Jeffrey Summit, G88, G95
Delicious Peace
Music is what brought Rabbi Jeffrey Summit to Uganda in 2000. A
unique, interfaith
collaboration is what keeps bringing him back.
LOCATION: UGANDA, 2006
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Rabbi Summit during a ceremony of the Bagisu people in Mbale, Uganda
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Children pour out of their homes and race toward Rabbi Jeffrey
Summit, G88, G95. Busy unloading several pieces of recording
equipment from his truck, the rabbi doesn't notice them at first.
When he finally does, it's too late: the children have surrounded
him. Curious, they crowd around his microphones and digital
recording
equipment. The news travels fast, and it doesn't take long for the
number of children to double and then triple. But this is just the
beginning. Before long, women in flowing dresses and men in crisp,
white collared shirts have joined the party. And yes, it has become
a party. Musical instruments appear. Singing fills the air. Dancing
feet strike the naked earth. Jeffrey Summit, standing in the shadow
of the region's numerous coffee fields, can only smile. He's
traveled thousands of miles to record their music, only to realize
that he has
become the event.
How did Jeffrey Summit, a rabbi and ethnomusicologist from Newton,
Massachusetts, find himself in Uganda? The answer, oddly enough, is
in Cincinnati, Ohio.
AFRICA BOUND
Richard Sobol, A76, first walked, or more accurately rode, into
Jeffrey Summit's life in the early 1970s. At the time, Summit was a
rabbinical student at Cincinnati's Hebrew Union College–Jewish
Institute of Religion and Sobol was driving around the country in a
"traveling Jewish library." The library that Sobol and his wife were
piloting brought books and other materials to Jewish communities
throughout the United States.
Summit remembers, "A friend, who was the Hillel director at the
University of Cincinnati, called me up and said, 'Jeff, I have these
really nice people who are traveling through town and need a place
to stay. Can they stay with you?'" says Summit. "I said 'sure.'"
In the years that followed, Summit and Sobol kept in touch. Sobol
pursued a career in photography, while Summit became a rabbi and
took on the role of executive director of the Hillel Foundation at
Tufts, a position he has held since 1979. At Tufts, Summit also
continued his graduate education in ethnomusicology, which is the
study of music in a sociocultural context. Summit, who was recently
named Neubauer Executive Director of the Hillel Foundation, first
became interested in the discipline while conducting research for
his rabbinic thesis on the biblical cantillation of the Yemenite
Jews. This research took the rabbi to Israel, where he studied with
Yemenite teachers and worked with Israeli ethnomusicologists.
After earning his master of arts in ethnomusicology from GSAS,
Summit entered the Tufts Interdisciplinary Doctorate (IDOC) program
in the early 1990s. He graduated with his Ph.D. in ethnomusicology
in 1995.
In 1999, Summit was again visited by his old friend Richard Sobol,
who by this time had become a well-known photographer.
"Richard had been photographing mountain gorillas on the
Ugandan/Rwandan border and had heard about a Jewish community living
in the villages surrounding Mbale in eastern Uganda," says Summit.
"He visited with the community for a few days and when he came back
to the U.S. he told me, 'Jeff, I need an ethnomusicologist on
this.'"
The rabbi was skeptical.
"I told Richard that I didn't work in Africa," says Summit,
laughing. "But then he played some music he had recorded. I listened
for about thirty seconds and then asked when we were leaving."
Three months later the pair were on a plane. Their mission: to
chronicle the lives of the Abayudaya, the Jewish community Sobol had
stumbled upon in Uganda.
A PERSONAL MISSION
Once described by Winston Churchill as "The Pearl of Africa," the
East African nation of Uganda has recently begun to reclaim its
reputation as one of the most beautiful and hospitable places in
Africa. As with most African countries, the boundaries created by
colonial Britain grouped together a wide range of ethnic groups,
groups that failed to establish a viable government after
independence in 1962. This led to what many people think of when
they think of Uganda—the brutal dictatorship of Idi Amin that
spanned the 1970s. But today
the country is one of the fastest-growing economies in Africa, due
in part to a developing tourist industry centered on the endangered
mountain gorillas, and remains a land of great ethnic and religious
diversity.
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Summit meets with musicians before a recording
session. Sessions like these led to a pair of CDs and a
Grammy Award nomination for the rabbi.
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The practice of Judaism among the Abayudaya (or "Jewish people" in
the Ugandan language of Luganda) can be traced back to the religious
leader Semei Kakungulu, who led a conversion to the faith in the
1920s. Today, the number of Abayudaya is estimated at 1,000 and,
like their counterparts around the world, they follow Jewish
rituals, celebrate Jewish holidays, pray in Hebrew, and observe the
Sabbath.
While in Uganda, Summit recorded the music the Abayudaya played
during their religious services and related celebrations and Sobol
photographed members of the community as they carried on their
daily, religious lives.
"We wanted to provide an oral and visual introduction to the
community," says Summit. "Up to this point, there had not been an
in-depth portrayal of the community, especially through music and
photographs."
