This paper reflects on the emergence of the Bahá’í Faith in 1950s-1960s East Africa through the perspectives of its early African converts. While the men and women discussed in this paper first encountered the religion in Kampala, its status as a colonial hub drew Africans from across Uganda, Kenya, Tanganyika, and Nyasaland. Following conversion, many of these new Bahá’ís took up the task of propagating their new religion in their home communities and in other parts of the Great Lakes region and equatorial Africa. These developments unfolded during a period of political and social upheaval as urban areas were increasingly shaped by debates over competing forms of belonging. In the aftermath of the Second World War, returning soldiers and laborers pressed for their civil rights and economic dues at the end of the Second World War, while clergymen, lay leaders, believers, and educated African elites called for the reform and Africanization of Christianity and the colonial civil service. Furthermore, Africans from all walks of life made renewed demands for land, education, self-government, and independence.
While the emergence of the Bahá’í Faith created suspicion among many government and religious actors, it also enabled converts to find new answers to personal and societal questions about racial, ethnic, and national belonging, as well as spiritual, social, and religious agency and well-being under constrained conditions. Drawing on first-person accounts, this paper highlights both the precariousness of conversion and the possibilities opened by embracing the Bahá’í Faith during the birth pangs of African independence. These accounts are placed into conversation with the work of historians such as Derek Peterson, Holly Hanson, and Patrick Otim, who have examined the political, social, and religious forces that shaped developments in postwar East Africa.
Janice is a Ph.D. candidate in History at Stanford University. She studies the history of science, technology, infrastructure, religion, mobilities, and the environment in East and Central Africa. She is particularly interested in locating contemporary technological developments within an East African longue durée by examining the technological entanglements that shaped the mobilities and environmental changes in the region. Her work aims to challenge problematic narratives about Africans’ capacity for scientific knowledge production and practice. She aims to explore how reframing these narratives has ramifications on 1) how Africans see themselves, their communities, and their futures, and 2) the ways in which African institutions and institutions in Africa create opportunities, construct mechanisms, and make policies concerning technology.
She is passionate about participatory and emancipatory processes of knowledge production, acquisition, and dissemination, especially at the grassroots, and how they translate into personal and social transformation. Using interdisciplinary approaches, she has explored this theme within the fields of education, global health and development, gender and women’s studies, and agriculture and environmental sustainability, through academic and professional experiences in the U.S., U.K. Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Mauritius, and Israel.