The sighting of the new moon was of cardinal importance for them as it is for Jews. They practised the ritual slaughter of animals, using a special knife they refused to eat pigs and a number of other creatures they sacrificed animals on high places like the ancient Israelites and they followed many of the other laws of the Old Testament. They did not traditionally eat with other groups. They did not intermarry with other tribes. What I knew about the 40,000 strong Lemba tribe in 1987 was that they were black, they spoke various Bantu languages such as Venda or Shona, they lived in various locations in South Africa and Zimbabwe, they were physically indistinguishable from their neighbours and that they had a host of customs and traditions identical to those of the African tribes among whom they lived.īut, on the other hand, they also had some mysterious customs and legends which did not appear to be African. The tribe had asked me to find their lost city, and I had promised to try.
No-one had any idea where in the world this mysterious Senna was located and neither did I. What I had heard was that the tribe believed that when they left Israel they settled in a city called Senna - somewhere across the sea. On the other hand, since early medieval times there had been rumours of lost Jewish kingdoms in darkest Africa. The Lemba harboured an astonishing claim to be of Israelite origin, although the presence of Israelites or Jews in central Africa had never before been attested. Then I would read, write up my notes and spend much of the night listening to the elders’ narratives. With my little trowel I had discovered a few bones, pieces of local pottery and one or two iron tools of uncertain age. How had I spent my time in the village? In the blistering heat of the day I would wander over the hills near the village and poke around the remains of the ancient stone-building culture, which, the Lemba claimed, was the work of their distant ancestors. At the time I was Lecturer in Hebrew in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London and for a while now this tribe had been my main academic subject. I had been doing fieldwork on a mysterious African tribe called the Lemba. In 1987 my home was a grass hut in a dried out tribal area of central Zimbabwe in southern Africa, completely cut off from the outside world.
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