In 2002, Sobol and Summit co-published Abayudaya: The Jews of Uganda
through Abbeville Press. The book contains Sobol's photos and a
companion CD with music that Summit recorded, compiled, and
annotated. A few years later, in 2004, Summit produced a separate CD
through Smithsonian Folkways Recordings titled Abayudaya: Music from
the Jewish People of Uganda.
"I brought the first material I recorded to Smithsonian Folkways and
they said, 'this is wonderful material, but we want to know not only
who these people are as Jews but we also want to know who they are
as Africans,'" says Summit. "They wanted to know if I could get
broader material like children's music, funeral music, music of
celebration, and music that's used in political campaigns. I told
them I could, so I went back and recorded more music."
Later that year, Summit's CD was nominated for a Grammy Award in the
category of Traditional World Music. Since its release, all proceeds
have been directed to the Abayudaya community.
"One of my personal projects has been to support Abayudaya students
who are studying at colleges and universities in Uganda and profits
from the CD have helped do this," says Summit, who worked with
recording engineer John Servies on the CD. "Tufts Hillel has been
running a scholarship program for this same purpose. We started out
with one or two people at the university, and right now we have
sixteen people studying there."
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Since 2000, Summit has recorded the music of more than 300 coffee farmers.
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By late 2004, Summit thought he had done all he could in Uganda.
But, as Summit would soon realize, his work was only just beginning.
COFFEE TALK
Jeffrey Summit has a thing for coffee.
"I love coffee," says Summit. "I drink it constantly. If my wife and
I find that we don't have any coffee in the house at 10 at night,
then somebody runs to the store."
Without coffee, Summit may never have found himself back in Uganda.
"One of the lead singers on the Abayudaya CDs is a man named JJ Keki,"
says Summit. "In 2004, with support from the non-profit organization
Kulanu, he set up an interfaith, fair trade coffee cooperative with
his Muslim and Christian neighbors. JJ told me that he and the other
coffee farmers were writing and playing music, and these songs were
being used to encourage other coffee farmers to join the cooperative
and to share the benefits of fair trade and interfaith cooperation.
I thought, 'This is just too good to pass up. It's everything I
love: music, coffee, and world peace!'"
The interfaith coffee cooperative Keki founded is Mirembe Kawomera,
or "Delicious Peace" in Luganda, and includes more than 700 Jewish (Abayudaya),
Christian, and Muslim Ugandans living in the Mbale region. The
cooperative's arabica coffee is grown on the slopes of the dormant
Mount Elgon volcano and, once harvested, is shipped to the
California-based Thanksgiving Coffee Company. The company, which
purchases the coffee at the Fair Trade CertifiedTM price of $1.61 per
pound (as set by the international regulatory agency FLO), then
distributes the product throughout the United States and abroad.
Inspired by the work of the cooperative, Summit returned to eastern
Uganda in 2006. And this is how he found himself surrounded by a
crowd of men, women, and children on one of his first days back in
the country.
"Recording in the villages of East Africa is not the easiest thing
to do," says Summit, recalling his return to Uganda. "When we first
started recording for the coffee project, we would try to do the
recordings right in the middle of the villages, sort of where people
would be practicing or performing in schools. But once we would come
out with a bunch of recording gear, it would be a magnet for scores
of children. We would become the most exciting thing happening for
ten kilometers. While these were great parties, they were not very
controlled recording sessions and it was very hard to get good
quality recordings."
Summit overcame these obstacles by holding recordings in areas that
provided more privacy and better acoustics, centralized locations
like synagogues, churches, mosques, and on one occasion a grass hut
located on the grounds of a local hotel.
Since beginning the project, Summit has recorded more than 300
coffee farmers singing in a number of different languages, including
Luganda, Lugisu, and Lusoga. The songs also include phrases in
Arabic, Hebrew, and English. In many of these recordings, musicians
from the cooperative accompany the singers, playing instruments such
as acoustic guitars, embaire (xylophones), and endingidis
(one-string
fiddles).
The songs, which are performed at community gatherings such as local
farmer days, meetings of the cooperative, and wedding receptions of
its members, touch upon a variety of themes. The lyrics convey
everything from the importance of peace (Members, let us gather
together/ When we keep together we shall have everlasting peace/We
need peace, we need unity, let's all join together) to the benefits
of fair trade (I was
lacking money but when I got hold of the hoe, I got something/And
us, we are using it for the education of our children/Fair trade is
very profitable. This hoe is profitable/For the children to go to
school, you have to plant coffee/To have joy, you have to plant coffee/).
The reason songs are used, as opposed to other forms of
communication, is a matter of necessity.
"In much of Africa, music is one of the most effective educational
tools to use in villages where many people don't read, write, or
have radios or televisions," says Summit, who notes that all the
music he records in Uganda is the property of the people who compose
it, sing it, and use it to build the strength of the cooperative.
When he first began researching the music of the cooperative, Summit
approached it with a critical eye.
"I wanted to see if this cooperation was real or if it was using
peaceful relations to sell a product, if it was just a big marketing
ploy," says Summit, who presented his findings on this subject at
the Society for
Ethnomusicology's International Meeting in 2007. "Through interviews
with Christian, Jewish, and Muslim members of the cooperative, I
found that the peace is very real."
