Seventy years ago in April 1955, twenty-nine delegations representing countries in Africa and Asia convened in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, with the bold assignment of addressing the future of the world. The Asian-African Conference has since entered the realm of Third World myth, at once celebrated for the collective sense of solidarity it generated — a political feeling that became known as the Bandung Spirit — but also criticized for its limited effects in relation to the principles outlined in the meeting’s Final Communiqué.
There are good reasons for emphasizing the historic nature of Bandung, as it is referred to in shorthand, that are linked to its size and demographic character. While preceding diplomatic events like the 1953 Asian Socialist Conference had involved Asian and African participants, the Asian-African Conference surpassed its predecessors in terms of scope and representation, with promotional materials arguing that the Bandung meeting reflected the aspirations of 1.5 billion people. Its only competitor was the United Nations, whose founding conference in San Francisco in 1945 also involved signatories from Africa and Asia, including Ethiopia, Liberia, and Turkey.
Still, much of Africa and Asia remained under imperial rule in 1945. The leaders who gathered in Bandung ten years later signaled the fundamental shift that had occurred in global politics following the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the communist revolution in China in 1949, and the independence of Indonesia itself in 1949 — to mention only a few examples of self-determination that were defining a new era of nation-state sovereignty against empire.
The path to freedom was not easy. The preceding decade had witnessed the launching of liberation struggles in countries like Kenya, Cuba, and Algeria. After decades of activism, the struggle in South Africa faced a new and more intractable version of white supremacy with the program of apartheid that the National Party initiated in 1948. Other places like French-ruled Indochina had only recently experienced decolonization, while a Cold War deadlock remained on the Korean peninsula after the conflict that raged between 1950 and 1953.
The delegates at Bandung did not address all these issues. However, there was a clear awareness of the novel dangers presented by the Cold War among those present at the meeting, as well as the common bond of a shared history of European aggression. Bandung stood at a historic crossroads defined by the ending of empires, the new global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the possibilities that a new postcolonial order presented. This conjuncture of competing elements would determine the early fate of the meeting and presage its revival in the present.
The Uses of Myth
If anything, Bandung served as a moment of postcolonial spectacle. In our present-day parlance, it was a public relations move for many of the leaders who attended, a number of whom would achieve global prominence. Journalists and especially photographers were omnipresent, creating a rich visual archive of the meeting that captured airport arrivals, delegate speeches, working groups, motorcades, crowd-lined streets, banquet dinners, and cigarette breaks. Though there were certainly private discussions during the conference, Bandung was not a meeting held in secret. It was a coming-out party for the Third World.
Five countries sponsored the meeting — Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma (now Myanmar), and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) — though the political figures who garnered the most attention were not exclusively from these states. As president of the host country, Sukarno reveled in the attention the conference brought to Indonesia, positioning it and himself as key power brokers in Southeast Asia and the postcolonial world more generally. Other leaders, however, also put themselves in the diplomatic limelight.
India’s Jawaharlal Nehru was among the more senior leaders present: his attendance nearly three decades previously at the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels was one of the credentials that gave him an intergenerational perspective and flair. Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), similarly garnered attention for representing China’s recent transformation under Mao Zedong, which was still precarious at the time. Zhou survived an assassination attempt on his way to Bandung, orchestrated by the Taiwanese Kuomintang, when the plane on which he was originally scheduled to travel blew up.
Zhou consequently used Bandung as an opportunity to normalize the PRC’s relations with countries in Africa and Asia — indeed, the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954, also known as the Panchsheel Treaty, provided a set of principles that Bandung’s Final Communiqué would replicate. On a separate front, Gamal Nasser of Egypt had recently come to power in 1952 through the Free Officers Movement, and he similarly perceived Bandung as an opportunity for legitimation on the world stage. Only thirty-seven years old, Nasser could stand shoulder to shoulder with a figure like Nehru, who was sixty-five.
These diverse agendas and personal histories contributed to the meeting’s postcolonial aura as well as its underlying tensions. The connections of those in attendance to liberation struggles and to an ethos of anti-colonial revolution and decolonization also imparted a mystique to Bandung. Scholars have criticized this mythology and the misleading impression it gives about what was achieved at the conference. However, it is important to note that the participants themselves actively constructed the myth of Bandung and promoted it for decades after.
Sukarno’s opening address is the ur-text for this willful mythmaking. Part historical séance, part rallying cry, and part vociferous warning, his speech wandered far and wide, invoking the League Against Imperialism meeting of 1927 but also the name of Paul Revere, whose legendary ride had taken place on the same day as the start of the Bandung Conference, 180 years previously. Sukarno called the American Revolution “the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”
Elsewhere in his speech, Sukarno cautioned about the problem of political complacency in the face of ongoing colonialism in Africa and Asia — Sudan and the Gold Coast, which both sent delegations, would not attain independence until 1956 and 1957, respectively — as well as the new dangers posed by the Cold War and the deployment of nuclear weapons. He spoke about how certain parts of Asia and Africa were still “under the lash” and noted that colonialism “appears in many guises.”
