When musician Gili Yalo was four years old, his father had a dream in which he was struggling to climb a mountain. When he eventually reached the summit, he saw leaves glistening with dew.
So he went to the rabbi in their Ethiopian village for guidance on what it all meant. “He told him that he should try to go to Israel,” says Yalo. “And that’s how we started. We were 100 people that in the middle of one night just started walking, without knowing how long the journey was going to last and how dangerous it was.”
Together with his family, Yalo was one of the thousands of Ethiopian Jews covertly evacuated from Sudan during a famine in 1984 under Operation Moses. By foot, they fled through the desert, and as they made their perilous and exhausting journey to refugee camps in Sudan, Yalo sang from his father’s shoulders, encouraging his loved ones to keep going.
“The first time I remember singing to a crowd, it was on our journey to Israel,” he recalls, looking stage-ready with his tinted glasses and partially unbuttoned denim shirt. “I loved singing. And people really enjoyed my singing, and told my father that I will be a musician.”
Not that his father approved; he hoped the young Gili would become a doctor or pilot. “But it was stronger than me.”
Indeed, Yalo has sung ever since, and his performances have taken him around the world, to Jamaica’s Reggae Sumfest, the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, Womad festival in Wiltshire, and, most recently, London’s own Jazz Festival where he played at Ronnie Scott’s.
Around 4,000 died during Operation Moses. Very quickly they ran out of food, and Yalo recalls how they had to swiftly bury, then leave the dead behind.
(c)Monika S Jakubowska-6425
Yafo on stage t Ronnie Scott’s (Monika S Jakubowska)
They walked at night and hid during the day, to avoid pirates on the way (“pirates can kill people and nobody will know about it”), and because it was dangerous to be Jews on the run. “And we always suffered enough staying there, as Jewish people,” says Yalo.
For six months they waited to be rescued, hidden incognito in a Sudanese refugee camp among the crowd who had fled communism. There, the situation was dire: people crowded in tents without medicine, fighting malaria (Yalo included) and swarms of ants, which meant more deaths.
When two trucks arrived, hundreds crammed in. “It was really awful,” he recalls. “Layers and layers of people… because nobody wanted to stay another day. It was all about this dream and belief that Jerusalem is heaven on earth. So people were willing to sacrifice themselves.”
The family had made the difficult decision to leave Yalo’s eldest sister, aged 12, behind in Ethiopia because she was too sick to travel. It took six years to bring her to Israel. “My mother was crying every Friday that her daughter was not there,” recalls Yalo, before comparing their situation to those who’d lost their loved ones.
“It was very risky. So thank God that we are alive.”
What he remembers is the glaring lights of the plane, the first time that he saw artificial lights — and white people. “We always thought that there’s only black Jews,” he explains.
“‘How come the white people are Jews?’ We were not connected to other Jewish communities.”
When the family arrived in Israel they discovered just how different their Jewish practice was from that of contemporary Israelis. By contrast, they had been living as if they were in Biblical times, following the practice for every mitzvah from the Bible in lieu of the Mishnah or Talmud.
“Until we got to Israel and understood that it had developed,” he says, smiling.
Yalo’s singing career soon took off in Israel. On a school trip he took hold of the microphone on the bus and serenaded his classmates, who were so impressed that they urged him to audition for the Pirhei Yerushalayim choir, for religious boys. “They loved it,” he recalls.
So did the choir manager, who asked Yalo if he had a passport. “He told me, ‘In two weeks, you’re coming with us to Paris.’” And so, at the age of eight, he found himself singing at the Olympia in Paris with the famous Algerian-French Jewish singer Enrico Macias.
It wasn’t long before he added Hebrew to English and the Ethiopian language Amharic, shelving the latter in an effort to fit in with his Israeli classmates. “It wasn’t fashionable to be Ethiopian back then. So we hid our identity,” he says, recalling how they never wore Ethiopian clothes or brought Ethiopian food to the school.
“And we never talked about it. It was embarrassing for kids, because we were trying to be part of this Israeli society. That was a kind of identity crisis. You don’t want to be Ethiopian, but you cannot change it. Look at you!
"So you’re trying to act Israeli. It was challenging, and only when we grew up were we starting to ask ourselves questions.
"Now people are going back to their roots, and suddenly they’re proud of who they are. It took a lot of time for us to understand that it’s OK not to forget your past to go to the future. You can take it with you, and maybe it makes you strong, because it’s your roots.”
Those roots emerge in his own music. He had long sought role models, discovering the music of Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley and Sam Cooke, and the reggae, funk, jazz, hip hop and Motown he listened to would become an influence in his own songs, along with a distinct Ethiopian twist.
“This is my DNA,” he says. “So there’s always Ethiopian motifs, in the rhythm or in the scales.”
Despite his early success, Yalo lacked confidence in his own music. He sang in cover bands for years after leaving the army, and became the lead singer of the Israeli reggae group Zvuloon Dub System. It wasn’t until he approached 30 that he eventually launched his solo music. “I felt in that band that I want to change so many things, but I can’t.” So he started writing his own songs.
“Some friends said, ‘Oh, that’s beautiful!’ That’s how I started to believe that I can do it. I felt like it’s my time.”
It took even longer for him to write songs in Hebrew; he plans to release more next year.
For Yalo, music is a form of social activism; he has always probed social matters and personal experiences through his songs. In Hyloga, he sings, “We can’t let them play with our lives/ you don’t have the right to think or make a move”, which he points out remains relevant today.
He received hate for criticising the system when he wrote about the July 2019 protest by Ethiopian Jews in response to the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Solomon Teka by an Israeli police officer. Not that criticism would put him off voicing his thoughts.
“We made a lot of demonstrations before and nobody was talking about it, and suddenly, when it became violent, the whole country was talking,” he says. “I’m not afraid to say what I feel. If you won’t talk about it, nothing will change.
"That’s part of my role as a musician, to say what I think. If I don’t have something to say, I won’t write. In hard times, music always comes back as the biggest influential social activism.”
He hopes that his music might help people to believe in themselves and their ability to effect change — “and make them smile and dance”.
