The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism 9789400604346

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The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism

Global Connections: Routes and Roots Global Connections: Routes and Roots explores histories that challenge existing demarcations between and within local, regional, and interregional arenas. The series encompasses single-site and vernacular histories as much as studies of long-distance connection. This series seeks to bridge early modern and modern history. By taking a wide timeframe of c. 1200 to the present, we embrace the many and shifting nodal points, key regions, modes of transportation and other forms of connectivity that together form the “routes” and “roots” of global history. This includes the making and unmaking of power in different manifestations, as well as the intellectual genealogies and trajectories of the ideas that did so. We welcome all work that explores the global as method. We stress the need to recover local primary sources as a way of investigating both the individual and the collective agency of all those involved in the making of the global. Series Editors Carolien Stolte, Leiden University Mariana de Campos Francozo, Leiden University Editorial Board Ananya Chakravarti, Georgetown University Scott Levi, The Ohio State University Su Lin Lewis, Bristol University Gerard McCann, University of York Prasannan Parthasarathi, Boston College Alessandro Stanziani, École des hautes études en sciences sociales Heidi Tworek, University of British Columbia Other titles in this series: Jos Gommans and Ariel Lopez (eds), Philippine Confluence. Iberian, Chinese and Islamic Currents, c. 1500–1800, 2020 Michele Louro, Carolien Stolte, Heather Streets-Salter and Sana Tannoury-Karam (eds), The League Against Imperialism. Lives and Afterlives, 2020 Neilesh Bose (ed.), India after World History. Literature, Comparison, and Approaches to Globalization, 2022

THE LIVES OF COLD WAR AFRO-ASIANISM

Edited by Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis

Leiden University Press

Global Connections: Routes and Roots, volume 4 Cover design: Andre Klijsen Cover illustration: Collage of Afro-Asian materials in the International Institute for Social History. Created in collaboration with Sandev Handy from Sri Lanka’s Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, and Fadiah Nadwa Fikri from the National University of Singapore. Lay-out: Crius Group Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher. ISBN 978 90 8728 388 9 e-ISBN 978 94 0060 434 6 (e-PDF) DOI 10.24415/9789087283889 NUR 692 © Carolien Stolte and Su Lin Lewis / Leiden University Press, 2022 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the publisher and the editors of the book.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism

7

Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte Chapter 2. Here and There: A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953

21

Elisabeth Armstrong Chapter 3. Résistantes Against the Colonial Order: Women’s Grassroots Diplomacy During the French War in Vietnam (1945-1954)

41

Adeline Broussan Interlude: Asian-African Solidarity

65

Chapter 4. Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom

67

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

93

Gerard McCann Chapter 6. Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia 

121

Yasser Nasser Interlude: The Dead Will Live Eternally

143

Chapter 7. Delhi versus Bandung: Local Anti-imperialists and the AfroAsian Stage

145

Carolien Stolte Chapter 8. Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo Reem Abou-El-Fadl

167

6 table of contents

Chapter 9. Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History and Humanism

191

Hanna Jansen Chapter 10. A Forgotten Bandung: The Afro-Asian Students’ Conference and the Call for Decolonisation

213

Wildan Sena Utama Interlude: Yesterday and Today

241

Chapter 11. Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan 

243

Ali Raza Chapter 12. Microphone Revolution: North Korean Cultural Diplomacy During the Liberation of Southern Africa

265

Tycho van der Hoog Chapter 13. Eqbal Ahmad: An Affective Reading of Afro-Asianism

291

Amza Adam Chapter 14. Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys

309

Taomo Zhou Epilogue. Afro-Asianism Revisited

327

Naoko Shimazu About the Authors

333

Index

335

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte

Abstract The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War can be conceptualised as a living network, nourished by connections created through political activism at both the local and the international level. The “lives” in The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism refer both to the many different incarnations of Afro-Asianism itself, and to the lives of the women and men who lived Afro-Asianism through their politics, their travels, and their relationships. Afro-Asianist engagement spanned a wide political spectrum, but its solidarities were not without limitations, constraints, and tensions. This introduction shows that, rather than a unified movement, Afro-Asianism functioned as both an affective and an effective banner for rallying a range of anti-imperialist agendas.

Keywords: decolonisation, Cold War, Afro-Asianism, biography, networks

Eighteen months after Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez canal, Rameshwari Nehru, a veteran of Indian social and political activism, rose to a lectern in the spacious auditorium of the University of Cairo to open the first official conference of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). She was seventy-three years of age, and it is easy to imagine that the journey to Cairo had not been an easy one. But it was a journey on familiar terrain. Rameshwari Nehru had first visited Egypt in 1932 and spent time in Cairo and the surrounding countryside on her way to a tour of Europe which included a speech at the League of Nations in Geneva.1 On this second visit, there was much she recognised, but she found the “climate and colour” to be different now. It was “refreshing to be able to breathe the fresh air of freedom” now that the Egyptian people had “accepted the challenge of their time” and won independence.2 At the conference, Rameshwari Nehru was also surrounded by familiar people. The Indian delegation in Cairo consisted chiefly of her own activist network, despite the fact that it counted different generations among its members. Perin Chandra for instance, was her junior by several decades, but had been her partner in an effort to join the communist and non-communist women’s movements in

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the Punjab during the Second World War.3 In a similar vein, Tehminabai Dhage and Rameshwari were some twenty-five years apart in age, but they were connected through their social work with children’s institutions.4 Other members of the delegation, such as Anup Singh and Perin Chandra’s husband Romesh, were long-standing colleagues of Rameshwari in the Indian peace movement. It was through the peace movement, especially Afro-Asian peace activists calling attention to the intersection of colonial power and nuclear capability, that many of the Cairo delegates had prior connections. Masaharu Hatanaka, for example, was a veteran peace activist who had worked alongside Rameshwari in preparing the “People’s Bandung” in New Delhi in 1955 (chapter 7). But he had also attended the 1952 Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing and in fact had co-written the Japanese delegation’s report on the conference.5 Similarly, the Chinese delegation to Cairo included famous Chinese poet-official Guo Moruo, whose international trajectory likewise passed through the 1952 and 1955 peace conferences, and the Burmese delegation included U Thein Pe Myint, a Marxist intellectual who had travelled to Delhi several times as part of the Burmese Preparatory Committee for Delhi. That Preparatory Committee had also included, among others, Anatoly Sofronov (chapter 9), a writer who could count himself among Rameshwari’s friends, and who continued to move through Afro-Asian conferences after Delhi and Cairo, such as the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in 1958 and the Tricontinental in Havana in 1966.6 In fact, the Cairo event, attended by some 550 delegates representing forty-four different Afro-Asian countries, was very much a product of the decolonizing world’s involvement in the international peace movement, and indeed of Rameshwari’s own anti-imperialist and anti-militarist work. It was she who had first suggested holding an Afro-Asian solidarity conference at a meeting for the “Relaxation of International Tension” in Stockholm in 1954.7 The 1955 Delhi conference was a first attempt at a conference of that kind. Several of the members of the preparatory Committee for the Delhi Conference, not least Hatanaka and Sofronov, stayed on to prepare the first AAPSO conference. By the time Rameshwari Nehru took the stage in Cairo, they had worked together for years. In this way, participant lists of Afro-Asian gatherings such as AAPSO provide historians with a snapshot of activist networks both regional and international, momentarily frozen in time. It is at the “hybrid” meetings of the Afro-Asian era, where government officials mingled with citizens committed to Afro-Asian solidarity, ranging from dissidents to dentists and dancers, that this is most apparent. It also provides the historian with a vivid demonstration that the Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War era cannot be reduced to any one nation’s post-colonial diplomacy. For these reasons, this book frames the political Afro-Asianism of the period of ca. 1945-1975 as a living network, connected through political activism at the local level as much as the international level. The “lives” in The Lives of Cold War

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Afro-Asianism refer both to the many different incarnations of Afro-Asianism itself, and to the lives of the individuals who lived Afro-Asianism through their politics, their travels, and their relationships. This book is a look at those lives. Each chapter turns the lens on either a person, a meeting, or an organisation, in order to bring into focus Afro-Asian politics and solidarity at a given point in time and space. This book is not, therefore, an attempt to impose a unity on Cold War era Afro-Asianism where it does not exist. Quite the contrary – it shows that Afro-Asian solidarity functioned as both an affective and effective banner for rallying a wide range of anti-imperialist agendas across the political spectrum. For Rameshwari Nehru, the “seed of Asian solidarity that has grown so well” and had drawn Africa into its fold, was not the famous 1955 Bandung conference but the New Delhi “People’s Bandung” that took place twelve days earlier.8 Yet, “Bandung,” the domain of her more famous relative Jawaharlal Nehru, came to epitomise Afro-Asian solidarity for posterity. Rameshwari’s life was inextricably entwined with Afro-Asianism, yet she was never at the main event with which Afro-Asianism became associated. Jawaharlal and Rameshwari Nehru’s lives, though they spent a lifetime disagreeing about politics in their correspondence, ran on parallel tracks.

