The Friends Who Met Anyway

*A retelling for children, based on the **Bahá'í Chronicles** account of the first Bahá'ís of South Africa.*

1 / 20

Imagine a room with the curtains drawn. Inside, a few people are sitting together — some with dark skin, some with light skin, some whose families came long ago from India. They are sharing food and saying prayers. It looks like the most ordinary, peaceful thing in the world.

2 / 20

But it was not ordinary at all. In that country, at that time, a meeting like this one could get every single person in the room into trouble. It could even get them arrested.

3 / 20

To understand why, we have to go back a little.

4 / 20

The country was South Africa. A few years earlier, in 1948, its leaders had made a set of harsh laws called apartheid. Those laws said that people of different skin colors had to be kept apart — apart in their schools, apart in their restaurants, apart at their gatherings. The law actually decided who you were allowed to sit beside.

5 / 20

Now, far away in the Holy Land, there was a man named Shoghi Effendi, who was the Guardian of the Bahá'í Faith. He cared about every part of the world, and he saw that there were whole lands where no one had yet heard the Bahá'í teachings. So in 1953 he asked for volunteers — brave people willing to leave their comfortable homes and travel to those faraway places to share the Faith. This great call was known as the Ten Year Crusade.

6 / 20

South Africa, with its difficult laws, was one of the places that needed help most.

7 / 20

And people came. Some traveled all the way from America. Two of them, Betty Reed and Reginald Newkirk, were Black Americans who had *asked* to be sent to South Africa — knowing exactly how hard things were there. Others came from Britain and from Europe. They settled in cities called Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban, and they began to make friends and share what they believed.

8 / 20

Before long, South Africans themselves began to listen. People who were Black, people who were white, people whose families came from India, people called Coloured — all kinds of people heard the Bahá'í teachings. And when they heard that all of humanity is one single family, something inside them said, *Yes. This is what I have always known to be true.* One by one, they joined.

9 / 20

But now these new friends faced a hard question — maybe the hardest question of all.

10 / 20

The Bahá'í teachings say that everyone is welcome. When Bahá'ís gather to pray and to celebrate, the door is open to people of every color and every background, sitting side by side as equals. That is simply how it is done.

11 / 20

But the apartheid laws said the exact opposite. They said people of different colors must *not* mix at meetings.

12 / 20

So what should the South African Bahá'ís do? They could obey the law and hold separate meetings — and quietly give up the very thing that made them Bahá'ís. Or they could do what their faith asked, meet all together as one family, and risk getting into serious trouble.

13 / 20

They made their choice. They decided to meet together.

14 / 20

And they did. They held their gatherings, called Feasts, with everyone welcome — every color, every language, all in one room. They knew that the police might come. They knew their homes might be searched. They decided the risk was worth it.

15 / 20

Sometimes the danger came true. Bahá'í homes were raided. Believers were questioned by the authorities. Some of the pioneers who had traveled so far were even sent out of the country. It was frightening, and it was not fair.

16 / 20

But the friends did not give up. They kept meeting. They kept welcoming everyone. And slowly, year after year, more and more South Africans joined, until the little group had grown into a community of thousands.

17 / 20

Here is the most wonderful part. For a long, long time, the laws of South Africa kept people apart. Then at last, in 1994, those cruel laws came to an end, and the country became a place where people of every color could finally live together as equals. But the Bahá'ís had been living that way all along — in their own small rooms, with the curtains drawn, for more than forty years. They had shown, quietly and bravely, that it could be done.

18 / 20

Sometimes doing the right thing is easy and safe. But sometimes it is hard, and even a little dangerous, and you have to be brave. The first Bahá'ís of South Africa teach us that when something is truly right — like treating every person as part of one family — it is worth standing up for, even when the whole world tells you not to.

19 / 20

*This is a retelling for children. For the fuller account, see ["The First Bahá'ís of South Africa"](/stories/bc-first-south-african-bahais).*

20 / 20