Referring to “the weapons of ultimate horror” that had been used against Japan, a conference attendee, Sukarno warned his audience about the danger of their future employment and how “the food that we eat, the water that we drink, yes, even the very air that we breathe, can be contaminated by poisons originating from thousands of miles away.”
Collective Solidarity
For the Indonesian leader, the bulwark against these pending political, technological, and environmental threats was collective solidarity among the delegate countries present and Asia and Africa more generally. Sukarno gestured toward his audience with a repeated refrain of “sisters and brothers,” underlining a sense of rhetorical kinship at the conference.
He subsequently urged those in the room to mobilize what he called the “moral violence of nations” against continued militarism, explaining that while Asia and Africa might lack strategic and technological resources in comparison to emergent Cold War powers, their mutual continents retained a “greater diversity of religions, faiths, and beliefs than in the other continents of the world. . . . Asia and Africa are the classic birthplaces of faiths and ideas, which have spread all over the world.”
Indeed, this interfaith spiritual element was integral to the Bandung Spirit as Sukarno defined it, although discussions of Bandung cite this aspect less frequently, typically understanding the expression in secular terms. He went further to impart his Indonesian vision of the Third World through his country’s motto of “Unity in Diversity” (Bhinneka Tunggal Ika). Sukarno viewed the differences among those present at Bandung as a source of strength, not weakness.
Taken together, Sukarno grasped the opportunity at hand in his speech, and he recognized the challenge of establishing solidarity, which required a calibrated sense of imagination and pragmatism at once. Regarding the latter element, the creation of North and South Vietnam through the 1954 Geneva Accords and the crisis that ensued in Southeast Asia had acted as a catalyst for the Bandung meeting. Europe was still deciding the destiny of Asia from afar — a neocolonial approach that regional leaders like Sukarno sought to undermine.
The founding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in February 1955 further marked the renewed encroachment of former imperial powers like Britain and France into Asia and the Middle East, as well as the United States as part of its policy of containment. States like the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Turkey that belonged to these organizations sent delegations to Bandung, adding an underlying sense of suspicion and uncertainty. Turkey had also joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) several years prior in 1952.
There was no innocence at Bandung. That said, the Final Communiqué endorsed at the end of the meeting did map out a shared vision of the future, however provisional. It foregrounded agreements to foster political, economic, and cultural cooperation, while granting special attention to the problem of apartheid in South Africa and the rights of the Palestinians. The communiqué concluded with ten principles, known as Dasa Sila Bandung, which reflected elements of the Panchsheel Treaty, including respect for sovereignty and noninterference, and the UN Charter, including respect for human rights and a commitment to settle disputes through peaceful means.
Unresolved tensions therefore remained in the final document between the rights of the individual, the sovereign rights of the nation-state, and the aspiration for a broader Third World solidarity. The communiqué also concluded by recommending a second meeting — a test that would soon expose the latent limitations already present in 1955 and the development of unanticipated factors in the years that followed.
Reinventions of Bandung
Sukarno was not the only political leader or intellectual invested in the Bandung myth. The novelist Richard Wright was an observer at the conference and wrote the most influential account of its proceedings, The Color Curtain, published in 1956. Wright was no stranger to the politics of decolonization, having visited the Gold Coast in 1953 through an invitation from Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of what was still a British colony at the time.
Wright’s work of reportage, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, offered a frank and circumspect perspective about the prospects for the country that would become independent Ghana, as well as his own relationship with the African continent. In contrast, The Color Curtain is more celebratory in tone. Wright dwelled on the united racial front that the meeting put forward and the future possibilities of Afro-Asian solidarity.
Indeed, his choice of title posed an alternative to the better-known Iron Curtain that separated the Soviet Bloc from Western Europe. It also genuflected toward W. E. B. Du Bois’s remark in The Souls of Black Folk, published decades earlier in 1903, that the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. Wright’s project therefore placed Bandung against a dominant US foreign policy framework, as well as within a genealogy of black American thought.
The issue of racial justice was not limited to Wright’s contribution. Moses Kotane, the secretary general of the South African Communist Party, returned to apartheid South Africa after attending Bandung as an unofficial delegate, enthusiastic about the support the anti-apartheid struggle had garnered. In his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in September 1956, James Baldwin noted how Alioune Diop, editor of Présence africaine, referred to the Parisian event as a “second Bandung,” and how Senegal’s Léopold Senghor invoked the “spirit of Bandung” as a source of inspiration for a black cultural “renaissance.”
Elsewhere Frantz Fanon wrote in the pages of El Moudjahid, the periodical of Algeria’s Front de libération nationale (FLN), of the “Bandung pact” — in contrast to the Warsaw Pact — which symbolized “the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation.” In 1963, during his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in Detroit, Malcolm X similarly referred to Bandung as a moment when Asian and African nations came together against their common enemy: “the white man.”
