April 24, 1955: Heads of state of African and Asian nations convene at the Bandung Conference.
Sixty years ago in Bandung, Indonesia, representatives from twenty-nine countries across Asia and Africa gathered to discuss their collective future in the turmoil of the Cold War and in the aftermath of, for many of these nations, the end of formal colonialism. Its principal organizers were Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and India. Also present were colossal figures of Third World decolonization and anti-imperialist efforts, to name a few: Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Thi Binh, Nelson Mandela, Ben Bella, U Nu, and Indonesia’s own Sukarno. Zhou Enlai of China was also present at the conference, where he alternately worried and placated other leaders about his country’s intentions.
Many of these leaders and the populations they claimed to represent constituted the whole of the national social and class hierarchy - that included the interests of the wealthy bourgeoisie, the peasants, the workers, the landlords and industrial elites. Even across those countries that gathered in Bandung, often the only common factor was a shared history of colonialism and anticolonialist struggle. Their leaders included self-described Marxists and conservatives and all else in between. Sukarno acknowledged this when he declared that the countries were united not by “skins” or “religion” but by “a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears… by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world.” Their principal goals, it was decided, would be to promote universal human rights and national sovereignty, to combat neocolonialism, to replace war, arms proliferation, and coercion with peaceful arbitration as the principal means of international intercourse. There were also considerations of spurring economic development and attaining economic independence through coordination.
The United States, naturally wary of a conference of Third World leaders with an independent agenda, did not officially send a representative. Adam Clayton Powell, a black representative in the U.S. Congress, was in attendance against the advice of the State Department. He noted that the conference was “anti-American foreign policy” and that it would “become an anti-white movement unless a narrow-minded and unskilled American foreign policy is revised.” Another American, Richard Wright, was in attendance; in 1956 he published The Color Curtain, an account of the conference, and observed:
What had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world.Wright’s sentiment, and the sentiment of many intellectuals in the optimistic early years of postcolonialism, gave rise to a phrase: the “spirit of Bandung” - a blunt rejection of economic and cultural marginalization by the world’s powerful nations, plus a great faith in global institutions like the United Nations, and great faith in the potential for international coordination. Substantial and irreconcilable rifts divided these leaders and their national interests not long after, but much that transpired in these countries in the years following 1955, including conferences in Cairo (1961), Belgrade (1961), and Havana (1966), social reform attempts, postcolonial developmental efforts, etc., followed in the “spirit of Bandung.”