ABSTRACT
Bandung served as a moment of postcolonial spectacle. It inhabited a historic intersection of the end of empires, and new postcolonial possibilities. The symbolism of Bandung slipped after 1965, if not quite disappearing completely. The diplomatic failures of Bandung contributed to this decline. It reflected a shift away from postcolonial optimism as Cold War intervention, underdevelopment, coup d’etats, and one-party states came to define the politics of Africa and Asia. Yet, since the end of the Cold War, the Bandung moment has re-emerged as a historical locus for re-chronologizing the past and reframing the present. The refashioning of Bandung appears less like mythmaking and more like a hijacking, providing a gloss of Afro-Asianism that emphasizes economic solidarity geared toward global capital from, and for, the Global South. Returning to Bandung after seventy years, therefore, requires critical judiciousness that dispels the notion of romanticism while not resorting to outright dismissiveness.
KEYWORDS
Bandung, Postcolonial, the Cold War, Afro-Asianism, Nehru, Sukarno,
Seventy years ago in April 1955, twenty-nine delegations representing countries in Africa and Asia convened in the city of Bandung, Indonesia, with the assignment of nothing less than addressing the future of the world. The Asian-African Conference, as it was formally known, has since entered the realm of Third World history and myth, at once celebrated for the collective sense of solidarity it generated during the week of April 18 to 24—a political feeling that became known as the Bandung Spirit—but also criticized for its limited effects in relation to its stated principles outlined in the meeting’s Final Communiqué. Revisiting Bandung, as it has been commonly referred to in shorthand, is important for understanding the political opportunities of the time as well as the cul-de-sacs that existed, which still pose challenges in the present.[1]
There are good reasons for the emphasizing the historic nature of the Bandung Conference. Though 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 highlighting 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 involved signatories from Africa and Asia like Ethiopia, Liberia, and Turkey.
Still, much of Africa and Asia remained under imperial rule in 1945. The leaders who gathered in Bandung ten years after the UN’s establishment 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. The decade between 1945 and 1955 had witnessed the launching of liberation struggles in countries like Kenya with the Mau Mau Rebellion in 1952, the Cuban Revolution in 1952, and the Algeria Revolution in 1954. After decades of activism, the struggle in South Africa faced a new iteration of white supremacy with the program of apartheid initiated in 1948. Other places like Indochina had recently experienced decolonization with the defeat of the French in 1954. Meanwhile, the Korean Peninsula sustained a Cold War deadlock following its internecine war between 1950 and 1953.[2]
The delegates at Bandung did not address all these issues. However, there was a clear awareness of the significance of global decolonization, the novel dangers presented by the Cold War, as well as the common bond of a shared history of European aggression among those present at the meeting. The Bandung Conference inhabited a historic intersection defined by the ending of empires, the emergence of the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the possibilities that a new postcolonial order presented. These competing elements would define the early fate of the meeting as well as its revival in our current political moment.
1. Between History and Myth
Bandung served as a moment of postcolonial spectacle. In our present-day parlance, it was a quintessential public relations move. Many of the leaders who attended would achieve global prominence. Journalists and especially photographers were omnipresent, creating a rich visual archive of the meeting involving airport arrivals, delegate speeches, working groups, motorcades, crowd-lined streets, and banquet dinners. Though private discussions were certainly held, Bandung was not a meeting held in secret. It was a coming out party for the Third World.
Sponsored by five countries—Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Burma (Myanmar), and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)—the political figures who garnered the most attention were not exclusively from these nation-states. As president of the host country, Sukarno reveled in the attention the conference brought to Indonesia, positioning himself and his country as a key power broker in Southeast Asia and the postcolonial world more generally. Other leaders, however, also placed themselves in the diplomatic limelight as means of leveraging their country’s place and power.
