Bandung, a historical moment of decolonization
Bandung-Belgrade-La Havana Conference – November 2022
Universitas Airlangga Press, Surabaya
Gustave Massiah
20-08-2022
The Bandung Conference, in April 1955, was a historical moment of decolonization. When the heads of state of the first independent countries of Africa and Asia decided to meet, at the invitation of Indonesian President Sukarno, they did not imagine how emblematic this meeting would become for decolonization. Bandung was to be a moment of a movement that was to become part of the decolonization process, the emergence of a Global South. The Conference will define an orientation that will deepen with the progress of decolonization, that of non-alignment as a step in the reorganization of the world. These two proposals, that of the Global South and that of non-alignment, are nowadays very topical and some have called it Bandung 2.
What happened in Bandung in 1955? We have many theses and works but few narratives of the Conference. We have one direct report, by Richard Wright. Editions Syllepse has just published Richard Wright’s important book, Bandung, chronique d’un monde en décolonisation, with a remarkable preface by Amzat Boukari-Yabara[1].
Richard Wright is a black American writer who lived from 1908 to 1960. He was a communist for part of his life and was constantly engaged against racism and for pan-Africanism. In 1955, he read a newspaper insert announcing the first meeting in Bandung of the first heads of state of the independent countries of Africa and Asia. He decided to go there; he was a direct witness and one of the journalists who followed and reported this important event.
Richard Wright understands that this is not only a meeting of the independent Heads of State but also the first summit of the colored peoples in which only whites are not invited. He realizes the close relationship between several factors: decolonization, racism, affiliations and colors, religions and beliefs.
The book is a very interesting report on the Conference. The journalist takes the lead; he quotes extracts from the speeches of the participating heads of state and testifies on the emotion that reigned there. Sukarno, President of Indonesia and host of the Conference, opens the session by declaring: This is the first international conference of the peoples of color in the history of mankind … For many generations, our peoples have been the voiceless of this world. Norodom Sihanouk, King of Cambodia, calls for the solidarity of the African and Asian peoples that will shake the borders that separate the communist and non-communist worlds. Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon, affirms that he wants to apply to the problem of the present world the traditional values for the respect of life and for the dignity of the human person. Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, declares that we are facing a crucial issue, the survival of humanity… We have been under foreign influence, it is not surprising that we feel so close. Quoted by Wright are phrases from representatives of Ghana, Iraq, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Thailand, Lebanon, Japan. Wright is struck by the importance of references to race and religion in all the interventions, which reflect reactions to the West’s rejection of the values of the countries that had been conquered.
Richard Wright offers a very fine analysis of the role of the two people who made the Conference possible: Pandit Nehru and Zhou EnLai. The restraint of the communists was noted at Bandung. Zhou EnLai was very present and very open. The agreement between India and China ensured the unity of Asia without which there would have been no conference. The Gold Coast, now Ghana, is the bearer of Nkrumahism, which will open up new avenues for Pan-Africanism.
Richard Wright presents and discusses the final communiqué of the conference. He emphasizes its moderation and its openings. He calls for a future in which the two spiritual foundations, Western and Eastern rationalism, would become one. The question posed at Bandung was not one of taking power; those who were there represented governments that had already taken power and were wondering what to do with it. The question posed at Bandung was How shall the human race organize itself?
The book begins with an excellent preface by Amzat Boukari-Yaraba. He recalls the history and complex personality of Richard Wright. He tells how one can be black, American, communist and a writer. He is part of the road to decolonization and he perceives and understands the importance of Bandung and the trial of colonialism. Amzat Boukari-Yaraba explains how the Bandung conference makes a de-occidentalization of the world possible. Richard Wright published Black Power in 1954; in 1956, he published his report on the Bandung Conference under the title The Color Curtain, which was prefaced by Gunnar Myrdal[2]. Amzat Boukari-Yaraba also quotes Malcolm X and his project to organize a Bandung in Harlem. He quotes Richard Wright who explains: color is not my home, I am a human being before I am an American; I am a human being before I am a Black and if I deal with racial problems, it is because these problems were created without my consent, without my permission. I am opposed to any racial definition. The reason I write about racial issues is precisely to end racial definitions.
