Dana Seidenberg died in the evening of May 25, doing what she loved: swimming at sunset in the warm waters off the coast of Zanzibar. She was 78.
Dana loved to entertain at her home, which she called the Loresho Ridge Art Commune, throwing parties for her friends and acquaintances, sometimes inviting artists from the region to come and show their work, and sometimes just for a birthday celebration.
She wrote this on her 78th birthday:
I am 78 and in very good health! Maybe it was the Ground Hog's Day part! I live in Nairobi, where on Feb 1, we celebrated everyone's birthday! We had about 21 friends and ate outside, serving barbecued chicken, meat, salads, broiled vegetables and, for dessert, cheesecake and pumpkin pie. I am a PhD in mainly East African history. I continue my life as a travel writer. Here, we also speak Kiswahili. Currently, I am writing a book about my life.
Dana looked forward to her trip to Zanzibar in May. Her beloved aide Judy Waga accompanied Dana to the island. She waited patiently with her adopted son Frederick Kioko on the shore for Dana to return from her usual hour-long swim, as she had done in the four evenings prior, but not this time.
Judy had a boat sent out to search in the black waters, but Dana’s body would not be found until the next day, some 20km from where they had last spotted her.
After her death, Judy writes:
“Dana was one special person with a golden heart. She could not see anyone suffer. She helped educate so many people and stood with so many people in times of need.
“Though she was a bit difficult at times, we managed to patiently know what she wanted and how she wanted things done her way.“Dana was one of the best writers I knew and was very focused on doing what she loved. She was a go-getter and very strong-willed.“Staying in Africa for more than 50 years made her fall in love with Africa and always feel at home. We embraced her, loved her wholeheartedly and protected her so jealously that no one could manipulate her or take advantage of her kindness and generosity.
“We were such a great team and family that she treated us equally and taught us the power of peace, love and unity. Dana loved exploring the world so she could learn of different people, cultures and traditions and food as she loved good food.
“She taught me to be a food writer in one of the newspapers in Kenya, called the Star, of which she was also an article writer, and in the East African newspaper, which was always published as she was so good.”
In the last few years, Dana decided to write her memoirs, and although she wrote an auspicious 280 pages, she felt she was not done. [Dana’s writings will be seen in italics throughout.]
COMING TO KENYA
Dana grew up in Fayetteville, New York, a middle-class suburb just east of Syracuse. Her parents, Robert and Faith Seidenberg, built the house on land designated for Whites only; Blacks and Jews were not allowed. That is, until Faith Seidenberg confronted the seller in person, and the Jewish family moved in.
Dana graduated from Jamesville-DeWitt High School, where she would say she did not fit in with the mostly straight-haired White (and Christian) students. She tells how she used to iron her untamable hair on the ironing board, and how she was taken to the principal’s office to see if she had the intelligence to graduate. She was told she was not smart enough to go to college, but applied to the University of Wisconsin, was accepted and thrived in her new environment:
University of Wisconsin, Madison Campus (1964-68). It was a thrilling time to be alive, and we were all having a good time! Situated on Lake Mendota, the setting seemed to match the energy of our young lives.
As we trudged up Bascom Hill, brushing off the snow during winter, to our lecture halls, our professors invited us to their homes for dinner or snacks. Most were from ‘the City’, meaning Manhattan and/or the five boroughs.
I kept where I came from a secret as I hoped no one would ask such an embarrassing question. No one had even heard of Syracuse, New York.
Dana graduated from the University in 1968 with a degree in history. She then studied at the Maxwell School of Public Affairs, Syracuse University Program, where she earned her Master’s and PhD in African and South Asian studies. This took her on a scholarship to Kenya.