Intersecting Lives The Afro-Asianism of the early Cold War has long remained buried under the narrative of the broader Bandung era, which shaped the historical contours of solidarity, but also homogenised it, hiding from view the different visions of post-colonial worldmaking that co-existed alongside the Bandung project. Jawaharlal Nehru’s every move before, at, and after the Bandung Conference has been the subject of historical scrutiny. Historians have used the plentiful documentation of the conference, among other things, to gauge India-China relations, assess India’s position in Asia, and trace foreign policy shifts.9 As recent work has shown, however, the political formations of the period evolved in a much broader context of Afro-Asian interactions.10 The Afro-Asianist formations which Rameshwari Nehru and her colleagues inhabited were not rooted in state power, but were nevertheless adjacent to it. It is an unfortunate by-product of Cold War era scholarship that they have not attracted much historical attention. Bandung, by contrast, is etched into the world’s historical memory as representative of a moment of decolonial possibility. As we have argued elsewhere, the veneration of the Bandung conference and associated diplomatic arenas has obscured other transnational interactions emerging alongside it.11 It was not just post-colonial leaders, but activists, intellectuals, and artists, who converged to participate in a process of post-colonial ‘worldmaking’:

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to end colonialism, to envision a more equitable social order, and to find ways of securing a lasting peace. This set of actors experimented with new ideas and techniques for intellectual and cultural expression to create new visions of the nation and of the world order. They wrestled with communist, socialist and democratic ideas in circulation, constantly reformulated their political loyalties, and built up networks of intellectual and radical sociability. Christopher Lee’s depiction of the Bandung era as one that contained “the residual romance of revolution, as well as the realpolitik of a new world order in the making,” very much holds for the Afro-Asian engagements in this volume.12 Adom Getachew’s characterisation of anti-colonial nationalism as ‘worldmaking’ – as an attempt to create institutions that would secure a world of non-domination – has shed light on the gravity of the task of decolonisation.13 We add that we must also widen our conception of worldmaking beyond the domain of leading intellectuals and statesmen. As David Featherstone has argued, “solidarities from below” have always been central to “making the world anew” and yet have been “frequently marginalised and actively silenced.”14 For this reason, the Afro-Asian Networks Collective from which this volume has emerged, started by placing the focus on large-scale but under-recognised events and gatherings – the ‘Other Bandungs’.15 We sought to examine how Afro-Asianism was lived by men and women – the latter having too often been written out of its story, and that of internationalism as a whole.16 In doing so, we add to an emerging social history of internationalism, moving beyond the realm of state relations to investigate associational life, interpersonal relationships, gender dynamics, and cosmopolitan mentalities.17 The Collective’s findings bore out that the boundaries between state and non-state were often blurred, and that Afro-Asianism had deep local and vernacular roots, consisting as much of solidarity as of political competition and racial hierarchy.18 In our research practice, we were driven by the same spirit of solidarity that motivated the individuals we studied. We argued that these networks should not be studied by lone scholars, but are best examined collaboratively, especially in terms of archival inquiry.19 We brought the Collective together in the archives of the International Institute of Social History to study conference booklets, brochures, publications, and the archives of bodies such as the International Confederation of Trade Unions. We drew on specialised local and linguistic knowledge, from research in the Cold War era archives of the United States and the Soviet Union, to national, institutional, and personal archives in New Delhi, Nairobi, Calcutta, Cairo, Yangon, Lahore, Jakarta, and Bandung. We shared documents, engaged in ongoing conversations through workshops and discussions, and wrote up our findings together in real-time. We hosted a half-day festival in Bristol on Afro-Asian connections, featuring a panel between historians and activists on the legacies of the Bandung era, short films, Nigerian and Indonesian food, and a hybrid performance of West

introduction: the lives of cold war afro-asianism 11

African and Bengali dance. We created a travelling exhibition, which eventually made it to the “Africa-Asia: a New Axis of Knowledge” conference in Dar Es Salaam. Looking back, these events are a reminder of the power and outreach of the cultural events that accompanied the conferences of the Afro-Asian era, which scholars are now beginning to explore.20 We created a data visualisation of our findings, aided by the voluntary support of scholars all over the world working on the Tricontinental Conference, the All-Africa People’s Conference, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference.21 For this collection, we welcomed a new group of scholars into the Collective with an online seminar series, providing feedback based on our respective regional and linguistic expertise and methodological vantage points. In The Lives of Cold War Afro-Asianism, we center the individuals and groups who inhabited these spaces. The network visualisation that we collectively created has given us a picture of a much wider world, before, besides, and beyond Bandung. The ways in which, as noted above, the AAPSO delegates were connected ahead of the Cairo Conference, is best accessed through this dataset. The ability to bring into view, at the click of a button, the diverse professional, class, and political backgrounds of individuals who attended Afro-Asian events and gatherings has irrevocably moved us away from the narratives of “national” and “institutional” positioning within Afro-Asianism. But it has also broadened the category of AfroAsian political actors, not least in terms of gender. Naoko Shimazu has argued that the Bandung conference was not only emblematic of diplomatic theatre but an arena where the most ‘visible’ diplomacy, at least according to textual sources, was conducted by men.22 By highlighting women’s Afro-Asian political trajectories, several of the chapters in this volume recover some of this less ‘visible’ diplomacy. The Collective’s earlier essays on “Other Bandungs” provide the backdrop for the “Afro-Asian moment” in this volume, but they are now interwoven with lifestories, such as that of Gita Bandyopadhyay, a leading member of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) who began organising mill workers in the Bengal Delta; of J.C. Kumarappa, the Gandhian economist and political activist seeking connections with China; of Lakdar Brahimi, who sought support for Algeria’s liberation struggle in Southeast Asia; of Eqbal Ahmad, whose scholarship drew him to activism against the wars in Algeria and Vietnam; or of Francisca Fanggidaej, an Indonesian activist-in-exile and leading Afro-Asian internationalist. These life stories provide key insight into the lived realities of Cold War AfroAsianism. They help us to see how individuals pursued solidarity networks outside their own national borders; how individuals carried on the promises of Afro-Asian gatherings in different places; and what ideas succeeded in bringing individuals from such varied backgrounds together. This shifts the conversation onto the individuals that made this moment – whether they were inspired by its promises or, as the chapter on Eqbal Ahmad shows, disillusioned by its failures.

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The Practice of Solidarity Afro-Asian solidarity was at its most emphatic at the large conferences that marked this era, and thus is a major part of the story we tell. As a recent volume on international conferencing has shown, conferences were “one of, if not the key location in which internationalism emerged in the post-war world.”23 In the Bandung era, they provided occasions to meet and put forward collective visions for a decolonised world, by and for Asians and Africans. They were arenas of solidarity and friendship as well as contestation and conflict.24 While Bandung has for so long been heralded as the defining moment of decolonial worldmaking, it was one of a much larger series of conferences and gatherings, characterised by diverse political and ideological formations. With each gathering, Afro-Asianism gathered steam across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, calling for anti-colonial solidarity and peace amidst continuing oppression and the threat of nuclear war. Between such events, the hard work of Afro-Asian solidarity was enacted by individuals and small transnational committees of activists engaged in the work of publicizing, networking, and advocacy. In his opening speech at the Bandung conference, Sukarno referenced the League Against Imperialism in Brussels in 1927 as the meeting point where many of its delegates had met for the first time. This was not true of Sukarno himself, who never travelled outside the Dutch East Indies, but whose political imagination was nonetheless shaped by tracts and texts circulating in an age in motion.25 The authors of a recent volume on the League, also in this book series, remind us that seeing the organisation as a precursor to Bandung blinds us to the specificity of the historical moment of 1927, and the promise of a united left that included communists, socialists, anti-colonialists, and trade unionists. As Michael Goebel has argued, Paris, along with Berlin, proved to be an interwar hub of anti-colonial internationalism, the erstwhile homes of the itinerant LAI.26 Both Goebel and the authors of the LAI volume have argued that the LAI was – barring a few notable exceptions – a homosocial space.27 But the Paris of the postwar era, as the home of the new WIDF, was a hub of leftist organising among Asian and African women.28 In chapter 3, Adeline Broussan examines the role of the WIDF in Paris as a site where Vietnamese and Algerian women engaged French women through “grassroots diplomacy,” resulting in an early anti-colonial orientation in the leftist French women’s movement to which the larger movement did not catch up for years. The interconnected web of conferences that we track emerged, in part, from the 1947 Asian Relations Conference in Delhi, which was itself born out of the various pan-Asian projects of the interwar era, and out of which sprang different trajectories of activism.29 The League Against Imperialism – Lives and Afterlives has commented on the continuity of anti-imperialist ideas, as well as the continued urgency of those

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ideas, into the Cold War era. But the Asian Relations Conference represents a departure in other ways. The centre of gravity for the anti-imperialist gatherings of the postwar period lay in Afro-Asia itself. The new hubs of Afro-Asianism were cities like Accra, Cairo, Jakarta, Delhi and Rangoon.30 Some of the practical and bureaucratic obstacles to mass gatherings in Africa or Asia, many of which had been insurmountable in the interwar years, had been removed. Meanwhile, the emerging Cold War meant that new geographical barriers emerged. Here too, the 1947 New Delhi conference served as the first meeting place for socialist leaders involved in the planning of the Asian Socialist Conference, making Rangoon into a (under-recognised) hub of anti-colonial solidarity (chapter 4) through which Ghanaian intellectuals such as James Markham passed en route to the Bandung Conference (chapter 5). Beijing offers another point of departure as an early hub of Afro-Asian solidarity. As Elisabeth Armstrong shows in an earlier examination of the 1949 Conference of Asian Women in Beijing, the WIDF’s first conference in Asia, this new generation of women from across Asia and North Africa engaged in a “solidarity of commonality” that explicitly recognised the imbalances between women of the world.31 In our earlier special issue, Rachel Leow examined the 1952 Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, which drew together delegates from South and Southeast Asia, as well as Latin America, betraying the enormous reach of solidarity networks in this era, particularly around the burgeoning international peace movement.32 While these early conferences contained few African delegates, they laid the groundwork for Beijing as an anti-colonial and socialist hub. It was also a place of socialist hospitality: as Taomo Zhou shows in chapter 14, it was China that housed and provided generous social welfare packages to exiles of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) for decades after the 1965 coup that decimated the Indonesian left. While scholars have recently examined China’s role as a reference point for East African diplomats and intellectuals in the 1960s,33 Yasser Nasser shows how Indian intellectuals saw 1950s China as offering solutions for India’s social and economic ills, and an alluring alternative to American and Soviet development models (chapter 6). Central to Kumarappa’s praise for China and his belief in Gandhian self-sufficiency, as Nasser argues, was his own commitment to the international peace movement at a time of superpower competition. Turning back to Bandung, the place, Wildan Sena Utama examines a ‘forgotten Bandung’ – the Afro-Asian Students’ Conference in 1956, one year after the famed Asian-African Conference (chapter 10). This conference perhaps most immediately captured the ‘Bandung spirit’, choosing the resort town as its venue due to the symbolic power of the 1955 conference. Utama turns the conversation away from the Cold War lens by highlighting the diverse ideological viewpoints of participating students – even if, on balance, the conference does show the increasingly leftward orientation of the Afro-Asian movement after Bandung.