The continuations of the Bandung Conference
The extensions of Bandung have been very present and have become very topical today with the need to return to decolonization and the assumption that decolonization is not over. The discussion on Bandung continues in particular in Africa, in Asia and has widened to Latin America from the Tricontinental[3], the review of the OSPAAL (Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America) directed by Vijay Prashad. In Asia, the network The Rise of Asia, animated by Darwis Khudori[4] runs a Bandung Spirit Book Series and organizes numerous international conferences. In Africa, Souleymane Bachir Diagne[5] indicates that the moment in history that marks decolonization is the Bandung conference, which projects the history of the world to come, a world of horizontal relations, the historical moment of the postcolonial. Immanuel Wallerstein proposes to move away from European universalism[6], which went from colonization to the right of interference, to build a universal universalism, based on the Bandung model.
The Bandung Conference was extended by the Non-Aligned Movement. The Non-Aligned Movement does not sum up decolonization, even if it is significant. The history of anti-colonial struggles begins with resistance to colonial conquests. Peoples have resisted colonial domination in a thousand ways. The right to self-determination of peoples was affirmed at the end of the First World War. An international political movement of decolonization was built. The Congress of the Peoples of the Orient, in Baku in 1920, proposed a strategic alliance between the national liberation movements and the workers’ movements. The Congress of Oppressed Peoples, in Brussels in 1927, put forward the right of peoples to self-determination and national independence.
From 1945 to 1955, there were colonial massacres and the first independences in Africa and Asia. In 1955, the meeting of the first 29 independent states of Africa and Asia took place in Bandung (Indonesia). They discussed the continuation of decolonization, the risks of a third world war and non-alignment, the development policies of the new states, and the debates at the United Nations.
In 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. He faced a joint military aggression by Israel, France and Great Britain. Despite their military success, the three countries were forced to withdraw following international pressure, including from the United States and the Soviet Union. The French and British colonial powers were weakened. Nasser’s Egypt became the spokesperson in the Arab world for the decolonization movements. The Third World designates the countries of the South excluded from the world political decision. A third world public opinion supports them.
Prefigured by Bandung, the Non-Aligned Movement was created in 1961 in Belgrade; it contributed to the evolution of geopolitical balances. After Bandung, decolonization spread with Ghana in 1957, Guinea in 1958, Algeria in 1962, the Portuguese colonies in 1975, the American defeat in Vietnam in 1975, the end of apartheid in 1990. The enlargement of the movement to Latin America was reinforced by the Cuban revolution in 1959 and the preparation of the Tricontinental meeting in Havana in 1966. Mehdi Ben Barka, one of the initiators of the Tricontinental, was assassinated in Paris in 1965 and Che Guevara was assassinated in Bolivia in 1967.
The Tricontinental extended Bandung to the countries of the South, a new representation of the decolonized countries. The American independences had concerned states formed by the former colons; the new struggles in Latin America will call themselves « national liberation struggles ». Without forgetting the two great moments of decolonization, the Haitian revolution which was victorious against Napoleon’s troops in 1804, and in 1905, the Mexican revolution led by Pancho Vila and Emiliano Zapata.
In 1973, the Non-Aligned Movement, meeting in Algiers, adopted the New World Economic Order which was voted at the United Nations in 1974. It proposes the control of raw materials, the financing of development, industrialization, the control of technologies and the control of multinationals. At the end of 1973, following the war between Israel and the Arab countries, the Gulf States reduced their production. The price of oil increased fourfold. In 1979, the Islamic revolution in Iran led to a further doubling of prices. The creation in 1975 of the G5, which will become the G6, then the G7, organized the response: indebting the countries of the South, imposing structural adjustment plans, implementing neoliberalism, controlling the South and accentuating the crisis of the Soviet bloc. The response by the non-aligned countries was made difficult by the division between oil-producing and non-oil-producing countries.
Decolonization was marked by some emblematic struggles that mobilized public opinion. Let us mention in particular the struggles of the Algerian and Vietnamese peoples against French colonialism and then against the armed intervention of the United States, and of South Africa against apartheid. The struggle of the Palestinian people is part of the emblematic liberation struggles. The support of a part of the international public opinion has been illustrated by the tribunals of opinion, notably the Russell Tribunal for Vietnam in 1966 and against the dictatorships in Latin America in 1967, and the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal created at the initiative of Lelio Basso in Rome. The Charter for the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Peoples adopted in Algiers in 1976 serves as a reference. The Russell Tribunal on Palestine organized, from 2010 to 2013, five sessions in Barcelona, London, Cape Town, New York and Brussels.