Jawaharlal Nehru of India, for example, was among the more senior leaders present, with his long-ago attendance at the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels being among the unique credentials that gave him an intergenerational perspective and charisma.[3] 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—a situation that placed certain demands on Zhou to utilize Bandung as an opportunity for normalizing the PRC’s relations with countries in Africa and Asia.[4] Indeed, the Sino-Indian Agreement of 1954, also known as the Panchsheel Treaty, provided a set of principles, including non-interference and respect for sovereignty, that would be replicated in Bandung’s Final Communiqué. Not least was the presence of Gamal Nasser of Egypt, who had recently come to power in 1952 through the Free Officers Movement and who perceived Bandung as an opportunity for legitimation on the world stage. Only thirty-seven years old, Nasser could stand shoulder to shoulder with someone like Nehru, who was sixty-five at the time.
These differences in agendas and personal histories contributed to tensions at the meeting. Their respective connections to liberation struggles, and to an ethos of anti-colonial revolution and decolonization, have equally imparted a mystique to Bandung. Scholars have criticized this popular mythology and its misleading effects about what was achieved at the conference.[5] However, it is important to note that the participants themselves actively constructed the mythos of Bandung at the meeting and promoted it in different ways for decades after. Like conjoined twins, fact and fiction were born at once.[6]
Sukarno’s opening address is the urtext for this unreconciled, yet purposeful, opposition between realism and imagination. Part historical séance, part rallying cry, and part vociferous warning, his speech wandered far and wide invoking the League Against Imperialism meeting mentioned before, but also Paul Revere, whose legendary ride took place on the same day, 180 years prior in 1775, as the start of the Bandung meeting. Sukarno called the American Revolution “the first successful anti-colonial war in history.”[7] 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 (Ghana), 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 “[s]ome parts [of Asia and Africa] still labour under the lash” and how colonialism “appears in many guises.” He cited “the weapons of ultimate horror” that had been used and would likely be used again. Gesturing to the invisible and lasting dangers of nuclear fallout, Sukarno also warned that “[t]he 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.”
The defense against these pending political, technological, and environmental threats was collective solidarity amongst the delegate countries present, and Asia and Africa more generally. Sukarno called upon his audience with a repeated refrain of “Sisters and Brothers,” underlining a sense of rhetorical kinship at the conference. He urged those in the room to mobilize what he called the “Moral Violence of Nations” against continued militarism, explaining that while Asia and Africa may 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 is an integral part of the Bandung Spirit as understood by Sukarno, if an aspect less cited, with the expression typically understood 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.
In these rhetorical and realpolitik ways, Sukarno served as a willful participant in the grounding and mythmaking of Bandung alike. He understood the sense of political opportunity at hand, and he recognized the challenge of establishing solidarity, which required a calibrated sense of imagination and pragmatism at once. The creation of North and South Vietnam through the 1954 Geneva Accords and the crisis that ensued in Southeast Asia in particular acted as a catalyst for the Bandung meeting. Europe was still deciding the destiny of Asia from afar—a neocolonial approach which regional leaders like Sukarno sought to resist and undermine. The founding of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) in September 1954 and the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), better known as the Baghdad Pact, 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. Member states of these organizations like the Philippines, Thailand, Pakistan, and Turkey sent delegations to Bandung, adding an underlying sense of uncertainty. Turkey had already joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) several years prior in 1952.
Summarily put, there was no political innocence at Bandung. That said, the Final Communiqué decided upon by the end of the meeting did map out a shared vision of the future, however provisional. Agreements to foster political, economic, and cultural cooperation were foregrounded. Special attention was also granted to the problem of apartheid in South Africa and the rights of Palestinians. The communiqué concluded with ten principles, known as Dasa Sila Bandung, which reflected elements of the Panchsheel Treaty, including respect for sovereignty and non-interference as noted earlier, and the UN Charter, which was mentioned by name, 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 nation-states and the aspiration for a transnational Third World solidarity. The communiqué also concluded by recommending a second meeting—a test which exposed the latent limitations then present in 1955 and the development of unanticipated factors in the years that followed.
2. Re-Inventions of Bandung
Sukarno was not the only political leader or intellectual invested in the mythos of Bandung. The novelist Richard Wright was among the prominent observers at the event, writing its most influential account, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, published in 1956.[8] 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 the late colony at the time. His subsequent work of reportage, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos published in 1954, offered a frank assessment, revealing a circumspect perspective about the prospects for Ghana as well as his own relationship with the African continent.[9]
In contrast, The Color Curtain is more celebratory in tone. Wright dwelled on the united racial front positioned by the meeting and the 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.[10] Wright’s project, therefore, placed Bandung against a dominant U.S. foreign policy framework, as well as within a genealogy of Black American thought.
