[Kampala, Uganda, February 12-18, 1953]
I hail with a joyous heart the convocation in the heart of the African
continent of the first of the four Intercontinental Teaching Conferences
constituting the highlights of the world-wide celebrations of the Holy
Year which commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the birth of the
Mission of the Founder of our Faith. I welcome with open arms the
unexpectedly large number of the representatives of the pure-hearted and
the spiritually receptive Negro race, so dearly loved by 'Abdu'l-Baha, for
whose conversion to His Father's Faith He so deeply yearned and whose
interests He so ardently championed in the course of His memorable visit
to the North American continent. I am reminded, on this historic occasion,
of the significant words uttered by Baha'u'llah Himself, Who as attested
by the Center of the Covenant, in His Writings, "compared the colored
people to the black pupil of the eye," through which "the light of the
spirit shineth forth." I feel particularly gratified by the substantial
participation in this epoch-making conference of the members of a race
dwelling in a continent which for the most part has retained its primitive
simplicity and remained uncontaminated by the evils of a gross, a rampant
and cancerous materialism undermining the fabric of human society alike in
the East and in the West, eating into the vitals of the conflicting
peoples and races inhabiting the American, the European and the Asiatic
continents, and alas threatening to engulf in one common catastrophic
convulsion the generality of mankind. I acclaim the preponderance of the
members of this same race at so significant a conference, a phenomenon
unprecedented in the annals of Baha'i conferences held during over a
century, and auguring well for a corresponding multiplication in the
number of the representatives of the yellow, the red and brown races of
mankind dwelling respectively in the Far East, in the Far West and in the
islands of the South Pacific Ocean, a multiplication designed ultimately
to bring to a proper equipoise the divers ethnic elements comprised within
the highly diversified world-embracing Baha'i fellowship.