Enoch Olinga - World Wide Service and Travels

World Wide Service and Travels

In February 1957, in four years, Olinga traveled on Bahá'í pilgrimage for 10 days. Immediately afterwards he was able to visit back to Uganda to attend the laying of the foundation stone of the first Bahá'í House of Worship of Africa. In October 1957 Shoghi Effendi appointed him as a Hand of the Cause of God at the age of 31. He was the only native African named as a Hand of the Cause. In November news of the death of Shoghi Effendi spread though Olinga was unable to attend the funeral in London. However Olinga was in attendance for the first Conclave of the Hands in Bahjí on November 18, 1957 to review the situation and the way forward leading to the election of the Universal House of Justice. Ebony magazine covered a conference in Uganda in January 1958 which Olinga and his wife attended and pictured him on page 129. However Olinga did not stay in Uganda - he returned to Haifa where he served at the Bahá'í World Center until 1963 when Olinga chaired the opening session of the first Bahá'í World Congress in 1963 which announced the election of the first Universal House of Justice. He then returned to live in East Africa and found he was estranged from his wife Eunica. They separated and divorced; he moved to Nairobi with his second wife, Elizabeth and all of his children and he continued to travel widely. After fellow Hand of Cause Músá Banání died, Enoch purchased his home in Kampala. Additional travels after 1968 were extensive, including a tour of Upper West Africa in 1969 and later that same year, South America, Central America, passing through the United States, then the Solomon Islands, and Japan. In 1977, Olinga represented the Universal House of Justice at the International Conference held in Brazil and then attended another one in Mérida, Mexico.

His co-religionist Dizzy Gillespie wrote a song named Olinga; and it was the title track of an album by Milt Jackson, produced by Creed Taylor, recorded in 1974 and re-issued in 1988 and covered by Judy Rafat on her tribute album to Gillespie in 1999. Olinga was also a song released by Mary Lou Williams in 1995.