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This paper seeks to situate the Guardian’s “Africa Plan” as the first joint international teaching plan implemented by a group of National Spiritual Assemblies (NSAs). This systematic effort was guided by Shoghi Effendi from the Baha’i World Centre, coordinated by the NSA of the British Isles, and ably supported by the NSAs of the United States, Egypt, Persia, and India. From 1950 to 1953, international Baha’i teachers, local contacts, and new converts formed nuclei of Baha’i activity and translated Baha’i writings into local languages in late colonial Africa i.e., Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Madagascar, Gold Coast, Liberia, Libya, Algeria, Somalia, N. Rhodesia, and Nyasaland. In particular, this presentation will focus on the “astonishing” successes in Uganda, perhaps explaining the Guardian’s choice of Kampala as the location for the first of the four intercontinental teaching conferences to launch the Ten Year Crusade in February 1953.
The Plan was at once centrally planned and rooted in a larger vision but also decentralized and iterative, requiring adaptation to local circumstances. Such expansion relied on a nascent culture of individual voluntarism, transnational community and inter-institutional collaboration, and utilized burgeoning mechanisms to enable the effective flow of communication and resources. Through racially and ethnically diverse gatherings in homes and public spaces open to all who were interested, regardless of belief, the Baha’i Faith offered those who encountered it new insights into pressing personal and collective concerns and facilitated hybrid forms of belonging that did not entail a complete break with the past.
These expansion efforts occurred during a moment of significant local and international political, economic, and social dynamism and transition shaped by the Second World War, the Cold War, the end of colonial empire, and the emergence of nationalist and independence movements. Thus, the Africa Plan can be understood as a vital precursor to the 10 Year Crusade i.e., a requisite part of the Baha’i community’s efforts to systematically expand across the world towards the goal of electing a globally representative Universal House of Justice.
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.
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