The issue of racial justice raised at the meeting was not, of course, limited to an American worldview. Moses Kotane, the Secretary General of the South African Communist Party, returned to apartheid South Africa after attending Bandung as an unofficial delegate, enthusiastic with the support the anti-apartheid struggle had garnered at the event.[11] In his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in September 1956, American author James Baldwin wrote how Alioune Diop, editor of Présence africaine, referred to the Parisian event as a “second Bandung,” and how Léopold Senghor invoked the “spirit of Bandung” as a source for inspiring a Black cultural “renaissance.”[12] In the pages of El Moudjahid, the periodical of Algeria’s Front de libération nationale (FLN), Frantz Fanon wrote of the “Bandung pact”—a 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.”[13] In 1963, during his “Message to the Grass Roots” speech in Detroit, Malcolm X similarly cited Bandung as a moment when Asian and African nations came together against their common enemy: “the white man.”[14]
The afterlives of Bandung were not purely symbolic, though. A new set of institutions and networks were established in the decade that followed. Indeed, though the majority of countries at Bandung were Asian, the destination of Afro-Asianism was primarily 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. Elsewhere, the Afro-Asian Writers Association held its inaugural meeting in 1958 in Tashkent, Soviet Uzbekistan, marking a venture that sought to decolonize the effects of Western acculturation through the promotion of national literatures in the former colonial world.[15]
Arguably the most important endeavor in the wake of Bandung was the founding of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM) in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1961.[16] 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 1962’s Sino-Indian War. At Belgrade, Bandung participants like Nehru and Nasser were joined by Ghana’s Nkrumah and the host country’s Josef Broz Tito. Zhou was notably absent. These growing divisions spurred an acrimony that ultimately sabotaged a proposed “Second Bandung” to be held outside of Algiers in 1965, cancelled only days before its scheduled occurrence.[17]
The upshot is that there was no single Third World project. There were many Third World projects, many alignments, and many non-alignments. 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 became indispensable in defining Third Worldism through the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL), adding yet another geography and dimension to the politics of the majority world.[18] This diversity of institutions and political formations cannot all be attributed to Bandung. However, many did reference Bandung as a point of orientation and origin—a politics of citation that has continued into the present.
3. Misusing Bandung
For understandable reasons, the symbolism of Bandung slipped after 1965, if not quite disappearing completely. The diplomatic failures of Bandung—those already mentioned, but also the advent of the Second 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 with elements of Cold War intervention, underdevelopment, coup d’etats, and one-party states coming to define the politics of Africa and Asia in the decades after. Yet, since the end of the Cold War, the Bandung moment has re-emerged once more as a historical locus for re-chronologizing the past and the reframing the present.
China-Africa relations since 2000 have constituted one development that has cited Bandung as a baseline for the historical connections between the PRC and its African partners. In a similar vein, the BRICS group, which was originally comprised of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (hence the term “BRICS” drawn from the first letter of each) and which now includes Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates, has been perceived as part of non-Western, counter-hegemonic genealogy that descends from Bandung. Notably, this interpretation forgets that the inconvenient fact that the “BRICS” concept was originally coined by Jim O’Neill, a British economist for Goldman Sachs.
These recent examples of refashioning of Bandung appear less like mythmaking and more like a hijacking, providing a gloss of Afro-Asianism that emphasizes economic solidarity geared toward global capital from, and for, the Global South. From a political standpoint, BRICS is a problematic conglomeration of largely one-party states, authoritarian regimes, nativist democracies, and unconcealed monarchies. That said, Bandung was not a gathering of liberal democracies either. It must not be lost that Bandung also involved an assembly of elites, all of whom were men, who also looked out for their interests in different ways.