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Coffee cherries must be picked, sorted,
and washed within a three-to-four day window of ripeness.
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A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH
Today, Summit is a pursuing a number of cooperative-related goals.
"One goal I have is to show how important it is for Jews, Muslims,
and Christians to work together," says Summit, who is sharing the
work of the cooperative through academic papers and conference
presentations. "A lot of my work on campus has been working toward
inter-religious dialogue, and the story of the cooperative is such
an inspirational story of cooperation in a time when religious
conflict is much more the norm than the exception in the world."
Another thing Summit hopes will come out of the project is an
understanding of how "incredibly important fair trade is and the
impact it can have on peoples' lives." As Summit has found, fair
trade can be a matter of life and death for coffee farmers in
eastern Uganda.
"Coffee markets fluctuate tremendously from year to year," he says.
"One year prices may be high but another year they may be low. If
prices are low, there may not be enough money coming in to survive.
But fair trade guarantees a substantial price for the coffee each
year, and for members of the cooperative this can be the difference
between being able to afford medicine or sending their kids to
school."
Adds cooperative founder JJ Keki, via e-mail, the goal of the
cooperative is "to fight our major enemies of poverty, hunger, and
diseases instead of using our differences to create a soft ground
for these
things."
Fighting these enemies is a difficult undertaking, given the legacy
of ethnic cleansing and religious divisions during the dictatorship
of Idi Amin, and the subsequent political turmoil, violence, and
famine during Milton Obote's second term as president, from 1980 to
1985.
"Yet in the 1990s, the Abayudaya set out to establish productive,
peaceful relations with their Muslim and Christian neighbors," says
Summit. "They established a joint school and shared projects to dig
wells and bring electricity to the area surrounding Nabugoye Hill,
where members of these three religious groups live in close
proximity."
Collectively, these efforts seemed to have worked, evidenced by the
peaceful relations between the groups and the continuous rise of the
cooperative's membership. When asked how these religious and
cultural differences are overcome, Keki writes, "through the lessons
of unity we give to a new applicant who applies to be a member of
our co-op."
COMING ATTRACTION
The story of the Mirembe Kawomera cooperative seems like something
out of a movie, which it will be in the
future.
"A few years ago, Richard Sobol and I shared our work with a number
of people, one of whom was Elie
Wiesel," says Summit of the Jewish writer, professor, and Nobel
Laureate. "We sat down with him and he said, 'this has to be a film,
if you really want the sort of exposure and to really tell the
story.'"
With funding from The Perry and Martin Granoff Family Foundation and
the Amy P. Goldman Foundation,
Summit and Sobol returned to eastern Uganda last summer.
But they weren't alone. Accompanying them was a film crew and Perry
Granoff, a psychologist and generous
long-time supporter of Tufts. Over the course of three weeks in
August, the team interviewed members of the
cooperative, recorded their music, and took photos for the
documentary.
"The documentary is going to explore a couple of issues, one of
which is the nature of cooperation between
Jews, Muslims, and Christians and why this is working in this small,
little corner of eastern Uganda." says
Summit, who in addition to co-producing the documentary is
conducting interviews and recording music for it. "It's also going
to tell the tremendously important story of economic justice and how
fair trade has had an impact on the lives of the people who grow coffee."
The piece will also address how coffee is harvested, something about
which many viewers may not be aware.
"There is no way for a good cup of Mirembe Kawomera coffee to get to
my kitchen in Newton without a farmer in eastern Uganda going out,
looking at the coffee tree, and picking the coffee cherries within a
three-to-four day window of ripeness," says Summit. "After picking,
the cherries are sorted, washed, hand pulped, dried, and bagged to
be taken to the cooperative office. We want people to be aware of
this incredible web of connection between us and coffee farmers in
Uganda, Guatemala, Ethiopia, and other parts of the world."
The web of connection that Rabbi Summit is part of is incredible in
its own right. It's a web that includes everyone from a well-known
photographer to an anonymous coffee farmer toiling under the hot
sun; from a Tufts graduate student sipping a cup of Mirembe Kawomera
coffee in the Tower Café to a smartly dressed Ugandan child heading
toward a schoolhouse in the distance. It's a web bigger than its
parts.
"These people are not just growing coffee," says Summit. "They are
showing a vision of peace, that people from different religious
traditions can work together. They are teaching by example."
Rabbi Jeffrey Summit is the Neubauer Executive Director of the
Hillel Foundation at Tufts University. He is also an associate
professor in the Department of Music and a lecturer in the
Department of German, Russian, and Asian Languages and Literatures.
More information on his work can be found at
http://www.jeffreyasummit.com/. He can be reached at
jeffrey.summit@tufts.edu. To learn more about
the Mirembe Kawomera Coffee Cooperative go to
http://www.mirembekawomera.com/
or call 1.800.648.6491.
Article by Robert Bochnak, G07, senior writer/communications
manager, Office of Graduate Studies
Photos by Richard Sobol
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2009 edition of
Alma Matters, the magazine for arts, sciences, and
engineering graduate alumni.
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