In the Heart of the Old City, the African Community Society Unites Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinians

Founded in 1983, the African Community Society (ACS) brings together Jerusalemites of Chadian, Senegalese, Nigerian, and Sudanese descent to build community and to provide opportunities.

The ACS’s headquarters are a few feet away from Bab al-Majlis, the main entrance of al-Aqsa Mosque. That’s where you’ll find its veteran executive director Mousa Qous most days, sitting at his large pinewood desk, answering emails, chatting with donors, and organizing community events.

The Afro-Palestinian community has rented this unit and the one across the street for more than 100 years. It’s prime real estate, right in the heart of Jerusalem’s Old City, with multiple families living inside the four-story complex.

Opposite Mousa’s office, there’s a large event hall where the community gathers for celebrations, commiserations, family events, weddings, workshops, and holidays. It’s where children learn to dance, to make art, to write poetry, or to take photographs, several of which are framed and hanging on the walls. The hall is the beating heart of the Afro-Palestinian community as well as the rest of Jerusalem’s Palestinian population, most of whom live below the poverty line and can rent out the hall for cheap.

Just like everything else in the Old City, this compound has a rich history. Mousa says it was built over 700 years ago by Mamluks, a term referring to non-Arab, ethnically diverse enslaved mercenaries who were assigned military duties during the Arab and Ottoman dynasties. “They built these two compounds to host Muslim pilgrims in Jerusalem,” Mousa explains. “But during Ottoman rule, they converted the compounds into prisons.”1 The British closed the prisons when they occupied Jerusalem in 1917, after which the authorities overseeing the Islamic waqf leased the buildings to the Afro-Palestinian community. Since then, these compounds have become the center of the community and its activities.

The first African Muslim migration to Jerusalem began after the city fell under Islamic rule in 634.2 In the 12th century, men from Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan, and Chad took part in the hajj. Once they reached Mecca, they came to Jerusalem to pray at al-Aqsa Mosque, which conferred on them the added label of Hajj Maqdisi (a pilgrim of Jerusalem). Most of the community, like Mousa’s family, came to Jerusalem during the period of the British Mandate and have African fathers and Palestinian mothers. “As we were raised here in Palestine, we feel more Palestinian than African,” Mousa says. Now the community is made up of around 45 families, totaling around 450 people.

The African Quarter lies along both sides of ‘Ala’ al-Din Street in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, just before it reaches al-Aqsa Mosque. It has two parts: Ribat al-Mansuri, on the right, and Ribat ‘Ala’ al-Din al-Busayry, on the left. Both were built by the Mamluks in the 13th century. Later they were leased to the community as a waqf in gratitude for their loyalty as guards of the al-Aqsa Mosque.

Despite their heritage, community members do not carry African passports. Mousa’s father is from Chad, which was a French colony when he emigrated to Palestine. France refused to grant passports to the next generation once colonial rule had ended in their countries of origin; Jordan, for its part, refused to grant them Jordanian citizenship as it did to all the Palestinians of the West Bank at that time. If Mousa wants to apply for a Chadian passport today, he must travel there, which will put him at risk of having his legal status as a permanent resident of Jerusalem revoked. Moussa and other Palestinian Jerusalemites have the option of applying for Israeli citizenship; however, most do not out of principle, and if they do, their requests may be denied: Asylum seekers and refugees who reach Israel from African countries are commonly left in permanent legal limbo and subject to racism and marginalization within Israeli society.3

It’s a dilemma all Palestinian residents of Jerusalem face, but it makes the Afro-Palestinian community even more determined to stay in their home city. Mousa was born in the Old City and lived here all his life, so leaving is not an option. “We fight to stay here,” he says. “Some have no choice but to rent outside the Old City, but they stay inside the borders of Jerusalem to preserve their right to reside here.”

The children of Jerusalem’s Afro-Palestinian community are in particular need of a safe space of their own. There’s nowhere for them to play in the Old City, so they either play on the streets or in the open space of the al-Aqsa Mosque compound. However, in recent years, this space has also become a flashpoint witnessing growing levels of violence, especially during the holy month of Ramadan. Judaism’s most holy site, the Western Wall, is just around the corner, so up to 10 armed Israeli soldiers are stationed at the end of the street every day. Being so close to the most contested holy sites on the planet, combined with the ever-increasing aggression of Jewish settlers in the Old City, means these children see more violence in their early years than most people see in a lifetime.