Her future was sealed; she was to live the rest of her life in Kenya:
I love Kenya, my beautiful country of adoption, and I believe it truly loves me! Whether [because of] the cooing of the doves and the cockatoos, [or] the wide-open spaces with herds of elephants in their natural habitats, drinking water from the rivers. Inter-woven in the narrative is, as is often said, quoting southern American author, William Faulkner (1897-62): “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
My beautiful country Kenya. Arriving in l973 on a scholarship out of Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York on a newly created, now-defunct Programme of Eastern African Studies, under the direction of Robert Gregory, Prof of History! At age 23 when I arrived, I was called memsahib, a colonial term of deference used for White women.
Prof Gregory took me to a house on 5th Parklands as then it was unthinkable that any young woman should live on her own.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE WAR
Dana had wanted to be an archeologist. Her parents took her to Egypt, where she learned of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Aswan Dam. Her father sent her to work on a kibbutz in Israel when she was 16, and then back to Israel to Ashdad, where she dug up some potsherds pieced together looking like part of an oil lamp dated from Roman times.
I had no idea that somewhere called Palestine ever existed. Much later, I learned about a seemingly permanent war between Israel and Palestine: 1948-1956, 1982, 2023… I always took the side of Israel.
[However,] on the Palestinian side, one cannot but notice the disquieting arrogance of those both living in and in support of the Zionist ethnic cleansing leading to genocide. Whether fact or fiction that hurting people hurt others or traumatised people traumatise others. In a strange reversal of history, it is now the Palestinians who are suffering the Pogroms.
Besides writing scholarly essays on history, travelling to off-the-beaten-path destinations, and socialising with her many friends in Nairobi and around the world, Dana loved to swim. From an early age, she was a proficient swimmer:
I attended a Jewish summer camp named Bradley Brook Camp in West Eaton, New York, where Dad also been a counselor. It felt so far away! I wondered if the parents would ever find the place to take us home.
I loved the camp…Cabin no. 13. We slept on a cot with a blanket called a jellyroll at the bottom of the bed. We swam in the lake. I received the blue ribbon for best swimmer. She went on to be a lifeguard at Thornden Park in Syracuse.
Of swimming and of Zanzibar, she writes:
While swimming in the warm, saline waters of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Zanzibar, the delightful dream of every swimmer, not far away, collectivities of hungry, unemployed people are watching and waiting. For Zanzibar is the way the world is rather than the way it ought to be.
And this: On 2nd Feb, Groundhog's Day, I shall be 75! I hope to go to Zanzibar, my favourite place of all times, accompanied by my Judy and Kioko, where we all can swim to our heart's delight in the warm Indian Ocean seas.
For many years, Dana was a research associate with the Institute for Development Studies and History Department, University of Nairobi. She was also managing director of Dajo Performing Artists, a Kenyan music and dance troupe run by her late husband, Solomon Ombembo, who was coincidentally born on the same date and year as Dana. They were married only a few short years when Solomon met his untimely death in April of 1990 at age 43 from HIV-Aids.
LITERARY PASSIONS
Dana spent her life pursuing her passions, which included writing. She published her first book entitled, Mercantile Adventurers, The World of East African Asians, 1750-1985. She wrote numerous articles on history, travel, philosophy, Greek mythology, religion and politics. She was interested in people, where they came from, their lives, what foods they ate. Although not much a cook herself, she loved to try new dishes, and these were the subject of many of her writings. She wrote of her grandmother (Rose Seidenberg’s) chicken soup with matzoh balls, puterkuchen (a cinnamon and raisin yeast bread):
I loved the whitefish, pickled herring and Grandma's puterkucken and kreplach, her chicken soup with matzo balls! Grandma was a terrific cook! Dana even posted a chicken recipe in her friend Judy Shenouda’s cookbook, entitled, A Bisl of This, A Bisl of That.
And for those who visited Dana from the States, their passkey to her home was a box (or two) of matzoh.
Dana travelled widely. She chronicled her journeys in colourful essays published in the Star, the East African and Signature magazines.
Dana loved Zanzibar. As it turns out, her first trip to Zanzibar foreshadowed her last and final trip to that island.
