January 2022 – With the gracious approval of Barry Kosmin the ZJC website is pleased to provide a scanned copy of the book which was published and printed in 1981 by Mambo Press. Founded in May 1957, the press started off under the name Catholic Mission Press of the Diocese of Gweru. Back then it was simply envisaged as a press capable of supplying the literary needs of the local Catholic missions and schools. The founding staff comprised of one priest, one brother, three Canisius Sisters from Fribourg (Switzerland) and a few untrained young local assistants.

Mambo published the popular MOTO magazine, published by the Mambo Press which was politically outspoken and not favoured by Robert Mugabe’s government.

In a recent meeting with Barry he told the story of how a 1,000 copies of the book were printed by Mambo in their Gweru offices and before most of the books could be distributed the press was fire-bombed, apparently by political opponents to ZAPU (Joshua Nkomo’s party) and many of the Majuta copies were destroyed. There was a single print-run of “Majuta” so there are not many physical copies available.

Nearly 40 years later the book remains an important record of the history of the Zimbabwe Jewish Community and we are grateful to Barry for giving permission for it to be scanned and posted on this website. 

Barry was a young Phd student at the University of Rhodesia (now University of Zimbabwe) in the early 1970s and was given a scholarship to research and write his thesis on the ZJC.  He went on to an illustrious career of authoring several books, and became Research Professor of Public Policy and Law at Trinity College, Hartford Connecticut and Founding Director of its Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture (ISSSC). He was a Senior Associate of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies , Oxford University, England.  

The book was scanned in double page PDF format and is word searchable. To download the 223 page file – please click here.