Returning to Bandung after seventy years, therefore, requires a certain level of critical judiciousness that dispels the accretion of romanticism while not resorting to outright dismissiveness. For example, there are decolonial theorists who have compared Bandung to the French Revolution, which is overstated.[19] More reasonably, legal scholars have situated Bandung in relation to the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), which also affirmed state sovereignty, while some historians have perceived Bandung as a counterpoint to the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), which validated Europe’s colonization of Africa.[20]
Other historians and 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 found in Sukarno’s opening address—namely, the common history of Western imperial aggression shared by both continents and the bond that provided. This present-day cynicism, primarily from American academics, is largely centered on examples of racism between Asians and Africans.[21] One need read no further than the reportage of V.S. Naipaul to grasp the fact of anti-Black racism among some prominent Asian intellectuals. However, to cherry-pick and overstress the frictions internal to Afro-Asianism is to re-marginalize a vibrant Cold War political imagination that emerged from comparative liberation thought and which stridently resisted the European colonial logics of a discrete “Africa” and a discrete “Asia.”
This continental logic still endures, unjustifiably from an intellectual standpoint, in the area studies model that continues at colleges and universities around the world—an academic imagination that descends from an imperial imagination.[22] The best scholarship that has emerged on the Bandung moment over the past decade is that which has sought to decenter the event, but not abandon it, by highlighting the different ways that activists, intellectuals, writers, and other ordinary people have carried on its legacy in direct and indirect ways.[23] The polysemic quality of Bandung guarantees that it will continue to be a source of debate for some time. It is typical for nations to have founding myths. It is unusual, though, for single events, especially diplomatic meetings, to develop the kind of mythology that Bandung has.
For a fleeting moment, the Asian-African Conference sought to address the future of humanity. By the same stroke, it was a profoundly human occasion. Bandung 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 they had little control over, but nonetheless felt they had a moral obligation to address.
Christopher J. Lee has published twelve books, including Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010, rev. 2nd edition 2019), Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014), Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism (2015), Kwame Anthony Appiah (2021), and Alex La Guma: The Exile Years, 1966-1985 (2024). He is currently the Lead Editor of the journal Safundi.
[1] For books on the Bandung Conference and its legacies, see Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019 [2010]); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2022 [2007]); See Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, eds., Bandung Revisited: The Legacy of the 1955 Asian-African Conference for International Order (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008); Wildan Sena Utama, Vision for the Future: An Intellectual History of the 1955 Bandung Conference (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2025).
[2] For discussions of decolonization and the global Cold War, see, for example, Lorenz M. Lüthi, Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); and Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[3] For recent work on Nehru’s internationalism, see Swapna Kona Nayudu, The Nehru Years: An International History of Indian Non-Alignment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025); and Taylor C. Sherman, Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).
[4] Chen Jian, Zhou Enlai: A Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2024), chapter 18.
[5] Robert Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong),” Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 4, no. 2 (2013): 261-288.
[6] Christopher J. Lee, “Return of the Event: Bandung and the Concept of the Conference,” in Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, ed. Christopher J. Lee (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2019).
[7] Sukarno’s text is available online and has been included in numerous conference paper anthologies, including: Asian-African Conference, Selected Documents of the Bandung Conference; Texts of Selected Speeches and Final Communique of the Asian-African Conference, Bandung, Indonesia, April 18-24, 1955 (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1955).
[8] Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1995 [1956]).
[9] Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954).
[10] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (Chicago, IL: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1903).
[11] Brian Bunting, Moses Kotane: South African Revolutionary (Bellville, South Africa: Mayibuye Books, 1998 [1975]).
[12] James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (New York: Vintage, 1993 [1961]), 14, 23.
[13] Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1988 [1964]), 146.
[14] Malcolm X, Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1994), 5.
[15] Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 3 (2012): 563-583.
[16] Jürgen Dinkel, The Non-Aligned Movement: Genesis, Organization and Politics (1927-1992) (Leiden: Brill, 2018).
[17] Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), chapter 5.
[18] Anne Garland Mahler, From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
[19] Quỳnh N. Phạm and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Meanings of Bandung: Postcolonial Orders and Decolonial Visions (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
[20] Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah, eds., Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
[21] See, for example, Antoinette Burton, Africa in the Indian Imagination: Race and the Politics of Postcolonial Citation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
[22] Martin W. Lewis and Kären E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997); and David Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004).
[23] See, for example, Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis, eds., The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2022).