The Non-Aligned Movement is expanding but it will lose its sharpness[7]. In 2012, it includes 120 states, which represent nearly 55% of the world’s population. The Non-Aligned Movement refuses, at first, to follow the guidelines of the Washington Consensus and the Bretton Woods institutions (International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the World Trade Organization (WTO)). After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Non-Aligned were confronted with the definition of Non-Alignment. Western countries designated a new enemy in the name of the clash of civilizations: Islam. The wars in Afghanistan, the two wars in Iraq, the destruction of Libya, the Israeli interventions, the troubled game of the Gulf monarchies, will give breath to jihadism and reinforce the discrimination against Muslims in Europe and the United States.
The alterglobalist movement asserts itself as the anti-systemic movement of neoliberalism. From 1980, it put forward the refusal of debt and structural adjustment plans. From 1989, it asserts that international law must not be subordinated to business law. From 2000, he organized the World Social Forums. In 2008, the financial crisis, followed from 2011 by insurrections in several countries, opens a new period. Neoliberalism begins an austeritarian mutation, combining austerity and securitarianism. Reactionary, identity-based and extreme right-wing movements are strengthening in response to the new forms of contestation of the social movements of wage earners and peasants, feminist emancipation and ecology. In the new movements, the anti-racist and indigenous peoples movements refer directly to decolonization. The crisis of the pandemic and the climate opens a new crisis of civilization. The alterglobalist movement is confronted with a necessary renewal.
The ideological debates of decolonization continue. On the strategic question of racism and discrimination, the Non-Aligned Movement was very active at the world conference in Durban in 2001 against racism, discrimination, xenophobia and intolerance. The debates were stormy (and passionate), especially on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, yet the final report states We recall that the Holocaust must never be forgotten, condemns in its 61st point the rise of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in various parts of the world, and affirms in its 63rd point We are concerned about the fate of the Palestinian people living under foreign occupation. We recognize the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and the establishment of an independent state, as well as the right to security of all states in the region, including Israel, and call upon all states to support the peace process and to bring it to a speedy conclusion. Durban II in Geneva, in 2009, links racism and discrimination, in their current forms, as a legacy of colonization.
The Non-Aligned Movement was not just a conglomeration of states; it also contributed to the creation of a world public opinion that is not limited to those of the dominant countries and media. This global public opinion, supported by determined social and citizen movements, supports the struggles against domination, colonization and apartheid. It reminds us that a people that oppresses another is not a free people. Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, wrote as early as 1955 about Europe: « Colonization degraded the colonizer. We feel the rise of barbarism in our civilization. Decolonization is a step on the road to emancipation. Zhou EnLai had declared in Bandung that States want their independence, nations want their liberation, peoples want revolution. He repeated this statement at the United Nations General Assembly following Bandung.
We are confronted with three major global strategic questions that call for international solidarity. That of the geopolitical dimension of the global crisis, of multipolarity versus bipolarity, of peace and wars. More than a billion people live in areas of armed conflict. The contradiction is open between manipulations and interventions on the one hand, and the new cycle of struggles and revolutions on the other. That of international law and the United Nations which are undermined by the system of unequal treatment in relation to values and principles[8]. Finally, there is the question of unfinished decolonization. The first phase of decolonization, that of the independence of States, is nearly complete. We have been able to measure its importance, contradictions and limits, especially since neoliberalism can be characterized as a form of recolonization. The second phase of decolonization, that of the liberation of nations and peoples, is beginning. It questions the nature of states and democracy. We are at the articulation of the two phases of decolonization, that of the independence of States, which is not yet complete, and that of the definition of new possibilities, which is just beginning.
[1] Richard Wright, Bandung, Chronique d’un monde en décolonisation, Préface d’Amzat Boukari-Yabara, Paris, 2021, Ed Syllepse
[2] Richard Wright, Black Power: Three books from exile: Black Power, The Colour Curtain, and White man: Listen ! New York, Harper perennial modern classics, 2008
[3] https://thetricontinental.org/fr
[4] Darwis Khudori, Bandung legacy and global future : new insights and emerging forces, New Delhi, 2018, Ed Aakar Book,
[5] Souleymane Bachir Diagne, https://www.sciencespo.fr/fr/actualites/souleymane-bachir-diagne-philosophe/ et aussi Babel après Bandung, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmusHmGi_Us
[6] Immanuel Wallerstein, L’universalisme européen, de la colonisation au droit d’ingérence, Ed Demopolis, Paris, 2008
[7] Philippe Braillard, Mythe et réalité du non-alignement, Graduate Institute Genève, 2015
[8] Nils Andersson, Le droit à l’autodétermination, Revue Les Possibles N°15, déc 2017