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Recording oral histories in rural Uganda

By Louisa Shepard

Fifteen students in a Penn Global Seminar spent 10 days in Africa filming members of local Jewish communities.

In a village in Uganda, Penn students set up their cameras under trees, shaded from the sun and the heat, ready for the interviews they had prepared for throughout the fall semester. The students would, over the course of 10 days, record extensive interviews with members of local communities, creating a lasting historical record.

The project was part of a Penn Global Seminar, Global Jewish Communities, studying emergent Jewish communities across the globe. They focused on the century-old Abayudaya—the name means “People of Judah” or simply “Jewish” in the local language Luganda—and its recent rebirth within the context of modern Ugandan history.

Taught by Peter Decherney and Sara Byala in the School of Arts & Sciences, the capstone to the course involved travel during the winter break to Mbale in eastern Uganda to conduct immersive fieldwork in the Abayudaya community. The Penn Global Seminars are semester-long courses that include a related travel experience, during the winter break for fall courses and the spring break or May for spring courses.

“What these students were able to do in terms of immersive fieldwork and community engagement, creating a real lasting contribution that’s going to live in this very important database, is really exceptional. They took ownership and masterfully handled the responsibility of the interview process with seriousness and intensity,” Decherney says. “They all did an amazing job doing the research, doing the fieldwork, and surviving difficult travel conditions with good humor and a great attitude.”

Oral histories

The project is in partnership with the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California, founded in 1994 to record, preserve, and share the oral histories of Holocaust survivors. Decherney and Byala are leading a new effort to record histories of African Jewish communities.

“The partnership with the Shoah Foundation is profoundly impactful for us,” Decherney says, “because it means some of our previous research interviews, as well as our work going forward, will be available through an archive that is used by thousands of people.”

“Being able to conduct and record oral history allows the students to contribute something that’s going to endure and reach a broad audience,” Byala says. “The videos are impactful for them but also support something much bigger.”

During the course, students learned the Shoah interview methodology for oral histories. “It is not interviewing in any sense that the students would have done before,” Decherney says. They follow strict parameters regarding how the camera is positioned and the audio recorded, with no breaks in filming. “These interviews are up to an hour-and-a-half long; they require intensity and focus, and the students were more than up for the challenge.”

The course placed an emphasis on understanding the ethics and rigors of written and visual fieldwork, as well as the intricacies of writing and creating short films. Students practiced interviews with friends at Penn to get ready for the work in Uganda.

They interviewed 14 people; students did the interviews and filming themselves, each taking a role as camera or sound technician, interviewer, or producer. A translator helped with about half of the interviews; although the official language of Uganda is English, many were more comfortable speaking Luganda.

“It was really exciting that the interviews that we were doing and whatever we were learning in class was actually going to make an impact on the outside world,” says Rose Wang, a fourth-year student from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. “It was just very moving to see how much they cared about their own faith.”

Penn Global Documentary Institute

The course and project are part of the Penn Global Documentary Institute, which focuses on “telling global stories through local collaborations.” The Institute also has summer research fellows, including Penn students and alumni, who travel to make films. The two short films created last summer in South Africa and Uganda have been featured in several film festivals and were shown at the Weitzman Nation Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia in February.

One is “Days Between Rest,” in which Grammy-nominated singer Rachel Namudosi tells the story of how her community overcame antisemitism and found peace in music, prayer, and Shabbat. The other, “The Cave Synagogue,” follows Abayudaya elder J.J. Keki as he returns to the cave where he prayed as a boy when Judaism was banned during the dictatorship of Idi Amin. “The Cave Synagogue” was accepted to this year’s Cannes Short Film Festival in France.

Wang was on the team that interviewed J.J. Keki for the oral history project. “It ended up being a really amazing interview and super rewarding,” she says. “I grew a lot as an interviewer … specifically around trying to respect someone’s story and really taking the time to soak it in and let them speak to the very end of what they want to say.”

The Penn group hiked with Keki down the ravine to the synagogue cave. Sam Koffler, a second-year student majoring in cognitive science, says he was inspired by the connections with observant Jews in rural Uganda, far away from his upbringing in Manhattan. “We have the same ritualistic practices,” Koffler says. “Judaism and religion very much transcend cultural backgrounds, physical location, and geographical distance to come together.”

Returning from the cave, the group went to the village synagogue, where Decherney set up a projector and showed the community the films made last summer. “To see it immediately after hiking down to the cave, surrounded by the community, just really elevated and changed the whole experience,” Byala says. “And for us it was also part of our mission: to be accountable to the communities we are partnering with.”

