2026 in Review

Bahá'í Chronicles records the establishment of the South African Bahá'í community in the early 1950s — when Shoghi Effendi's Ten Year Crusade brought pioneers to the apartheid-era cities, and the first declarations were made by a handful of Black, white, and Indian South Africans who had found in the Faith the answer to the racial question their country had not yet faced.

Bahá'í Chronicles records that in the late 1870s, Bahá'u'lláh dispatched Sulaymán Khán-i-Tunúkábání — known as Jamál Effendi — from 'Akká to India, with the charge to establish the Faith on the subcontinent. With Sayyid Muṣṭafá Rúmí, who would later carry the work into Burma, he founded the first Bahá'í communities of Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.

Bahá'í Chronicles preserves the biographical record of John Ebenezer Esslemont — the Aberdeen physician who, after encountering the Cause in 1914, wrote the introductory work *Bahá'u'lláh and the New Era,* moved to Haifa to serve at the Master's side, and was named by Shoghi Effendi a Hand of the Cause after his early death in 1925.

Bahá'í Chronicles preserves the biographical record of Lua Aurelia Getsinger — the radiant Tennessee farm girl who, after the 1898 pilgrimage of fifteen Westerners to 'Akká, became the most celebrated travel-teacher of her generation, and whom 'Abdu'l-Bahá named *Livá* — *the Banner-Bearer.*

Bahá'í Chronicles preserves the biographical record of Martha Root — the small, quiet Pennsylvania newspaperwoman who, in the years between 1919 and her death in 1939, travelled four times around the world as a Bahá'í teacher, met queens and presidents, and was named by Shoghi Effendi *the foremost Hand of the Cause* of the Western world in his time.

Bahá'í Chronicles preserves the biographical record of May Bolles Maxwell — one of the first pilgrims to 'Akká, the woman who established the Bahá'í community of Paris and of Montreal, the mother of Rúḥíyyih Khánum, and the travel-teacher whom Shoghi Effendi would name a martyr of the Faith after her death in Buenos Aires in 1940.