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The 1958 Afro-Asian Writers’ conference in Tashkent, sponsored by the Soviet Union, likewise shows this orientation. As Rossen Djagalov shows in his recent book on Second-Third World connections in the realm of literature and cinema, ignoring Cold War dichotomies “obscures as much as it reveals”, and fails to recognise the way both the Third World and Second World were mutually constitutive of each other, and how ideological affinities with the Soviet Union could give way to a “more pragmatic appreciation of its resources”.34 The real benefit of the gathering, whatever the intentions of its Soviet planners to showcase a distinctly Soviet site of modernity, decolonisation, and friendship, was to create what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called ‘links that bind us’: literary connections across the South, enabled by the ability to meet fellow Afro-Asian writers face-to-face.35 Some of the other chapters in this volume similarly disrupt the conventional geographies of Afro-Asianism. Hanna Jansen examines the role of scholars and writers in Soviet engagements with the Afro-Asian solidarity movement (chapter 9). These were built on strong personal ties, especially on the part of the Central Asian members of the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with the Countries of Asia and Africa, as evidenced by the Afro-Asian engagements of writers like Mirzo Tursunzoda or Bobodzhan Gafurov. Jansen’s chapter makes clear that, even as Central Asia was receding from view in western cartographies of Asia, it emerged in alternative forums as part of new regionalist formations.36 Such new regional arrangements, signalled by the All-African People’s Conference in Accra in 1958, signalled the demise of the Afro-Asian project on the African continent and the popular appeal of Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism over Nasser’s Afro-Asianism. At the same time, new cartographies extended the Afro-Asian remit, as with the 1966 Tricontinental Conference in Havana, which established the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It was at the Tricontinental where Francisca Fanggidaej (chapter 14) found herself stranded in the wake of the 1965 coup in Indonesia, stripped of her citizenship for her vocal critique of Suharto’s role in the coup. Unmoored, without a nationality, Fidel Castro granted her honorary citizenship to Cuba, the passport with which she entered Beijing, and began a long exile in China. Two years later, the 1968 Cultural Congress in Havana further marked the city as a destination for Afro-Asian intellectuals, as shown by Ali Raza (chapter 11). Through the writings of Pakistani authors, he shows how the Cultural Congress of Havana convened writers devoted to the cause of national liberation movements, drawn by the promise of a new and equitable society offered by Castro’s Cuba. Raza shows how intellectuals in Pakistan subverted their country’s diplomatic alignment to the US in important ways. His chapter offers further proof of the limited analytical value of Cold War binaries. This is also the case in Tycho van der Hoog’s chapter on North Korean cultural diplomacy in Southern Africa (chapter 12). This chapter brings into

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view the many reasons why Southern African liberation movements partnered with North Korea, vividly demonstrating that to frame these solely as communist alliances deprives both sides of agency. It also risks hiding from view the longer-term consequences of these relationships. DPRK support for these movements extended into the 1970s and 1980s, and has resulted in current economic relations, particularly with regard to construction projects, showing that the Afro-DPRK relationship cannot be reduced to a “curiosity” at the intersection of decolonisation and Cold War. The lens of Afro-Asian solidarity, by contrast, allows for a more capacious view of political and ideological difference within such engagements.

Forging Connections This flurry of transnational activity in the 1950s and 1960s was enabled by the material contours of mobility and communication in this era. The increasing availability of air travel shortened distances across the Afro-Asian region, while the short hops on 1950s air routes allowed participants to work their way to a conference through multiple stops, not only getting to know the territory in between but also using those intervals to build personal relationships.37 It is no coincidence that many of the 1950s conferences took place along the transcontinental air routes of the era. Leaders and literati who travelled to such conferences wrote of their experiences at airports, on airplanes, on layovers which both connected them to the landscape of Afro-Asia, and betrayed the enormity of the challenge of creating a more equal world.38 Train travel invited its own narratives of humour and social critique, as Armstrong reveals in the intimate letters of Gita Bandyopadhyay’s train journey with the German WIDF contingent. Letters and travel narratives stitched together the strange and the familiar as encounters with new terrain, new people were shared with intimate contacts or a broader transnational sisterhood. These could also serve a political purpose: as Nasser notes, Kumarappa’s travelogues of China were published for Indian intelligentsia and government leaders, extolling the state’s ability to provide for the welfare of its citizens, instil discipline and patriotism, and carve out a unique Asian historical trajectory built on the industry of the peasantry. This was pitted in contrast to Kumarappa’s more contemptuous view of Tokyo – slick with wide avenues, cars, and “double-buses”, its harbours filled with American ships. Aside from the financial, practical and cultural dimensions of this new era of transnational friendship and solidarity, there were also crucial political constraints. Both colonial and post-colonial governments restricted the movements of activists and intellectuals across these borders. These ranged from the confiscation of passports, to refusal of visa and travel permission, to power play. The most famous

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case of the latter is probably British, French and American strategising over their response to the Bandung plans, resulting in the British advising Kwame Nkrumah not to attend Bandung.39 The annulment of Fanggidaej’s passport while in Havana in 1966 was one example of the way in which Afro-Asianists suffered from growing restrictions from Asia’s new authoritarian regimes in the 1960s. Similarly, in Raza’s chapter, the Pakistani poet and recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, is invited to the 1968 Havana Congress but unable to leave the country under Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship; it is only because he is based in London that Pakistani writer Abdullah Malik is able to attend. Zhou’s attention to the passport thus reminds us of both the materiality and the “spatiality of internationalism”, and the ways in which this era was marked by the rise of new borders and definitions of the relationship between citizenship and territory – even as Afro-Asian internationalists sought desperately to supersede them.40 Ronald Burke has shown in his work on “emotional diplomacy” that US official assessments of such gatherings were often disparaging and dismissive of the “unreasonable enthusiasm” of Afro-Asian delegations.41 But as Rachel Leow has argued, attention to the emotional registers of Afro-Asianism is a crucial part of any effort to more fully recover the subaltern dimensions of the Cold War.42 Amza Adam thus centers the affective pull of the Bandung Moment in his examination of the emotional registers in Pakistani intellectual Eqbal Ahmad’s Afro-Asian activism. In “subalternizing” the Cold War, the importance of lived Afro-Asian connections is crucial. Ranging from the journeys of African students to Asia examined by McCann, to the Afro-Asian stage that was Havana in Raza’s chapter, or conversations between Soviet Central Asian intellectuals and their Asian and African peers in the halls of UNESCO examined by Jansen, these interactions often ran counter to established notions of the directions of Cold War international traffic. Similarly, in the following chapters, these different “pulls” of cultural and intellectual traffic from Moscow, Beijing, Cairo, Hollywood, and London nourished the dynamism of the age, but also constituted new and grievous splits, particularly on the left. In Lewis’ and McCann’s chapters, Asian and African socialists distinguished themselves from the communist parties with whom they had once been aligned by denouncing the Soviet Union and its “totalitarian” and “imperialist” impulses. While they drew on models of the welfare state, they also voraciously criticised the colonial policies of European socialists. Abou-El-Fadl shows how the 1957 Cairo conference, far from being a front for Soviet communism, was an occasion for Nasser to carefully navigate the relations between the Soviet Union and China, while Egyptian intellectuals continued to cultivate relationships with African and Arab liberation movements. These actors, then, were not puppets and passive recipients of the propaganda battles of the Global Cold War, but actively seized, challenged, and created new currents of thought.

introduction: the lives of cold war afro-asianism 17

The events and gatherings of the Afro-Asian era gave rise to new publications, creating new communities of solidarity: the Asian Socialist Conference produced Socialist Asia and the Anti-Colonial Bureau; AAPSO and the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference produced the Afro-Asian Bulletin and Bulletin of the Afro-Asian Woman; the Afro-Asian Journalist was based first in Jakarta and then Beijing.43 Other publications were linked to one specific Afro-Asian gathering, such as the Indonesian collection of poems for the second Afro-Asian Writer’s conference, which are interspersed between this book’s chapters.44 The cover art of these publications, meanwhile, spread Afro-Asianism’s aesthetic further, a feature of the movement we have sought to highlight with the cover of this present volume.45 While the dissolution of older networks forged in the 1950s indicates the failures of AfroAsianism at the inter-state level, it also shows that it was in the cultural sphere that Afro-Asianism left its most important legacies, as well as its most lingering divisions. In recovering these narratives of conferences and gatherings, we must also acknowledge the ephemeral quality of the Afro-Asian era and the fragility of its internationalism in the 1950s, both at the diplomatic and non-state level. By the end of the 1950s, a number of Asian socialists were marginalised, jailed, exiled, their parties banned or dissolved. As Cairo became the new leader of AAPSO and the Afro-Asian world after 1957, Indians began to gradually pull away from the organization. Meanwhile, the second “Bandung” in Algiers in 1965 stalled. The first generation of post-colonial leaders passed away or was removed from power, the Vietnam War and Arab-Israeli conflict continued to escalate, and new regionalisms took precedence. Nkrumah, who emerged as a leader of pan-African movements and rival to Nasser, was deposed in a coup in 1966 during a state visit to China and North Vietnam. Afro-Asianism thus was never one movement. It had multiple incarnations, and lived many lives. At its heart, our research collective has sought to trace the convergence of networks of decolonisation through the web of Afro-Asian engagements. This has meant looking below and beyond the conventional framings of the Cold War and entrenched, state-centric narratives about winners and losers in the post-colonial world. The intellectuals, artists, writers, activists, and political operatives who traversed these routes met, in many cases for the first time, in the various hubs of the Afro-Asian world to envision and make a world after empire.46 Their relationships were fraught with tension, hierarchies, and conflict, but they were also characterised by solidarity, affect, and intimacy. While they left a much lighter, and often grainier, archival footprint than the political elites of Bandung, these gatherings provide us with a far more nuanced understanding of the post-colonial world and its multi-directional pulls. Tracking their movements uncovers the vitality of world peace movements, the everyday work of anti-colonial solidarity,

18 su lin lewis and carolien stolte

and converging journeys to the new meccas of the Third World. Afro-Asianism was brittle and easily disrupted by post-colonial governments and Cold War propaganda battles, but its lives left important imprints on both cultural production and international engagements of the post-colonial world.

Notes 1

Om Prakash Paliwal, Rameshwari Nehru: Patriot and Internationalist (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1986), 20.

2

“Speech by Mrs Rameshwari Nehru,” Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 55.

3

Paliwal, Rameshwari Nehru, 21.

4

B. Suguna, Women’s Movement (New Delhi: Discovery Publishing House, 2009), 147.

5

Hirano Yoshitarō and Hatanaka Masaharu, Ajia wa kaku uttaeru: Ajia Taiheiyō Chiiki Heiwa Kaigi no kiroku (Asia Appeals: a Note on the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 1953).

6

Connections drawn from the authors’ Afro-Asian Networks Visualised, accessed through www. afroasiannetworks.com. For further elaboration, see below.

7

D.N. Sharma, Afro-Asian Group at the UN (Allahabad: Chaitanya, 1969), 30.

