eager to get back his small Kawempe studio though, filled with dozens of machines, his friends and students, and the market he most wants to wear his products.
More than anything, he wants to see Ugandans wearing his designs. He cringes at cheap Chinese imports and the high prices of American clothes. “We want to show people that Ugandans can make good things, he says.” Latif says he won’t carry his nice scissors to Niger. “You could easily lose it,” he says. But he hopes he won’t lose FIMA.
I had very mixed feelings about both the community and writing the article, but here it is, on the Jerusalem Post.
Banana trees interrupted by occasional villages passed by as the matatu, a mini-van-like bus, meant to seat 10 and carrying 16, jostled over the potholed road for four hours, apples and honey in my backpack.
Abayudaya youth at leisure.
Photo: Glenna Gordon
My shoulder was wedged in my neighbor’s armpit, yet I felt isolated and alone. I’d been living in Uganda for almost a year, but this was the first time I’d spend the High Holy Days in Africa where I’ve been working as a journalist, some 15,000 kilometers away from my family in California.
But I was only 400 km. away from a Ugandan Jewish community, the Abayudaya. I didn’t know much about them other than what I had read on the Web, and I hadn’t participated in many Jewish activities in years, but I always had a dinner with family and friends on the holidays. I missed this community. This sounded like it might offer a sense of spirituality that I thought I might be looking for on Rosh Hashana.
So I went east, towards Mbale, a small town close to Kenya’s western border, and then to the village of Naboguye.
Inside the local chairman’s home, the TV’s static tuned to Ugandan Broadcast Network and the children’s stirring high-pitched voices in the Luganda language were as expected. The knitted kippa, the Jewish calendar and other Judaica scattered about the living room were not.
The combination was jarring. The Luganda language didn’t make sense among these icons etched into my psyche. The power went out, making it feel more like Uganda, but I couldn’t forget I was talking to Africans with names like Israel, Samson and Hadassah.
An American couple in their mid to late 50s arrived, volunteers in Uganda. The wife, Judy, explained that they had stumbled upon the Abayudaya’s music at the Smithsonian Museum some years ago.
“It’s amazing to hear these African voices signing L’cha Dodi,” she said, just as another American arrived, a Peace Corps volunteer named Rivka.
“Wow, look how many people are here!” said Judy, who didn’t seem to count the villagers already living there.
Isaac, a young Abayudaya wearing a red-and-black knit kippa, gave us a tour of the village and told us a bit about the history of the Abayudaya. He pointed toward a distant hill rimmed with thin trees with wide umbrella-like tops, the site of founder Semei Kakungulu’s grave. Kakungulu worked under the British as a soldier, helping them to pacify eastern Uganda. A diligent biblical scholar, he read the Bible and questioned why the laws of the Old Testament were not followed. Around 1918, he decided to found his own community, circumcising his sons and keeping kosher. A chance encounter with some Yemenite Jews in the 1920s, who endowed him with some Hebrew texts and taught him Jewish traditions, lead Kakungulu to excise mentions of Jesus from his religious ideology and to more closely follow the laws of Judaism.
The Abayudaya lived in isolation, fluctuating from 300 to 800 people through years of persecution, especially suffering under the infamous Idi Amin. Then, in 1992, they were “discovered” by an American Jew living and working in Kenya who connected them with the American Jewish NGO Kulanu, whose mission it is to support isolated and remote Jewish communities. Eventually, some American rabbis came and did some formal conversions. Israel does not officially recognize the Abayudaya as Jews since the conversions were Conservative rather than Orthodox.
As we toured the upper part of Nabugoye village, we visited the posh new guest house being built by the Kulanu sponsors. In a country where most people live on less than a dollar a day in homes with mud walls and floors and pit latrines, this place was all tile and porcelain toilets – just waiting for all the tourists coming to make an attraction of the Abayudaya.
The next stop on the tour was the school headmaster’s office, walls covered with Israel posters, desk crowded with an inflatable globe and an older model printer-scanner duo.
“We have benefited so much from our partnership with America,” he told us, displaying a copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Rivka, the Peace Corps volunteer, interrupted the tour to ask about buying some Abayudaya kippot. They were very unusual, after all.
Some Israelis joined our entourage as Rivka sifted through a bag of brightly colored knitted kippot in front of Shalom Shopping and Internet Center.
“Most secular Israelis wouldn’t past the beit din test,” said one of the Israelis, a 19-year-old girl volunteering in the village for a few months, in defense of the Abayudaya.
But I still felt suspicious. Who were these people claiming to be Jews? The kids in the village walked around crying out, “Shabbat shalom.” And I wanted to tell them, it isn’t Shabbat. But they knew it was a special day, somehow, and they knew that was what they were supposed to say on special days. They ran around in nice dresses and patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and I thought of all of the villages I’d visited where the kids didn’t have shoes, let alone holiday shoes.
Two American East Coast Conservative Jews in their early 20s arrived, Adam and Maital. Adam had an I-want-to-be-a-rabbi-when-I-grow-up attitude, and he was there to lead services. We entered the small synagogue, complete with hand-me-down siddurim from Kulanu and other donors.