Mousa says the Afro-Palestinian community faces the same challenges as the rest of the Palestinian community—precarious citizenship, high rates of incarceration, continual surveillance through hundreds of “security” cameras, harassment from settlers, and violence from the military. Mousa’s cousin is currently serving a 17-year sentence in prison, while Mousa himself was jailed for five years for helping distribute food during the First Intifada in 1987. He served some of that time in the same prison as his brother.

While he was there, Mousa vowed to dedicate his time to continue building his community and helping it flourish. The original incarnation of the ACS was called the Sudanese Welfare Club, which Mousa launched with friends in 1965. “Our activities revolved around sport, particularly boxing,” Moussa says. “One of our members was the champion of the entire Kingdom of Jordan.”

The organization folded when Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967, but Mousa reestablished the club in 1976 under the name African Youth Club. “We had lots of different activities, like art, sport, music,” Moussa says. “And we had our own soccer team.” After a few years, the African Youth Club was forced to close. Their headquarters needed renovating, and they didn’t have the funds to cover the required work. But then they reached out to the late Faisal Husseini, a prominent and respected Palestinian leader among Jerusalemites at that time, and he helped them renovate the club so they could launch the ACS in 1983. “Since then, we’ve provided services for women, children, and youth in Jerusalem,” Mousa says.

Their impact reaches far beyond the Old City’s borders. Last June, Mousa was invited to New York by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to participate in the second session of the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent. Before that, he was invited to Geneva to take part in the Regional Meeting for the Middle East on the International Decade for People of African Descent, where he met other representatives from the region. "We succeeded in establishing a network for the MENA region,” Mousa says. “We called it the Regional Network for Development and Anti-Racism in the Middle East and North Africa.” Mousa was elected deputy head, serving alongside the head of the network, who is based in Yemen. Over the years, the ACS has built relationships with other marginalized African communities, including the Hebrew Israelites in Dimona, who also struggle to obtain residency in Israel, and the Christian Ethiopian community in Jerusalem. However, the Jewish Ethiopian soldiers are among the most violent toward the Afro-Palestinian community, a fact Mousa laments. Because Jewish Ethiopians experience racism and oppression from within Jewish Israeli society, internalized racism likely plays a part in their disproportionate violence toward the Afro-Palestinian population.

Mousa has been with the ACS in its various incarnations since the beginning, and he worked hard to obtain educational credentials. “I am one of the most educated people in the community,” he says. “We are all living under the poverty line, but I worked at night and studied in the mornings to get my master’s degree in international studies from Bir Zeit University.” Most of the community do not go to university as they must work to support their families. “Some succeed in pursuing their studies, but the majority don’t,” Mousa says. Today, the society plays an active role in helping young Jerusalemites fulfil their potential, such as by offering free tutoring to pass exams and helping young graduates get into university. They have a computer lab so students can research and learn online, and they organize workshops to empower women. “We don’t want our children in the streets,” Mousa says. “So we organize trips and travels and summer camps here in the hall.”

The ACS also hosts workshops and seminars to help the community cope with the increasing tension and violence from Jewish settlers in Jerusalem. Mousa says settlers are becoming increasingly bold and approach their headquarters and harass the community with ever more regularity. “We are not living normal lives,” Mousa says. “We are not living freely, we cannot go wherever we want or do what we want, and we don’t have a nationality.” But the community gives each other strength, hope, and structure and keeps their dual identities alive. And, Mousa stresses, their services are open to all those marginalized in society, not just people of African descent. So despite the myriad of challenges this community faces, the ACS provides crucial support to a community that faces persecution in several directions. And with Mousa’s ever-growing network, he can raise awareness for the struggles within the community and wider Palestinian society, while providing a safe space for those most marginalized within Jerusalem.

For more information, visit the African Community Society website and Instagram.