The Penn Global Documentary Institute courses and projects return to the same communities multiple times with different students, remaining engaged, donating equipment, and training community members. It started in 2017 with a summer abroad course partnering with FilmAid Kenya, a nonprofit that operates films schools in two refugee camps, to create films with the residents. “We hope to empower them to tell their own stories,” says Decherney, who returned to the refugee camps with Penn students to make films in 2022 and 2023.

Through the Institute, Decherney and Byala say they are putting together a series of the films they are creating with Jewish communities in Africa. They returned to South Africa during spring break this month to continue filming a profile about a woman who is reviving Yiddish music in Johannesburg. Plans are for the summer fellows to go to South Africa and Zimbabwe, filming a road movie about the Lemba Jewish community.

Keeping kosher

Of the 15 students on the travel experience to Uganda, five are Jewish and, of those, three keep kosher, meaning they eat certain foods prepared in a certain way, and follow the rules of Shabbat from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, such as not using electricity or technology.

“It was incredibly inspiring to keep kosher on the trip, which meant eating lots of mangoes and dried meat, and some tuna and granola bars we packed,” says Koffler. “But once we got to the Jewish community in Uganda I ate regularly, as if I was at home.”

Decherney recalls that one day while at the base of the White Nile River, the group bought tilapia just pulled from the water. “We had a one kosher knife with us,” Decherney says. When the question arose of who could clean and filet a fish, it turned out Wang knew just what to do.

Wang is in the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, a dual-degree program between the Wharton School and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, concentrating on computer science and entrepreneurship.

Interested in startups, Wang worked for Shinke Systems—founded by a Penn student, a 2022 President’s Innovation Prize winner—during a gap year. The company builds robots that kill fish in a more humane way that preserves the quality and the freshness. So, she had to learn how to kill and clean fish. “I don’t know how many fish I gutted and scaled that summer, but it was definitely in the hundreds,” Wang says.

She overheard the other students talking about the tilapia and looking at YouTube videos to figure out what to do. She let them know she could clean and filet the fish, and she did. “It was so funny. Everyone was surrounding me with cameras,” she says.

“I am passionate that I know and understand where my food comes from, and then from there trying to help others know and understand where their food comes from. So, if the rest of the class got to see how to gut and scale a fish for the first time, I think it was pretty meaningful,” she says, “and it tasted good.”

Travel experiences

The students became close during the experience and came back to campus as friends. “It was a very diverse group of people, sharing their cultures, their origins, their practices, and their family heritage, and I think that was a unique part of the trip,” Koffler says. “Most of the students were not Jewish, but everyone demonstrated interest in each other's religions and cultures, and that was a very valuable learning experience in its own right.”

The Chief Rabbi, Gershom Sizomu, a former member of Uganda’s parliament, came to the hotel with his wife during Shabbat to hold services. “That was one of my favorite experiences of the trip,” Koffler says.

The students also attended the rehearsal of a Bat Mitzvah that drew leaders from neighboring communities, and they visited the national Mosque of Uganda, the Bahai Temple in Kampala, and what is billed as the world’s biggest hut. They also went hiking in a national forest and swam under waterfalls on a hot sunny day.

The class continued research they had started in the fall semester Global Jewish Communities course on a topic of their choosing and presented their findings to each other while in Uganda. For example, one student studied the colorful patterns in the kipot, or head coverings, that are handmade by the Abayudaya.

Fourth-year student Maura Catherine Dresner-Pfau from Boise, Idaho, is majoring in fine arts with a focus on photography. In addition to being a producer filming the oral histories, Dresner-Pfau took her own films along the way with a secondhand Super 8 film camera, unsure of what she captured until it was developed. “I absolutely love all the footage I have. The fact that anything turned out made me so excited,” she says, adding that she plans to use the film camera again for her senior thesis. “It just felt very true to the place.”

Although many of the students had traveled extensively, they said they had not witnessed the kind of poverty they saw in Uganda. “It was really transformative for me,” Wang says. “Going forward, I think it’s really important for Penn students to think about how we give back to the rest of the world or give back to other communities.”

Byala says that although they visit some tourist sites, these research travel experiences are not tourism. “This is travel where you’re connecting and making meaning and taking meaning in a whole different way,” Byala says. “It’s a lot harder. We delivered six enormous boxes of soccer gear that we brought to two schools, which meant spending hours in some profoundly poor areas. It’s all very challenging. And the students really took that on in great ways.”

To engage and learn about the world, to delve into different cultures, to see and connect with people thousands of miles away, “it really changes you,” Koffler says. “It makes you think about what we could be doing with our education and our degree to help different communities, not only of our faith, but of all faiths and all people.”

Sara Byala is a senior lecturer in critical writing in the School of Arts & Sciences and the associate director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute.

Peter Decherney is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Endowed Term Professor in the Humanities, a professor of cinema & media studies in the School of Arts & Sciences, and director of the Penn Global Documentary Institute.