8

“Speech by Mrs Rameshwari Nehru,” Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, 56.

9

Standard works from this perspective are G.H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber, 1966); See also Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya (Eds.) Bandung Revisited: the Legacy of the Asian-African Conference for the International Order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008).

10

For India-China relations in the immediate post-1949 period specifically, see Tansen Sen, India, China, and the World: a Connected History (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017); Arunabh Ghosh, Making it Count: Statistics and Statecraft in the Early People’s Republic of China, esp. chapter 7 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020); Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui (eds.), Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s-1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

11

See Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalisms in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30:1 (2019): 1-19; See also Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The anti-imperialist women’s movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41: 2 (2016): 305-331; Katharine McGregor and Vannessa Hearman, “Challenging the lifeline of imperialism: Reassessing Afro-Asian solidarity and related activism in the decade 1955–1965” in Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, Vasuki Nesiah (eds.), Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 161-176; Quito Swan, “Blinded by Bandung? Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 58-81.

12

Christopher J. Lee, “Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung”, in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010): 1-42.

13

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

introduction: the lives of cold war afro-asianism 19

14

David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden histories and geographies of internationalism (London: Zed Books Ltd., 2012).

15

See the abovementioned special issue “Other Bandungs.”

16

See, for instance, Patricia Owens and Katharina Ritzler’s Women’s International Thought: A New History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), which highlights the glaring omission of women in the history of internationalism but features none from the Global South.

17

Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms”, The American Historical Review 117:5 (2012), 1461-1485; Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and Benjamin Zachariah, The internationalist moment: South Asia, Worlds and World Views 1917-1939 (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2015); Andrew Arsan, Su Lin Lewis, Anne-Isabelle Richard, “Editorial – The Roots of Global Civil Society and the Interwar Moment”, Journal of Global History 7:2 (2012); Leslie James and Elisabeth Leake, Decolonisation and the Cold War (Bloomsbury, 2015); Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Jessica Reinisch, “Introduction: Agents of Internationalism”, Contemporary European History 25:2 (2016), 195-205; Imaobong D. Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Scholars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018)

18

Lewis and Stolte, “Other Bandungs”, 1-19.

19

Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 176-182.

20

See for example Elena Razlogova, “Cinema in the Spirit of Bandung: the Afro-Asian Film Festival Circuit, 1957-1964”, The Cultural Cold War and the Global South: Sites of Contest and Communitas (London: Taylor & Francis, 2021).

21

See www.afroasiannetworks.com/visualisation. We would particularly like to thank Philmon Ghirmai, Lasse Lassen, and Rossen Djagalov.

22

Naoko Shimazu, “Women ‘Performing’ Diplomacy at the Bandung Conference of 1955” in Darwis Khudori (ed.), Bandung at 60: New Insights and Emerging Forms (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2014): 34-49.

23

Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder, and Benjamin Thorpe, eds. Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021).

24

A similar point is made in James Mark and Paul Betts, “Introduction”, Socialism Goes Global: The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the Age of Decolonization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022): 1-24.

25

Wildan Sena Utama, “Engineering Solidarity: Indonesian Activists, Afro-Asian Networks, and Global Anti-Imperialism 1950s-1960s” (forthcoming PhD thesis, University of Bristol); Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1926 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019).

26

Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

27

Michele Louro et al., “Introduction,” The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden:

28

See also Armstrong, “Before Bandung” and Katherine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The

Leiden University Press, 2020). Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965,” Women’s History Review 25:6 (2016): 925-944. 29

Carolien Stolte, “‘The Asiatic Hour’: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947,” In The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War (London: Routledge, 2014): 75-93; Vineet Thakur, “An Asian Drama: The Asian Relations Conference, 1947” The International History Review (2018): 1-23.

20 su lin lewis and carolien stolte

30

See also “Hubs of Decolonization. African Liberation Movements and ‘Eastern’ Connections in Cairo, Accra, and Dar es Salaam,” in Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War ‘East’ (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2019), 25-56.

31

Armstrong, “Before Bandung”, 305.

32

See Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019): 21-54.

33

See Jamie Monson, Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods in Tanzania (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 2009); Priya Lal, “Maoism in Tanzania: Material Connections and Shared Imaginaries” in Alexander C. Cook (Ed), Mao’s Little Red Book: A Global History (Cambridgue University Press, 2014), 96-116; G. Thomas Burgess, “Mao in Zanzibar: Nationalism, Discipline, and the (De)Construction of Afro-Asian Solidarities” in Lee, Making a World After Empire, 196-234; Ruodi Duan, “African Nationalism, Colonial Afterlives, and the Development of China-Tanzanian Relations, 1960-1966” in Erez Manela and Heather StreetsSalter (Eds), The Anti-Colonial Transnational (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).

34

Rossen Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and cinema between the Second and the Third Worlds (McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2020).

35

Djagalov, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, 72. See also Masha Kirasirova, “Building anti-colonial utopia: The politics of space in Soviet Tashkent in the “long 1960s””, The Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (London: Routledge, 2018) and Vijay Prashad (ed.), The East was Read: Socialist Culture in the Third World (New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2019).

36

Martin Lewis and Karen Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 177-78. On the disciplinary history of Area Studies and its relationship to the Cold War, see also Matthias Middell and Katja Neumann, “Global history and the spatial turn: from the impact of area studies to the study of critical junctures of globalization,” Journal of Global History 5:1 (2010), 149-170.

37

Su Lin Lewis, “Skies that bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era” in Stephen Legg, Mike Heffernan, Jake Hodder, and Benjamin Thorpe (Eds.), Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).

38

Ibid.

39

Frank Gerits, “Bandung as the call for a better development project: US, British, French and Gold Coast perceptions of the Afro-Asian Conference (1955)”, Cold War History, 16:3 (2016), 255-272: 262.

40

Jake Hodder, Stephen Legg and Mike Heffernan, “Introduction: Historical Geographies of Internationalism, 1900–1950,” Political Geography 49 (2015): 4-5.

41

Roland Burke, “Emotional Diplomacy and Human Rights at the United Nations,” Human Rights Quarterly 39:2 (2017): 273-295. On the emotional registers of Third World diplomacy in this era, see also Frank Gerits, “‘When the Bull Elephants Fight’: Kwame Nkrumah, Non-Alignment and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957-66),” The International History Review 37:5 (2015): 951-969.

42

Leow, “A Missing Peace.”

43

Taomo Zhou, “Global Reporting from the Third World: The Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association”, Critical Asian Studies 51:2 (2019), 166-197.

44

Bintang Suradi (transl.), Indonesia Sings of Afro-Asia (Jakarta: League of People’s Culture Indonesia, 1962).

45

We were fortunate to have the help of Sandev Handy from Sri Lanka’s Museum of Modern Art, and Fadiah Nadwa Fikri from the National University of Singapore, who joined us in Amsterdam for a new iteration of the project.

46

Here of course we borrow from Lee, Making a World After Empire.

CHAPTER 2

Here and There: A Story of Women’s Internationalism, 1948-1953 Elisabeth Armstrong

Abstract The rise of a renewed women’s movement against imperialism and colonialism emerged in the 1940s. The Women’s International Democratic Federation provided the global network to allow local movements, such as the movement in Kolkata, India to strengthen their goals through international networks of solidarity across Asia and the world. Through the political life of Gita Bandyopadhyay, an Indian communist who worked in WIDF’s central offices in Paris and Berlin from 1948 to 1951, this essay explores the connections that dismantled colonialism through women’s solidarity of commonality that traversed the era’s geopolitical differences.

Keywords: internationalism, anti-imperialism, solidarity, colonialism, women’s activism, left feminism

Gita Bandyopadhyay was an exceptional activist: an early fighter for communism when the movement was still in its first decades.1 Her activism began when she was thirteen years old. She was born to a landed family in Shibnibash, Bengal. Her paternal grandmother, Katyayani Devi fought for the rights of young widows and deserted housewives in the locality, to the dismay of the other Brahmin families in the locality.2 As Gita described her, “she had such authority in the village that she could make a tiger and a deer drink from the same pond.”3 Gita was brave like her grandmother, and when she joined the communist movement in the late 1930s, she gave up an entire lifetime of comfort and ease. Her first protest sought the release of political prisoners from the jail in the Andamans and though arrested by the British authorities, to her searing disappointment, she was released because at thirteen years old she was considered underage. Gita Bandyopadhyay joined the Communist Party of India through its cover: the Workers Party. When in college, she joined the Chhatri Sangh, the leftist women’s student organization linked to the larger All India Federation of Students. In addition, Gita was an early member of the famed leftist women’s organization, the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti, translated as ‘women’s self-respect’ and more

22 elisabeth armstrong

commonly, ‘women’s self-defense’ organization.4 While still in her twenties, she joined the central organizational offices of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Paris, France to help build an anti-imperialist women’s movement. In large part, this is her story, but it is also the story of women’s leftist solidarity – built on their commonalities and their differences in the landscape of the end of one war, World War Two, and the continuance of imperial wars that sought to hold onto their colonial territories against the will of the people who lived in those countries. Bandyopadhyay was from the enfranchised middle-class in Bengal, India. Her family valued education for girls and boys. She lived abroad with her family and went to school in Malaysia, and then Singapore, until her mother died suddenly, and her father sent her and her siblings to live with extended family in Kolkata. She joined Kamala Girls School without knowing the Bengali alphabet, but she and her siblings “managed to mug up the alphabets quite fast.”5 She went to college, studied, and learned. But she took a conscious chance and was not of the middle-class. By the time she had finished college, she had married someone of her own choice, and divorced. Middle-class goals were not hers, not necessarily. For parts of her life, she lived and organized among the mill workers and the very poor in the Bengal Delta, a marshy region that had minimal desalinated land for farming, and endless mosquitoes as vectors for malaria and other mundane, deadly diseases. The district was also a hotbed of radicalism since the turn of the century. Later, she returned to Calcutta as an organizer. Gita Bandyopadhyay studied the same scholarly texts as others – novels, mathematics, science and geography in school. Marx, too, probably the Communist Manifesto since the Bengali translation was passed hand to hand throughout the region at this time. Study circles shared this and other Marxist books, always by candlelight, at night, in secret, alongside one’s comrades.6 “All around us was the silent, careful footsteps of Socialism,” she described, “influenced by her (their Bengali teacher, one of the first women to join the Communist Party of India, Sudha Ray) and let ourselves go in the tide of socialism at the mere age of thirteen. One moment there would be a call to defy Section 144 – in the next we’d be in a class on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto, learning to look at an international revolution together – all in all, it was an enchanting atmosphere.”7 Her communist analysis of colonialism meant she must understand its origins and purpose for capitalism, not simply as a geopolitical or historical aggression. She had to understand the larger schemes that crafted the local manifestations in Kolkata, in Bengal and in India. There was a world outside this colony that Gita also must understand in relation to her own conditions. Other colonizers, other colonized. The end of colonialism for communists demanded a scooping together of all those struggles, all those particularities chipped away and cast aside by capitalism. Gita studied but also became one of these fragments once she cast her solidarity with the working classes, organizing with the labor unions formed in the jute mills and coal factories that studded the Houghly River.