Dana was 42 when she first visited Zanzibar, a place she describes as “that mysterious and romantic island” in an article entitled, Never Travel by Dhow [motorised sailboat], published in 1992 in Signature magazine. That journey turned out to be one of sheer terror for Dana. Of her harrowing ordeal, she writes:
Imagine sitting leeward in a small, motorised boat, hunched over as if to protect yourself somehow from huge, icy waves, which cascaded at unpredictable intervals over the bow, first spilling over you before landing on the makeshift tarpaulin roof.
Imagine being wrapped in a freezing, water-drenched blanket — your heaviest cotton clothing — for 8½ hours!
Some miles from the shore, the boat’s engines sputtered, and died. This left the dhow to lurch dangerously from side to side on the water:
I looked around and understood why the Ancients of the Indian subcontinent had so feared crossing the treacherous ‘Kala Pani’ — the Black Waters of the Indian Ocean. The sea of invisible demons was as shiny and opaque as ebony, and there was not a star to light up the sky.
Desperate, my university lap-swimming days reverberated in my head. (“Practising for the Olympics?” Kimori, the lifeguard in Nairobi, would ask, gently mocking my dogged performance.) Right, Kimori, and this is where it all ends! But in which direction should I swim? No land was to be seen anywhere.
After some minutes, hours, a water-logged eternity (who could tell? Anyone wearing a watch probably wished he wasn’t!), the motor was miraculously brought to life again.
Dana had spent the last couple of years writing her memoirs, and her first working title was, If you don't have Mazel, you shouldn't be born; the life and times of an independent-minded, Jewish Woman in Africa.
It is a story of contentment written with candour, building bridges where few existed before. It is a life of self-discovery, the life of my choice… the life of the mind. Or an effective story. I like to employ sarcasm.
She begins and ends her memoirs with this:
Stay tuned, I have had a very adventurous life.
Donations in Dana’s memory may be made to the YMCA of Central New York, and/or PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), or to Michael Njoroge and his team of volunteers, who make hot meals for the hungry and homeless in Nairobi every Saturday. Money can be sent to him via Sendwave or World Remit. His phone and WhatsApp number is +254 721 321942.
THE ONES SHE LEFT
Dana April Seidenberg was born on Groundhog’s Day, February 2, 1947, in Syracuse, New York to parents Robert Seidenberg, psychoanalyst, and Faith Seidenberg, civil rights attorney, who both preceded her in death.
She is survived by her two sisters, Laurie Brooke Seidenberg of Charlottesville, Virginia, and Lisa Lian Seidenberg of Westport, Connecticut, and two nieces, Laurie’s daughter, Rachel April Edwards and her two children, Robert and Alexander, and Lisa’s daughter, Rebeka April Foley.
She is also survived by her beloved aide, friend, confidante and business manager, Judith (“Judy”) Awour Waga, and her trusted helper, Frederick Kioko Muthembwa, and two others in her household, Kilatia Muthembwa and Boniface Kisanya, members of her home, and trusted friend, Francis Oludhe Macgoye, and Dana’s dogs, Ziggy, Zelda, Tyson and Shadow.
She is also survived by a young woman she held dear and considered to be her daughter, Areen Helou.
Dana leaves many friends, including those in and around Syracuse, New York, where she visited at least once a year. Her good friend and trusted accountant, Ken Gravante, her friend and caretaker of the house in Fayetteville, Anthony Worthy, her friend and assistant, Marilyn (Moe) Mathers, her cousin Marilyn Zaleon, friend Ellen Siegel, “Artrage” friends, Ann Tiffany and Ed Kinane, and cousin, Lisa Weiss, cousins Larry and Rosalie Young and their son, Judge Sam Young and wife, Robin, Neal Martin and wife, Liu Hsiu (Willow) and many, many friends in Kenya, including Thomas Wolf, Dr David Silverstein, Diana and Peter Simkin, to name a few.
Dana’s long-time partner, best friend and devoted companion, Kimani Gocheru, died in 2023, a death she grieved until her own on May 25.