Adam belted out Conservative tunes in his just-hit-puberty earnest voice, so strange to hear in a village just outside Mbale, standing underneath an Abayudaya flag that incorporated their symbolism with the blue-and-white stripes of the Israeli flag, near a rudimentary ark.
Later, when they brought out the Torah, I wondered if I was being so judgmental of their connection to Judaism because I could not muster my own. I thought of what the Israeli girl said about the beit din and the earnest American leading services. Was this community only Jewish to benefit from the aid dollars flowing steadily into the village? But, they had really only begun to benefit from aid in the past 10 years, and they’d been Jewish for nearly a century.
‘d never wanted to call my family more. I wanted to write, to take pictures, to jump up and down, to do anything other than stand there and watch two East Coast white kids trying diligently to roll the Torah to the right place. This didn’t feel like the spiritual connection I was looking for.
Abayudaya youth at leisure.
Photo: Glenna Gordon
Then they called Isaac to the Torah for an aliya. He was still wearing his black-and-red kippa, and he sang the bracha carefully and intently. That was nice, watching one of the members of the community participate in the services. Then they called a 13-year-old girl to the Torah. She wore a bright green head scarf with modest pride.
When they finished, Samson, the chairman, carried the Torah around the room. I pulled out a siddur from the slot underneath one of the paint-chipped metal chairs, and held it waiting for the Torah to pass by.
Samson stopped right in front of me for what felt like a long time, but maybe he stopped in front of everyone in the sparsely filled room for that long. I put the prayer book to the Torah and then to my lips and kissed it with a smack, finally feeling connected to something.
While it appears that Uganda has improved in Press Freedom Rankings from 116 to 96 (a big jump), things are without problems in the Ugandan media.
For example, just last week sometime, some of the editors and a reporter at my paper were detained for an article they wrote that was critical of the police, saying soldiers were training to take their jobs.
The grip is tight, regardless of rankings.
Lots of headlines about the LRA this weekend. It’s hard to make sense of what’s going on, but basically, the top commanders got in a shoot-out over the $600k allocated for peace talk consultations, and then, some of the commanders surrendered in Sudan, and finally, as of now, that is, Sudan has denied that happened, and Uganda wants them extradited.
Hmmm…. what’s next?
That’s a lot of news, in a very short amount of time. It will be some time before these things sort themselves out and the future is clear.
In the LA Times, Afrigo Band takes its audience back home to Africa
By the time Afrigo Band took the stage at Temple Bar in Santa Monica on Friday night, the room already felt a long way from Southern California. A good African club show is not just a concert but also a visit to another continent, and to many of the people crowding around the stage, it was clearly a chance to spend a few hours back home.
And these are some of my photos from Obligato, that I’ve been meaning to post forever…
NEW YORK – Meet Paris Hilton, grown-up. The 26-year-old socialite has vowed to change her party-girl image after serving a 23-day jail sentence in June for violating probation in an alcohol-related reckless driving case.
“There are a lot of bad people in L.A. Before, my life was about having fun, going to parties it was a fantasy,” she tells Newsweek magazine in its Oct. 22 issue, now on newsstands. “But when I had time to reflect, I felt empty inside. I want to leave a mark on the world.”
Hilton says she is now committed to using her celebrity status for the greater good. Next month, she plans to pack her bags for Rwanda to bring attention to the African country.
“I’m scared, yeah. I’ve heard it’s really dangerous,” she says. “I’ve never been on a trip like this before.”
Hilton, accompanied by a children’s charity called Playing for Good, will visit schools and health-care clinics as part of a five-day charity mission. The trip will be filmed not surprising, given Hilton’s love of the camera.
“I love having everything documented,” says Hilton, who hopes to turn the footage into a film. “It shows people what everyday life is like for me, how hard I work. There are a lot of misconceptions about me.”
Hilton says her dating life isn’t as wild as the tabloids make it out to be.
“I’ve been linked to so many guys, but there’s nothing romantic going on at all,” she says. “I get along better with guys than girls. I trust them more. They don’t get all girly and mean. Girls have drama.”
See the essay here. Not gonna quote on this blog.
I’ve just finished and just started two great books, worthing of posting about.
Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, just won the Orange Prize for fiction this year, and it deserves it. The book (AVAILABLE AT ARISTOC!!!) traces several characters as they make their way through the sixties and the Nigerian civil war, poetically managing to capture brutality and hope, often in the same space. Adichie’s first novel, “Purple Hibiscus,” was a lovely coming of age story, though it conformed too closely to the conventions. This book, however, manages to work within the conventions of literary fiction and tell such a powerful story that the reader forgets any story has ever been told this way before. Can’t recommend it highly enough.
Won’t write too much about King Leopold’s Ghost, because I haven’t finished it yet, but it makes me realize how ahistorical all the news about Congo is today. Perhaps the incredible prevalence of sexual violence that’s oft quoted in today’s news is somehow related to the plundering of the region was just as brutal as the horrified news reports of today’s papers? It seems to me like there’s such a clear connection between establishing a violent colonial regime, whose precedent is passed down through each subsequent leader and permeates each remote region, and what’s happening now. But not a single news brief mentions anything about Congo’s storied past. I know there’s not much room on a news wire, but maybe that points to something wrong with the news. Okay, enough of this rant, maybe more posting on this great and very readable book later (ALSO AVAILABLE AT ARISTOC!!!)