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 23

In the 1940s, Bandyopadhyay joined the workers’ movement to listen to the workers’ wants and to make manifest their needs and desires. In the Marxist analysis of Gita and her comrades, colonialism was a tool for capitalism; one answer to the system’s contradictions of supply and demand, overproduction and underconsumption. Colonialism was an integral part to capitalism, and not simply a coercive system of unequal governance by a white supremacist foreign hand. Instead, colonialism fed the ravenous maw of capitalism by creating new markets, new workers, and thus additional surplus value, additional profit wrung from labor exacted to make its wheels go round. The anti-colonial movements that Gita swam in demanded a more risky politics of refusal. These movements sought to throw a spanner in the engines of capitalism itself. Organizing the industrial workers of jute mills and coal mines alongside the landless agricultural workers and small landholding peasants was critical to this vision. To listen to the workers, as communist and labor movements sought to do, complicated the knowledge of ledgers and accounts, taxes and accruals in the hands of educated middle-class Indians. To listen to the workers during the 1940s was not an act alone, it had to be learned – first, by spending time and energy alongside working-class people. It meant turning one’s middle-class gifts to other ends than a smooth transition from colonial governance to a nationalist one. The system itself needed new logics, new beneficiaries, and most of all new horizons.

Kolkata, India & Budapest, Hungary, 1948 In 1948, Kolkata was a city in foment that seeded revolt spilling beyond the confines of independent India to revolutionary movements across Asia. The World Federation of Democratic Youth held its Southeast Asian convention in Kolkata in February, 1948, and the conference title stated its goals clearly: “The Conference for Youth and Students of South-east Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence.” Students from Indonesia, Vietnam, Burma and elsewhere demanded an independence not just from colonial occupation, but from capitalism itself. The militant position held by Indonesian young people sprang from betrayal: their new republic faced bombing by the Dutch. The experiences of the Vietnamese participants mirrored their own.8 Entrenched in an insurgency to regain their recently declared independence, Vietnamese delegates told the story of French colonial refusal to let go and the Euro-American henchmen that supported them.9 As a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI), Gita worked in two formations that sought to organize working-class women and men; the labor movement and the women’s movement (MARS). In 1947, Gita met with members of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) who conducted a tour

24 elisabeth armstrong

of India, Burma and Singapore to better understand the effects of colonialism on women and children.10 In addition, Gita worked with Lu Cui, a Chinese Communist Party member who also worked for the central offices of WIDF. Cui spent time in Kolkata in 1948 to solidify plans to hold the Asian Women’s Conference in India. These plans failed because of the deep distrust by Nehru’s Congress Party members who thought that another anti-colonial conference would be too disturbing to the status quo.11 The Security Control Office decided to open a file on the activities of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in response to their refusal to accept the Indian government’s decision to ban the conference and deny visas to all international participants. By March, 1948, the Congress Party banned the Communist Party of India. Leaders went underground, but continued to meet. As in colonial times, jails became cells for organizing as much as confinement. Bandyopadhyay’s connection to WIDF remained firm, and influenced the decision made by the CPI to send her to Paris to work for the WIDF’s central offices. A year later, in 1949, the women’s group affiliated with WIDF, the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS), was also banned, in part due to its connections with the CPI, and its members moved into hiding. Regional and national leaders were imprisoned or driven underground, constantly moving from house to house to escape arrest. The rural movement integral to MARS’ activism called Tebhaga was also on the government’s watchlist. In the Tebhaga movement that emerged after India’s independence in 1947, farmworkers and small-landholding peasant women and men sought basic human rights: fair land practices, an end to the feudal tributes of forced labor (begar) and the sexual control of rural women.12 Violent police repression, that included widespread rape of rural women, sought to crush the uprising that united peasants and agricultural workers of all backgrounds, Muslims and Hindus, adivasis (indigenous peoples) and Dalits (oppressed castes). The MARS, Bengal’s member organization in WIDF, developed powerful strategies to organize the “sarbahara” – or ‘those who’ve lost everything.’13 Gita was an early member of MARS, and sought to organize refugees from Partition as well as other encampments of dispossessed women. Members of MARS mobilized mass public protests of women seeking redress on their own behalf. They built leadership at local and regional levels among the most oppressed women. They developed the signature petition to represent the numbers of women who supported their demands and gave heft to cross-class campaigns. Perhaps most revolutionary of all, they listened to dispossessed women. Rural landless women and urban, resettled refugees from India’s partition violence were two central bases for MARS’ membership. Demands for affordable food, clothing and housing combined with a focus on women’s economic independence to imagine women’s future independence from need. MARS propaganda – its songs, plays, pamphlets and speeches, explained

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 25

women’s basic survival issues through an analysis of regional class conflict and capitalism’s global imperial war. Radical women developed powerful tools of protest during the British occupation of India and they further honed their methods during the early years of India’s independence under the Congress Party. The story of Pratibha Ganguly and her comrades has the contours of their struggle archetype: the mass protest of women in public.14 One afternoon in April 1949, the members of MARS gathered with their children in Kolkata. They used a technique they’d mobilized during the famine in 1942, one that forced the colonial government to address widespread hunger, homelessness and unemployment. A large group of women marched peacefully in public streets to government offices. Their demands in 1949 also mirrored their demands in 1942. These mass protests of women addressed the state: for civil liberties and livelihood support. They demanded the release of political prisoners, many of whom had been imprisoned without charges, and basic amenities of food, clothing and work.15 In 1942, they faced the British colonial government. In 1949, they addressed the ruling Congress Party government. This time, instead of being beaten, jailed and roughly dispersed as happened in 1942, the police fired on the protest and killed five people: four women and one child. Pratibha Ganguly was one of the women who died.16 Gita Bandyopadhyay was not part of the Tebhaga movement, since she lived in the city. But she followed Pratibha Ganguly’s footsteps after she returned from Europe in 1951. The novelty of women’s public protest shifted from a shocking sight of women filling the streets to a body count. Women protested their living conditions of impoverishment, and demanded their rights as citizens (not subjects) of India, and they were killed. After this police shooting, MARS was banned by the Congress government for their activism, and the women of MARS blended into their surroundings to carry on organizing in secret. Bandyopadhyay took a slightly different route from many of her comrades, and flew as one of two Indian delegates to WIDF’s 2nd Congress held in Budapest, Hungary, in December 1948. She didn’t return to Kolkata until 1951. After the conference in Budapest, she travelled to Paris to work at the central offices of WIDF in Paris. Bandyopadhyay, alongside the Secretary of WIDF from the People’s Republic of China, Lu Cui and the French communist Simone Bertrand, shouldered much of the logistics, outreach and communication for WIDF’s mandate to support women’s anti-colonial organizing. Lu Cui’s work involved considerable travel to colonized regions of the world to develop WIDF’s contacts with local organizers, and support their activism. Between 1949 and 1951, Gita mostly travelled within Europe, with some notable exceptions. As her letters attest, she, quite literally in some cases, represented the anti-colonial struggles around the world to internationalist allies.

26 elisabeth armstrong

Primitive Accumulation By the end of 1948, when Gita arrived, the central offices of the Women’s International Democratic Federation had been running for three years. Its official membership was ninety-one million women. Located in Paris, the post-war global city for anti-fascist organizing, its staff enjoyed support from the pro-communist government. By 1950, France’s central government had changed, their welcome worn thin. Eugenie Cotton, president of WIDF, also worked to found the World Peace Council. Eugenie was arrested for advocating that women should tear up their sons’ enlistment papers to fight against the Vietnamese liberation movement. As Adeline Broussan details in her essay, “Resistantes Against the Colonial Order,” Vietnamese women radicalized French communist women through what she calls “grassroots diplomacy” at WIDF gatherings.17 Their radicalization also galvanized the major shift within the French Communist Party to denounce French colonialism in absolute terms. But the consolidation of anti-colonialism at the French imperial center came with a cost. By January 1951, the WIDF offices moved to Berlin – the Berlin of the state-socialist German Democratic Republic, where they stayed until 1991. “It seems they are quite the aristocracy over there in Berlin,” Gita wrote on July 1st, 1954.18 She wrote her letter to another staff member from these early years: Betty Millard, a communist party member in the United States, who worked alongside her in Paris from 1949 to 1951. Gita worked as part of WIDF’s Anticolonial International Preparatory Committee to support women’s organizations in colonized regions of the world. Betty was an editor of the CPUSA journal New Masses for four years before arriving in Paris. Millard edited the English-language edition of its Information Bulletin that publicized international, regional and national campaigns for women’s emancipation. Like Gita, Betty also solidified the international outreach by the organization, and gathered information about ongoing local campaigns of its member organizations for the Bulletin and solidarity campaigns. “But we may be pleased to remember that we did the primitive accumulation part,” Gita wrote. “Now we are again engaged in primitive accumulation.”19 Gita’s primitive accumulation, along the grain of Rosa Luxemburg’s use of the term, described the process of creating value from something in its raw, unrealized form. In jest, Gita flipped the term on its head. Rather than referring to the profits capitalism requires from commodifying non-capitalist land, resources, and labor, Gita imagined a communist primitive accumulation that built valuable revolutionary movements from peoples’ scattered struggles against their oppression. She knew firsthand of the movements like the Tebhaga land struggle that pushed agricultural women into their movement’s leadership. She imagined ways to give heft to regional working people’s struggles, not by making their demands homogenous, but by pulling together their multiplicity through international solidarity