The afterlives of Bandung were not purely symbolic however. A new set of institutions and networks was established in the decade that followed. Indeed, though the majority of countries at Bandung were Asian, the destination of Afro-Asianism proved to be Africa.
Nasser sought to build upon the momentum of Bandung by founding the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) at a conference in Cairo in December 1957 and January 1958. As a historical and political crossroads between Africa and Asia, Egypt remained committed to the idea of Afro-Asianism and Third Worldism, with AAPSO being central to this aim.
On the cultural front, the Afro-Asian Writers Association held its inaugural meeting in 1958 in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan. This arts organization sought to counterbalance the effects of Western acculturation through the promotion of national literatures in the former colonial world. It held meetings across Africa and Asia and published the journal Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings.
The Non-Aligned Movement
Larger in scale and representation, the most important endeavor that came in the wake of Bandung was the founding of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in the Yugoslav capital, Belgrade, in 1961. Though clearly drawing from the initiative of Bandung, it also marked a break from its predecessor’s political configuration due to the exclusion of the PRC. During the intervening period, tensions had resurfaced between India and China, exacerbated by the Sino-Soviet split and later resulting in the Sino-Indian War of 1962.
At Belgrade, former Bandung participants like Nehru and Nasser were joined by Ghana’s Nkrumah and the host country’s Josip Broz Tito. Zhou was notably absent. The NAM benefited from the wave of decolonization that swept across Africa during the early 1960s, though these growing divisions spurred an acrimony that ultimately sabotaged the proposed “Second Bandung” to be held outside of Algiers in 1965, canceled only days before its scheduled occurrence.
The upshot is that there was no single Third World project. There were many Third World projects, many alignments, and many nonalignments. Indeed, it is important to stress that NAM members did, in fact, have relations and agreements of various sorts with the United States, the PRC, and the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, following the Tricontinental Conference in Havana in 1966, Cuba played an indispensable role in defining Third Worldism through the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), adding yet another dimension to the politics of the majority world.
We cannot attribute this wide range of institutions and political formations entirely to Bandung. Yet many did reference Bandung as a point of orientation and origin — a politics of citation that has continued into the present.
Hijacking Bandung
For understandable reasons, the symbolism of Bandung receded after 1965, though without disappearing completely. The diplomatic failures of Bandung — including those already mentioned, as well as the advent of the Vietnam War — contributed to this decline. In many ways, this trend reflected a general shift away from the postcolonial optimism that animated the 1950s and the early 1960s as Cold War interventions, neocolonial extractivism, coup d’états, and one-party states came to define the politics of Africa and Asia in the decades after.
However, since the end of the Cold War, the Bandung moment has reemerged once more as a key historical reference point. Bandung has been cited as a baseline for the post-2000 economic relationships between the PRC and its African partners, while some have framed the BRICS group as part of a non-Western, counterhegemonic genealogy that descends from Bandung. This latter interpretation ignores the inconvenient fact that it was a British economist for Goldman Sachs who originally coined the BRICS acronym.
These recent allusions to Bandung constitute a hijacking of its memory, providing a gloss of Afro-Asianism that emphasizes economic solidarity geared toward global capital from and for the Global South. Having said that, we should remember that Bandung was no more a gathering of liberal democracies than the BRICS summits. The 1955 conference was an assembly of elite figures, all of whom were men and a number of whom represented authoritarian states. They were all looking out for their own interests in different ways.
Returning to Bandung after seventy years requires us to exercise critical judgment without being overly dismissive. Some decolonial theorists have compared Bandung to the French Revolution, which is a wildly overblown analogy. More reasonably, legal scholars have drawn parallels with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which also affirmed state sovereignty, while some historians have argued that we should see Bandung as a counterpoint to the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, which validated the European colonization of Africa.
Other scholars have been entirely dismissive toward Bandung and the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity generally, which neglects the most significant point raised by the meeting as expressed in Sukarno’s opening address — namely, the common history of Western imperial aggression shared by both continents and the bond that history provided.
Such present-day cynicism, which comes primarily from US academics, largely concentrates on examples of racism between Asians and Africans. True, one need only read the reportage of V. S. Naipaul to grasp the existence of anti-black racism among some prominent Asian intellectuals. However, it is historically and politically inaccurate to overemphasize the internal frictions of Afro-Asianism.
More damningly, such skepticism has the effect of reinstating an intransigent imperial worldview centered on racial and continental differences that Pan-Africanism, Pan-Asianism, and Afro-Asianism struggled against. A political imagination of human liberation is lost in the process.
It is unusual for a single event, especially a diplomatic meeting, to develop the kind of mythology that has grown up around Bandung. Still, for a fleeting moment, the Asian-African Conference sought to address the future of humanity. It lay at the confluence of competing narratives and ideas about the world, where the ambitions and aspirations of a handful of people, representing many, confronted the forces of history over which they had little control, but nonetheless felt they had a moral obligation to address.