In a remote area of Kenya, a small community of Jews has recently established contact with other East African Jews. Although their origins are uncertain, they seem to have come to Judaism through Christianity in the 1990s, and were formally converted under the auspices of the American Conservative movement in 2006. Melanie Lidman writes:
The 60 members of the Kasuku Gathundia Jewish community are sprinkled across the Kenyan highlands, eking out a living as subsistence farmers during the week by raising cows and maize. On Saturday mornings they unwrap an old United Synagogue ḥumash—a bound copy of the Torah (not a scroll)—from a canvas bag and read the weekly Torah portion, partly in Hebrew and partly in the local Kikuya tribal language. . . .
Yosef ben Avraham Njogu, the community’s patriarch, . . . explained that Kasuku also happens to be the headquarters of Kenya’s sizable Messianic Jewish congregation. In the late 1990s, some Messianic Jews decided that it was time to fulfill the prophecy and move to Israel. So the leaders of the Messianic church reached out to the Israeli embassy in Nairobi, inquiring about the process of moving to the Holy Land. . . .
“We started to understand there’s a difference between Messianic Judaism and Judaism, and some of us chose to turn to Judaism,” said Njogu, sitting in his living room, [which is] adorned with an Israeli flag and a poster of the Hebrew alphabet.
But most of the Messianic church did not agree. So, Njogu and another church elder, Avraham Ndungu Mbugua, broke away and started studying Judaism in depth, keeping the Sabbath and other holidays based on books about Judaism they photocopied from the library.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-kenyas-highlands-a-jewish-community-struggles-for-recognition/