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 27

and support. Left feminist activism, that created movements in Budapest, Paris, Kolkata, Beijing and New York, to name just a few locations, built the women’s movement in these years. While in Paris, Gita played a key role organizing the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference, held in Beijing. Their primitive accumulation plumbed the soil of internationalism after the destruction of a planetary war. They strengthened old values of common worth, not as a hidden ore below humanity’s surface, but as an affirmed commonality of vision and purpose. Even in the years when WIDF was welcome in Paris, this work was hardscrabble in the wreckage that a fascist war left behind: broken lives, destroyed communities, betrayal and ongoing colonial occupation. In 1950, Gita was part of the team that coordinated WIDF’s first international campaign for peace in Korea. She attended campaign organizational meetings across Europe. Betty wrote press releases and speeches. WIDF framed the campaign in two ways. First, WIDF described women’s activism as it forged solidarity against US-led imperialist aggression, led by women from Korea, but also women from other colonized countries. Second, WIDF framed the campaign as a maternalist fight led by all women from imperialist and colonized nations against the use of their sons and husbands as canon-fodder for war. The World Peace Council, co-founded in 1947 by WIDF members, joined their campaign against the NATO forces and US military attack on North Korea to demand peace, self-determination, and an end to the American occupation of the region. They sought the support of the Chinese forces to help them in their fight against superior air power and chemical weapons that decimated whole populations of people. They framed American imperialism as the defining trigger for war, not the North Korean government’s attempt to break the Rhee government of South Korea by crossing the 38th parallel, allowing its military forces to briefly occupy most of Korea. This framing remains contentious, since it overturns the current historical consensus about the instigation of the Korean War, as Bruce Cumings exhaustively details.20 Yet, even in his careful untangling of which side’s military forces acted first, the precipitating act of war is hard to locate with any certainty, nor with any clear gain in our understanding of the conflict. The perspective of delegates to the WIDF conferences included women from the south of the 38th parallel and from north of this border; nevertheless, as communists, they shared their analysis in support of North Korea. Their perspective about the larger context of imperialist occupation refuted the dominant narrative that the US-NATO forces and the South Korean military simply responded to North Korea’s initiating an overture to war by launching their capture of territory far beyond the 38th parallel in June 1950. The first UN-backed invasion began soon afterwards, when the United States launched a military response to the North Korean advance across the 38th parallel into the region designated as South Korea in the years after the withdrawal of

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Japanese occupation. In alliance with the South Korean government led by Syngman Rhee, these US and NATO forces pummeled North Korea for the next three years. The alacrity of American support for the South Korean government surprised the North Korean military. The sheer force of the US government’s support for South Korea was overwhelming, including military ships, airpower, troops and military expertise. The early speed of North Korean forces in occupying parts of South Korea, including Seoul, was quickly halted and decisively pushed back by the end of 1950. At the end of the conflict, over 3 million Koreans were killed; it is estimated that at least 2 million were civilian deaths.21 In North Korea alone, civilians were half of the two million people killed. Over these three years, American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs and 32,557 tons of napalm on the country. By 1952, no military targets remained, but the onslaught continued until 1953. The WIDF campaign against the Korean War spanned women’s activism around the world to frame peace as a women’s issue. In the words of historian Suzy Kim, “socialist internationalism in the context of a global peace movement facilitated a productive understanding of difference – whether gendered, racial, ethnic, national or any other – toward a ‘transversal’ politics of solidarity as seen during the Korean War.”22 Michelle Chase provides a fascinating account of Cuban women’s dedicated solidarity to the global campaign against US military intervention in Korea. Chase focuses on Edith Buchaca, who attended the Asian Women’s Conference in 1949, and Candelaria Rodriguez, a member of the WIDF fact-finding team that toured North Korean cities devastated by war. The solidarity of complicity that refused the conscription of soldiers from colonized countries to fight for imperialism shifted to what Chase calls “internationalist solidarity.”23 Internationalist solidarity refused to support the imperialist war machine; but it also articulated a prosocialist alternative to imperialism through anti-colonial women’s unity through a solidarity of commonality. In 1951, Gita returned to India and the activism of the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (MARS). As she joked to Betty, their work of primitive accumulation in Paris gave organizational form to shared ideals and disparate contexts around the world. Organizing to build socialism, with women’s equality and justice at the heart of this vision, simply continued after they returned to their homes of origin. Gita and Betty wrote letters to each other for decades after spending those two years in Paris building WIDF together. In no small part, due to their countries’ anti-communist clampdown, they never met again. Gita’s letter to Betty written in 1954 spurs two questions faced by most, but not all activists part of anti-imperialist internationalism during this period. How do you build a feminist people’s movement for revolution grounded in a nation-state that doesn’t want you there? And how do you build this movement alongside someone who’s halfway around the world? Movement-building – or in Bandyopadhyay’s

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 29

creative reuse of Luxemburg’s term, primitive accumulation – developed during the forties and fifties through WIDF’s centrifugal energy of an international organization. The creativity and vitality did not come from the central offices in Paris, but from the varied struggles waged in colonialized, post-colonial and imperial contexts. International organizations like WIDF meant little without the bullets taken by its members, and the campaigns launched by its affiliated women’s groups that they won and lost and won again.

Budapest, Hungary, 1948 & Beijing, People’s Republic of China, 1949 Gita and Betty first met in 1948 at WIDF’s Second International Women’s Congress held in Budapest, Hungary. The Congress in Budapest brought members to assess their activism since its founding three years earlier. The decision to focus on women’s anti-colonial activism in 1946 expanded their founding commitment to anti-fascism.24 WIDF explicitly added anti-racism and anti-colonialism to its commitment to fighting fascism. Women from the US delegation and women from the Indian, Vietnamese, Moroccan, Algerian and Chinese delegations sought this clarity from WIDF’s inception. They gained solidarity for their demand from African American activists who made sure anti-racism was another explicit goal. In this sense, they adhered to a definition of fascism honed in the 1930s. Marxist theorist R. Palme Dutt, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, defined fascism as an integral ideology of capitalism since it was the defense of last resort. Fascism maintained capitalism in the face of revolutionary upheaval. It intensified the dictatorship of capitalism and the repression of the working class. Fascism also concentrated each imperialist block into a single economic and political unity. War only solidified the antagonisms and contradictions within imperialism. Dutt also characterized fascism as a movement through its actors: “Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements dominantly petit bourgeois, but also slum proletarian and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working class revolution and smash the working class organization.”25 What made fascism specific, in Dutt’s analysis, was its reliance on overt violence and illegal methods to shore up the capitalist system in crisis. WIDF members from around the world sharpened a gendered and racialized analysis of fascism during these heady years from 1945 to the mid-1950s. They mobilized women’s socially-dominant role as mothers and maternalist rhetoric to attack fascism. But anti-fascism in their publications also emphasized women’s willingness to fight, physically and militarily, against fascist violence. WIDF’s public materials used the terms of maternalism not as a biological destiny, but as a

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social role that anti-fascist, anti-racist and anti-colonial women shaped rather than simply inhabited. Gita contributed to the central document presented at the 1948 conference, “The Women of Asia and Africa.” The report began with a quotation from the United Nations Charter, Article 73 about “non-self-governing territories” that affirmed “that the interests of the inhabitants of these territories are paramount, and accept as a sacred trust the obligation to promote to the utmost, within the system of international peace and security established by the present Charter, the well-being of the inhabitants of these territories,” with cultural rights and self-government upheld.26 The photo after this declaration showed the severed heads of anti-colonial insurgents on stakes. Underneath was the caption, “Here is how the colonialist countries respect the charter of the United Nations which they signed.”27 As a member working in the WIDF’s central offices in Paris, Gita was on the Asian Women’s Conference organizing committee. She spent over a month in China beforehand to prepare for the gathering. She also attended as a delegate. Due to the hostile political climate in India, she used a pseudonym, Mira Mitra, for her speech about children’s conditions in India.

Paris, France & Warsaw, Poland, 1950-1951 Gita and Betty became close while working together in Paris. They shared a wry sense of humor and a keen eye for the absurd. Gita and Betty both attended the WIDF executive committee meetings in Berlin held in February 1951, where they decided to send an investigative team to Korea. On March 5, 1951 Gita wrote to Betty about a train journey she took after the meetings, with the East German contingent from Berlin, GDR to Warsaw, Poland to attend a WIDF-sponsored rally for peace, as part of the “Hands Off Korea” campaign. Gita was sure her adventure would make Betty “green with envy” as she sat in Paris editing the Bulletin Anglais: I never knew the German women possessed as loud voices as the Bengalis and Americans or could speed up their speech like the French. Four of those German women – extremely friendly and delightful – four among the 91 million front ranks, kept up a non-stop conversation for 4 hours while the rather bewildered Bengali – also a front member of a more colonial order tried to catch a bit of sleep… At the stroke of twelve, suddenly the noise increased a thousandfold and in spite of the gradually developing deafness of the Bengali type, her eardrums seemed to be on the bursting point!28

Gita’s inability to rest on the overnight journey was compounded when five other men entered the compartment carrying bottles of vodka to jumpstart a party.

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Peeping through a buttonhole, I beheld the following spectacle: in front of me (the compartment by the way, was 6 x 3 feet in size) a pug-nosed, bald-headed, perpetually smiling man; next to him one of the 91 millions (a member of WIDF), squeezed like a tomato in a sandwich; next, another stub-nosed, toothbrush-moustache, bald-headed Pole holding a vodka bottle near Elli’s (Elli Schmidt, President of the Democratic Union of German Women) unwilling mouth… They pushed me and thrust the vodka bottle to my horrified mouth, making me reflect a little bit on the inferiority of the European civilization!! I shouted “Dormir” in pure French because I couldn’t really remember any other language and shut my eyes as tightly as possible. In a little while the room became dead quiet and a load fell on my side. “Hai ah” I shouted and found this giant, bald-head sleeping comfortably on my side smelling of vodka and on hearing me shout punched me affectionately!

The train journey ended with Gita’s glasses broken after wrestling to avoid a hug. On arriving, one of the toothbrush types thought of making up with an Asiatic type by asking for my Mao Tse Tung badge, which I immediately gave him, fearing being vodka sprinkled. With the greatest passion he threw his arms around me and in the process of his trying to launch a toothbrush kiss and me trying to avoid it, a “crack” was heard leaving my spectacles a little damaged which resulted in the blindness of my right eye… Well, Bettuska, would you every again travel by plane? I would never. Life would be much uninteresting in contrast in such 12 hours – wouldn’t it?!!

