Mirembe Kawomera (Delicious Peace)

Coffee, Music and Interfaith Harmony in Uganda

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Back to Uganda

I thought I was winding down my work in Uganda after completing the Smithsonian Folkways CD Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda in 2004, but coffee led me back to Namonyonyi. Since the time I had begun my work with the Abayudaya Jews in 2000, J. J. Keki, one of the community's leaders and a key performer and composer on the CD, had founded an interfaith fair-trade coffee cooperative with his Muslim and Christian neighbors. J. J. described how he and many other farmers were writing and playing songs to encourage others to join the cooperative and to share the benefits of fair trade and interfaith cooperation. I thought, "This project has everything I love: music, coffee, and world peace!"

I hoped the peace it was creating was real. I know how challenging interfaith cooperation can be. In my university rabbinic work, I had been co-directing a multi-campus project funded by the Academic Affairs Office of the Department of Homeland Security to promote understanding among Muslims, Jews, and Christians through dialogue and education. I was eager to explore the impact that J. J.'s cooperative, Delicious Peace, was having on the communities. Was their cooperation real or just a clever way to market fair-trade coffee?

One Man's Vision

J. J.'s vision for the cooperative grew out of seeing close up what can happen when religious conflict leads to violence. On his first trip to the United States on a lecture tour in 2001, he stayed in our home in Boston on September 10th; he was on his way to New York to meet a friend who was going to show him the city from the World Trade Center Towers and was literally walking up to the buildings when the planes hit. J. J. thereby became "the Ugandan on the scene of the disaster" and was interviewed by New Vision, the Monitor, and other local papers in Uganda. This 9/11 notoriety, coupled with the GRAMMY nomination for the Abayudaya CD and the belief that J. J.'s new contacts in the U.S. could help local development, got him elected as chairman of Namonyonyi sub-county.

After 9/11, J. J. was more convinced than ever in the importance of interfaith cooperation. As he related, "It was not difficult for me to set up Peace Kawomera in 2004. I had been working with all of these people. They were the ones who elected me to office." Working together with Laura Wetzler, of the non-profit organization Kulanu, they established a relationship with the Thanksgiving Coffee Company. J.J. walked door to door selling his vision of an interfaith cooperative, and to date, more than 1,000 farmers have joined Peace Kawomera.

To what extent is this interfaith cooperation working? Organizationally, the leadership of the co-op is religiously diverse: the chairman, J. J. Keki, is Jewish; the secretary manager, Eliasa Hasulube, is Muslim; the treasurer, Samuel Ngugo, is Christian. The Abayudaya have developed a stated policy of shalom bayit (Hebrew: peace in the house) with their Muslim and Christian neighbors, actively working to develop inter-religious development projects (schools, clean water, power). While these projects have been successful, in my conversations with Christians living on Nabugoye Hill (where the Semei Kakungalu Primary and Secondary School are located), I still found a certain amount of jealousy directed at the Jewish community. The Abayudaya have raised money from Jewish visitors to provide scholarships for Jewish children in the school. But there were no scholarships in place yet for Muslims and Christians. Furthermore, while the bar is generally low for religious conversion in this area, the local Christians complained that it was very hard to convert to Judaism; the Jews required circumcision for all men as well as intensive study and community participation before they would consider someone for conversion.

Still, the cooperative was clearly making a difference in people's behavior and attitudes. Women farmers' groups are primarily organized by location, and because the neighborhoods are not segregated by religion, many of these groups, who work and sing together, have members from the three religious traditions. Women described how they help one another farm when necessary. Men and women who in the past would have never sat down to eat with one another now socialize freely. In the church in Namonyonyi, the chairman publicly observed (in Lugisu), "It's that unity which brought us peace." After Friday prayer, as I stood outside the Nkoma mosque, the chairman of the local Muslim community put his hand on my shoulder and said, "You know, we are all children of the same God. We see little sense in fighting. We have found it is more to our benefit to cooperate together."

About the author

Jeffrey A. Summit is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University, where he also serves as rabbi and Neubauer Executive Director of Tufts Hillel. His CD Abayudaya: Music from the Jewish People of Uganda (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings) was nominated for a GRAMMY Award.

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