Chapter 5 - Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’

Summary

Abstract

Africans are staged but not often heard in discussions of the ‘Bandung Moment’, a high-watermark of decolonial possibility and Afro-Asian connection. This article foregrounds the agency and perspectives of African activists who travelled across Asia in the 1950s. In Delhi, Rangoon, and Bandung, Africans engaged, co-produced, and made useable the dialogical Afro-Asian world to deconstruct colonialism and engineer alternative futures. This chapter reveals how the overlapping internationalisms of these fora reinforced a dyad of anti-colonial politics and developmental thinking in the construction of African nationhood and pan-African community. This article breaks new ground in privileging the Afro in Afro-Asian.

Keywords: Afro-Asianism, Bandung Moment, international socialism, internationalism

In June 1954, the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) published the first edition of its Anti-Colonial Bureau News Letter. After reporting the recent Bureau meeting in the Burmese hill-station of Kalaw, the news became overwhelmingly African: political crisis in Buganda, a new constitution for Tanganyika, Mau Mau and Kwame Nkrumah’s electoral success in Gold Coast. The editor of the News Letter and Joint Secretary of the ASC, working in Rangoon, Burma, was a young West African journalist, James Gilbert Markham. His mission: to wrangle the ideological and organizational potency of Asian national liberations and Afro-Asian solidarity towards expedited freedom for Africa and his own flagship country, Gold Coast/Ghana. Jim Markham was Nkrumah’s man in Asia as the ‘Bandung moment’ approached its powerful and fleeting crescendo.

Markham’s journey to Burma and the landmark 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, was one track in the dense traffic of anti-colonial solidarity journeys across the 1950s. Most famously, African-American man of letters Richard Wright reprised Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois in asserting a global ‘Color Curtain’ from his reading of Bandung at which Wright was an observer. Hundreds of less-feted tours around Asia by African trade unionists, journalists and students shaped the effervescent debate on the nature and timetables of post-colonial futures. Africans contemplated how conversations with free Asians could expedite the end of empire. New Afro-Asian institutions channeled the energy of peripatetic activists to castigate colonialism and forge equitable development in building global post-colonial communion.