Bandyopadhyay’s racialization of her journey multiplied and refracted through her telling: to be a “Bengali type” sent up ethnic codes of regionalized India. These regional types are colonial, since they were constructed and mobilized in the divide-and-conquer techniques honed by the British. They are also national, since they continued to have characteristic typecasting within India after independence. The “Asiatic type” she references carries a racism that crosses the globe and does not rely on overt colonialism for its violence. “European civilization,” while intrinsic to the colonial rationalization of manifest destiny, in Bandyopadhyay’s story is synonymous with alcoholic sexual harassment endemic to colonizing countries. The cacophony of languages with exclamations in French and Hindi, embedded in German, Polish, and English, adds yet another layer of humor through the discomfort. Her final riposte, of always traveling by train, never plane, embeds a class analysis in her tale. The bourgeois manners of plane travel would have shut down the possibility of mayhem altogether. The humor of Bandyopadhyay’s storytelling to Millard relied upon a shared critique of colonialism and male supremacism, without a doubt. But her humorous indirection also relied on a deeper level of intimacy; one of shared sensibility and knowledge that the humor in its anti-imperialist complexity would be understood.

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Hands Off Korea campaign, 1950-1953 With her vision blurred in her right eye and a perpetual wink to gain some vision in her left eye, the Congress for Peace began. The international peace movement against the bombing of Korea by US and NATO forces was the central topic. Gita described her role as one “of a more colonial order” through the parochial but deeply felt solidarity of WIDF’s Polish delegates: In the meantime, all the Polish women present at the Congress wanted me to be a Korean. This led to many tears and embraces, very touching, but it left me a bit shy on account of taking all the courageous fight of the Koreans on me.29

This form of parochial solidarity was not Gita’s first experience with it. A year earlier Gita added a personal note to Betty that she attached to a WIDF report she wrote from Budapest, Hungary. You may call me an imposter or whatever you like but the fact is that the Hungarians insist on my being a Korean and I like it or not I am a Korean in Budapest. But thanks to the People’s government I have not yet encountered the inevitable questions in regard to jungles – snakes and tigers. It is wonderful to see how much they are propagating for Korea. Everywhere, in streets, in colleges, in cinemas one would find “HANDS OFF KOREA” posters. I wish Pak Den Ai [Pak Chong-ae] and the other Korean comrades could see all of this.30

Betty wrote to her mother about meeting Pak Chong-ae, a committed anti-colonial leader in North Korea who was the chair of the Democratic Women’s Union of Korea and served on the WIDF Executive Council since 1948. “I have a Korean friend, Pak Den Ai (the transliteration of her name used in WIDF documents during this period), when I first met her in Budapest we could only smile and shake hands and talk sign language – by the time we met in Peking (Beijing) I had learned a few words of Russian and she of English – now in Helsinki we know a little more and we’re old friends.”31 They first met in Budapest at WIDF’s second international congress, then renewed their friendship on the train from Moscow on their way to the Asian Women’s Conference in Beijing the following year, and met again at the Executive Council meetings in Helsinki in 1950 after the Korean War had begun. By 1951, these interpersonal linkages smoothed the campaign to oppose the NATO and American military campaign against Korea. At the invitation of Pak Chong-ae and the Korean Women’s Democratic League in January 1951 to witness the carpet bombing and ground troop assault, a WIDF fact-finding delegation of twenty-one women from eighteen countries traveled to North Korea in May 1951. They filmed what they saw and the women they met, yet another proof of the veracity of their claims. Their

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 33

report, We Accuse! was issued in five languages, English, French, Russian, Chinese and Korean. As the campaign rippled outward, it was translated into twenty languages.32 We Accuse! galvanized women’s organizations around the world to oppose the US military occupation of Korea. It also spurred the United States to hold congressional hearings to refute their findings, particularly about the use of chemical warfare on civilian populations, an act of human rights abuse against the Geneva conventions. WIDF’s report, detailed with devastating specificity how American and UN forces tortured eleven-year-old girls, buried the people of entire villages alive, and raped women until they died. They submitted their report, with its graphic and well-documented testimony of chemical and biological warfare, to the United Nations. As a result of their opposition to the Korean War, as Taewoo Kim describes, they lost their consultative status to the UN Economic and Social Council, a status not returned until 1967.33 The women who visited war sites, spoke to women and wrote the report lost their jobs, faced other retribution such as imprisonment, but no one recanted the truth of their findings.34 We Accuse fueled the global peace campaign to rally against the atrocities by United States and NATO troops committed in Korea. Michelle Chase characterized the activism of two Cuban revolutionary women in this international campaign, Edith García Buchaca, who attended the Asian Women’s Conference, and another, Candelaria Rodríguez, who traveled to Korea as part of WIDF’s fact-finding mission. Their combined stories suggest that some Cuban women found inspiration and meaning in global struggles for women’s emancipation and that they saw these as linked to broader questions of national liberation, decolonization, and socialist revolution. Finally, their conceptual framework helps explain why women’s anti-war activism in this period was not restricted to maternalist references to women’s natural desire for peace.35

“Hands Off Korea!” read the posters on the streets of Hungary and Poland. “Germany No Second Korea!” was one slogan in East Germany. Another poster was more visceral: “Vermin Infestation. Korea is a warning! Fight for peace against the criminals of humanity.”36 Giant fleas with the faces of Truman, Churchill and Adenauer crawled toward the poster’s viewer. The name of the campaign in the Soviet Union was “Struggle for Peace!” In the US, American Women for Peace, with Betty Millard playing a central coordinating role, launched “Save Our Sons!” Michelle Chase describes the solidarity campaign in Cuba, where the Democratic Federation of Cuban Women poured its energy into the campaign. A flyer read, “Imperialists Demand Cuban Blood! Let’s Save Our Children!”37 Millions of signatures were collected on petitions against the Korean War around the world. American women launched a letter-writing campaign to President Truman demanding the release of WIDF’s report to the American public.38

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International Women’s Day became the touchpoint for anti-imperialism in the US leftist women’s movement beginning in 1950, heeding the call for solidarity issued by the Asian Women’s Conference. By contrast, Gita’s organization revived International Women’s Day within India even earlier, in 1943. Claudia Jones, the chair of the CPUSA Women’s Commission, and close comrade of Betty Millard wrote numerous articles against the bombardment of Korea in her column “Half the World” in the Daily Worker. The US government arrested her three times between 1950 and 1951; under the Smith Act (the Alien Registration Act) and the McCarren Act, that required communist organizations to register with the US Attorney General. Her speech “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace” was the reason for her first arrest.39 As part of an upsurge in active refusal of government foreign policy and domestic priorities, Jones was truly part of a global moment in history. In Syria, the two delegates who attended the Asian Women’s Conference, Amine Aref Hassen and Salma Boummi, were also arrested for leading an international women’s day protest against the government. In 1953, Claudia Jones contested her imprisonment to the US Court: Will you measure, for example, as worthy of one year’s sentence, my passionate adherence to the idea of fighting for full unequivocal equality for my people, the Negro people, which as a Communist I believe can only be achieved allied to the cause of the working class? A year for another vital Communist belief that the bestial Korean war is an unjust war? Or my belief that peaceful coexistence can be achieved and peace won if struggled for?40

Internationalism during this period was a praxis that had two terrains, one imperialist and the other under imperial domination. Both espoused shared ideals and picked a fight. This praxis asked every activist to choose a side: in favor of imperialist occupation and war, or against.

Budge Budge, South 24 Parganas, 1951 Gita returned to a vastly different nation three years later when she returned in 1951. The communist party was no longer underground. Women energized by the struggles in the 1940s gained some victories in the 1950s. When they fought alongside peasant men during the much-celebrated Tebhaga movement, they began with a demand for more grain from their harvest. They then pursued their rights to the land they sowed. Peasant women activists joined the communist party and peasant organizations linked to the communists. They made manifest demands that communists before them may have heard, but let wait for another day. Peasant women demanded an end to the interpersonal violence that structured their pinched

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horizons. Gargi Chakravartty described the direct criticisms of the CPI lodged by members of MARS in 1952: At a meeting, sometime in November 1952, Communist women discussed threadbare, the politburo’s document on “Task on the Women’s Front.” While appreciating the call for a separate broad-based, multi-class organization of women for equal rights, they disagreed with the Party for not addressing the issue of the “double yoke of oppression.” They expressed their resentment that the Party document had failed to link the social with the economic demands of women. They were critical about the Party’s formulations regarding working-class women as they did not address gender inequality.41

As Chakravartty describes, organized peasant women added another dimension of patriarchal violence into the frontlines of communist struggles. Violence was not entirely at the hand of the state, they said, but also embedded itself in the patriarchal relations that gave husbands and parents-in-law control over the movement and actions of women. Additionally, peasant women successfully argued they should have the right to their own earnings unconditionally. Land to the those who worked on it. Fruits of labor to the worker. If the peasant family was the only unit to measure justice; peasant women working every day of their lives would see little of it. Women’s rights within these families, they argued, required enumeration, attention and organization woven into communist mores. These lessons came from struggles that had heavy costs. Yet Gita also returned to a nation where little had changed since 1948. Even with communists living above ground, they faced unending harassment from the police. Communist women fighting for basic justice issues for the most vulnerable people in their localities faced more subtle, but just as wrenching pressures. The social boycott was one popular velvet hammer wielded against women activists, for daring to move more freely in and out of homes, for demanding an audience at the local police stations, for listening to women’s stories, and for addressing groups in public places. The old trope of honor as a cudgel used against women placed suspicion on their service. These whisper campaigns jeopardized these women’s ability to buy food from local merchants, or kerosene for their stoves, or any of the other small necessities of life. Gossip and personal slander that impugned their morality were a nuisance. Social boycotts, however, could mean expulsion from a neighborhood and disruption of movement building. Gita moved to the rural heartland of militant jute mill workers, an area called Budge Budge in South 24 Parganas and plunged into peasant and workers’ struggles through organizing rural women. Most likely, she was given this assignment by the CPI to develop her organizing skills of working class and agricultural people; to develop her capacity to listen to the working masses of India. Upper caste, college

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educated organizers like Gita learned the lives of the rural poor, living alongside the rural poor. Their decisions were not temporary ones. They did not spend a little time in one place before moving to another, unless they were organizing across a region as some did during the Tebhaga movement. Brahmin caste status was largely lost in the process, since the work and contact with the rural poor of diverse caste and religious backgrounds had cultural consequences. Gita followed directly in the steps of her comrade Pratibha Ganguly who had been killed by the police in 1949 while Gita was working for the WIDF central offices.42 Ganguly had been a beloved communist organizer in Budge Budge, trudging daily through the marshy ground of rural localities even during heavy monsoon rains to talk with peasant women. Between 1947 and 1951, eleven thousand peasants and activists had been arrested in South 24 Parganas alone.43 When Ganguly was killed by the police in the women’s march for peace and rights in 1949, she left tracks and networks that Bandyopadhyay followed. Every day of her work in Budge Budge held long-standing difficulties. Health – of simple dysentery and endemic malaria – were life-threatening when food and basic medicines, even topical antibiotics were so scarce. In her letters to Betty Millard, she described the need for quinine, or thanked Betty for the latest supplies sent. She organized along the grain of communist tradition: provide relief for daily needs and build the means for women to determine their own demands. With one other woman from South 24 Parganas, Bandyopadhyay opened a school in Ganguly’s name for women and girls. At first the school failed, since both the Muslim and Hindu women in the area said they were too busy to attend. They did not think that the school met their needs. Even after scouring the region, only two women joined the school. In response, they developed specialized outreach methods for women of different ages: literacy for girls and young women, skilled work like midwifery, sewing and handicrafts for women, and organizing training for older women whose children had grown. By 1953, the school had gained the enthusiasm of women, young and old, who enrolled their daughters. Older women used their organising skills to open new MARS chapters across the region.44 Middle-aged women opened women’s work cooperatives, and schools. Young women created groups for teen girls (Kishore bahinis). The membership of MARS burgeoned in West Bengal, through its proliferation of schools, job-training sites, and self-help initiatives. They still fought for women’s right to live free from violence. They still confronted the state for its neglect. But they also built the strength of women to live independently in the process. Bandyopadhyay’s school in Budge Budge became a model for radical women’s education and proliferated across West Bengal.

