Chapter 8 - Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo

Summary

Abstract

This chapter highlights Egyptian contributions to the history of Afro-Asian solidarity, which remain understudied in scholarship on twentieth-century decolonisation, and on Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt. It argues that Egyptian activists and intellectuals worked to build ‘infrastructures of solidarity’ on multiple spatial scales in 1950s Cairo, from Arab to African to Afro-Asian, and engaged in the relational construction of their political imaginaries in the process. Analysing the African Association, the 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, it shows how state and popular actors’ interactions at such sites produced Cairo as an Afro-Asian hub. Egypt’s case thus offers valuable insights into the nature of popular solidarity networks, and the porousness of state-society boundaries, in contexts of decolonisation.

Keywords: solidarity, Afro-Asianism, decolonisation, national liberation, Egypt, Abdel Nasser

In December 1957, Cairo University played host to an international gathering of unprecedented scale in the colonised world. Representatives from forty-six countries across Asia and Africa spent a week sharing their experiences of colonisation and their aspirations to overcome it. Their closing resolution invoked the Asian- African Conference held two years earlier in Bandung, Indonesia, which they said had ‘set the standard’ with its principles of self-determination, global equality, and peace. Bandung remains preeminent in the lore of Afro-Asianism worldwide, and in historiographies of decolonisation today. Yet the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference and its Cairo Declaration were self-consciously a broadening and deepening of the ‘Bandung Spirit’: Cairo’s delegates represented many more countries, most of them yet to achieve independence, and they were not political elites, but activists, unionists, writers, and artists.

This presents two paradoxes for exploration, reflecting the richness of the extraordinary historical process of decolonisation. Firstly, the Cairo Conference delegates celebrated their struggles for national liberation – many were nationalist activists and organisers – but they also greeted each other as Afro-Asians. How did the national and transnational coexist in this context? Secondly, not only were the Cairo Conference delegates unaffiliated with their states, but many had also taken great risks in travelling to Cairo, evading colonial border controls or the surveillance of hostile regimes. Yet it was the Egyptian state that was sponsoring these proceedings, with a senior cabinet minister appointed conference chair.