by Rytas Sakavičius
One average day doing my usual thing, scrolling through facebook, an entry caught my eye about a European who is a national hero of Zambia. The most interesting part was his surname, Zukas.
It sounded familiar, but I didn’t really believe it: is it possible we wouldn’t know about this person? We so love stories about people whose ancestors came from Lithuania and it hardly matters whether they identified themselves with Lithuania. Not expecting much, I put “Simon Zukas” into a search engine. The results were suprising. Born July 31, 1925, in Ukmergė [Vilkomir], Lithuania. That’s when I got interested, thinking it strange such an important and exceptional African political figure might be completely unknown in his native land.
It’s sad that we hardly know Litvak history. We know more about the Vilna Gaon, born more than three hundred years ago. At the same time there are many Jews who come from Lithuania, or Lita, including South African architect Hermann Kallenbach, friend to Indian independence leader Mohandis Gandhi; the poet and singer Bob Dylan, singer Leonard Cohen, J. D. Sallinger, author of “Catcher in the Rye;” Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky who translated the Old and New Testaments into Mandarin Chinese and Ludovik Zamenhof who invented Esperanto in the Lithuanian town of Veisiejai. Some of them are more famous, others less, and we know about still others but never think they might have come from Lithuania. Simon Zukas, although little-known in his home country and although I was unable to find information about him in Lithuania, is worthy of attention. His story is exceptional in all its aspects.
I was able to find an email address for the 96-year-old Zukas on the internet. We corresponded and he eventually to my disbelief consented to an interview. We discussed his life full of activities, and in order to provide some context for his story, I also contacted Oxford professor High McMillan, head of the Africa Studies Center there. I also made use of Frank Shapiro’s book “Zion in Africa: The Jews of Zambia” and Simon Zukas’s memoire “Into Exile and Back.”
Full text with interview in Lithuanian here.
Rytas Sakavičius is an eleventh-grade student at the Vilnius Lyceum. This text was one of the winners of NARA’s contest “Africa Is Not a Country,” in which 20 Lithuanian high school students prepared journalistic texts about Africa today demonstrating the continent’s diversity and our relationships with Africa.