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Internationalism The train journey from Berlin to Warsaw returned in Gita’s letters, this time through the lens of nostalgia. In her first letter to Betty after landing in Kolkata, she announced her sudden marriage to a well-known revolutionary poet and communist Subhash Mukhopadhyay. “I am so anxious to know your reactions on this. Subhash (my husband) felt a bit jealous of you when I told him how all of you kissed me on all occasions and even men with moustaches embraced me.”45 The love within the movement, and its showering of affection, wanted and undesired, stayed uppermost in Gita’s memories of this time. She also returned to what she calls the glamour of WIDF. Gita’s passport was seized by the government as soon as she returned – as was Betty’s in the US. In 1953 she wrote to Betty during WIDF’s Third International Women’s Congress held in Copenhagen, Denmark. Neither could attend, but each of their national delegations at the massive women’s conference was large and enthusiastic: I feel a pang near my heart remembering the good old days. Remember being photographed in Berlin every two minutes? Imagine the Congress in Denmark. Click, click – click, click – the cameras go. I am here in this remote jungle in a hut beside a ditch. You are somewhere in Latin America may be.46

Internationalism is a lofty invocation. Unlike imperialism, with the class-targeted hardships of scarcity, it’s harder to see the increments of international solidarity: relationships, affection, laughter and shared ideals. As Rachel Leow and Su Lin Lewis emphasize in their scholarship about activism in Asia during the early and mid 1950s, even in avowedly leftist spaces, the visions for socialism were wide-ranging, fluid and under construction by Asian activists across the region.47 It is also difficult to imagine how to put solidarity with women across the globe into practice. In West Bengal, in 1953, leftist women distributed petitions for peace across the state and collected thousands of signatures. A symbolic gesture against the Korean War, against ongoing colonial occupation and counterinsurgency. But each signature by a rural woman had education behind it: discussions about the struggles for anti-imperialist peace and the fights waged by women against imperialism around the world. Each signature was also a celebration of the fight for literacy won by that woman. Each signature provided a material record of her place in this wider collectivity that dared to imagine what the world could be.

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Notes 1

Gita Bandyopadhyay’s name was most commonly spelled Bannerji in the WIDF’s publications. I have chosen Gita Bandyopadhyay’s own spelling of her name, and the spelling used for her name among her comrades, friends and family in India.

2

Ratnabali Chatterjee, “Gita Bandyopadhyay: Memories and Impressions,” email correspondence with the author, 2021.

3

Gita Bandyopadhyay, Ek Dub Dui Dub (One Dip, Two Dips) (Kolkata: Kabi Pokkho, 1998). Translated to English from Bengali by Sarbajaya Bhattacharya, 2021.

4

Manikuntala Sen, In Search of Freedom: An Unfinished Journey (Calcutta: Stree, 2001):120-1; Gargi Chakravartty, “Emergence of Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti in the Forties – Calcutta Chapter,” in Calcutta: The Stormy Decades edited by Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay. (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015), 177-203.

5

Bandyopadhyay, 2021.

6

Marik, Soma. ‘Breaking Through a Double Invisibility: The Communist Women of Bengal,  1939–1948’, Critical Asian Studies, 45:1 (2013), 79-118.

7

Bandyopadhyay, 2021. Section 144 of the Criminal Procedure Code was used to ban political activity in India. For additional mention of Sudha Ray’s formative role in the CPI, see Hajrah Begum, “Women in the Party in the Early Years,” New Age (December 14, 1975), 11.

8

National Union of Students, “Co-ordinating Council for Colonial Students’ Affairs,” letter to solicit support for a demonstration for “Indonesian freedom and (to) show their solidarity with the Indonesian youth struggling against colonialism,” written by Mina Sen, Secretary, January 11, 1949. The National Archives, London, UK, Accession Number, CP 537/4381.

9

Ruth McVey, “The Calcutta Conference and the Southeast Asian Uprisings,” Interim Report Series, Modern Indonesia Project, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1958; Tuong Vu, “’It’s Time for the Indochinese Revolution to Show Its True Colors’: The Radical Turn of Vietnamese Politics in 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 40:3(October 2009), 519-542; Larisa Efimova, “Did the Soviet Union Instruct Southeast Asian Communists to Revolt? New Russian Evidence on the Calcutta Youth Conference of February 1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 40:3(October 2009), 449-469.

10

Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41:2(Winter 2016), 305-332.

11

Women’s International Democratic Federation South East Asian Women’s Conference, KPM/ SB/4671/08, Special Branch files, Calcutta Police, Kolkata Police Museum Archive, Kolkata, India. Thanks to Suchetana Chattopadhyay for sharing the Women’s International Democratic Federation files with me.

12

Adrienne Cooper, Sharecropping and Sharecroppers’ Struggles in Bengal, 1930-1950. (Kolkata: KP Bagchi, 1988); Custers, Peter, Women in the Tebhaga Uprising: Rural Poor Women and Revolutionary Leadership, 1946-47 (Kolkata: Naya Prokash, 1987); Yasmine Khan, “Sex in an Imperial War Zone: Transnational Encounters in Second World War India,” History Workshop Journal 73:1(2012), 240-58.

13

Sonali Satpathi, “Mobilizing Women: The Experience of the Left in West Bengal, 1947-1964,” PhD., History, University of Calcutta, 2013.

14

Renu Chakkravartty, Communists in Indian Women’s Movement (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1980).

15

Ibid.

here and there: a story of women’s internationalism, 1948-1953 39

16

KPM/SB/4671/08, Special Branch files, Calcutta Police, Kolkata Police Museum Archive, Kolkata, India. The police reports state that the women were also throwing bombs at the protest, but every woman arrested was released due to the police’s inability to substantiate their claims.

17

See the chapter by Adeline Broussan in this volume.

18

Gita Bandyopadhyay, Letter to Betty Millard, July 1, 1954. Betty Millard Collection, Sophia Smith Archives, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, United States. Hereafter cited as Millard Collection.

19

Ibid.

20

Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 568-621.

21

Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Kim, Suzy, Among Women Across Worlds: North Korea in the Global Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2023).

22

Suzy Kim, “The Origins of Cold War Feminism During the Korean War,” Gender and History 31:2(July 2019), 461.

23

Michelle Chase, “‘Hands Off Korea!’: Women’s Internationalist Solidarity and Peace Activism in Early Cold War Cuba,” Journal of Women’s History 32:3 (Fall 2020), 64-88.

24

“The Situation of Women in Colonies, Discussions on Racial Discrimination,” Bulletin d’Information. 9-10 (Octobre-Novembre, 1946): 7. Women’s International Democratic Federation collection, Atria Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Vivian Carter Mason, the US representative to WIDF from the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Jeanne Merens, a communist and founder of the Algerian Women’s Union and Jai Kishore Handoo, member of the Women’s Committee of India League in London developed early materials for the WIDF executive committee meeting focused on anti-colonialism and anti-racism.

25

R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (San Francisco: Proletarian Publisher, 1934), 102.

26

WIDF Preparatory Committee for the Conference of the Women of Asia, The Women of Asia and Africa (Budapest: WIDF, 1948).

27

Ibid, 5.

28

Gita Bandyopadhyay, letter to Betty Millard, March 5, 1951, Millard collection.

29

Ibid.

30

Gita Bandyopadhyay, letter to Betty Millard, September 6, 1950, Millard Collection.

31

Betty Millard, letter to her mother (copy), April 2, 1950, Millard Collection.

32

“We Accuse! Report of the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Korea, May 16 to 27, 1951” (Berlin: WIDF, 1951). See also, “The Children of Korea: Call to the Women of the World,” another pamphlet published by WIDF in 1951 with an appeal for humanitarian support for the Korean people, particularly mothers and children. The WIDF official report, delivered to the United Nations, was also published in 1951. “Report of the Women’s International Commission for the Investigation of Atrocities Committed by the USA and Syngmann Rhee Troops in Korea,” The Delegation, Korea II, Box 60, Folder 2, Reference Center for Marxist Studies Pamphlet Collection, Tamiment Library and Robert Wagner Labor Archives, New York City.

33

Taewoo Kim, “Frustrated Peace: Investigatory Activities by the Commission of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in North Korea During the Korean War,” Singkyun Journal of East Asian Studies 20:1 (2020), 83-112.

34

Ibid, 84.

35

Chase, “‘Hands Off Korea!’”, 81.

36

Young-Sun Hong, Cold War Germany, the Third World, and the Global Humanitarian Regime (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 54.

40 elisabeth armstrong

37

Chase, “‘Hands Off Korea!’”, 71.

38

Many of the members of CAW reconfigured as part of American Women for Peace to maintain their activism during the McCarthy period. Their newsletter, The Peacemaker, dedicated one issue to the WIDF contingent that toured Korea and reported on the carnage. In “Negro G.I.s Question Korea,” demanded an end to racist wars in Asia and Africa. “We think that we Negroes, who are asked to fight wars in Asia and Europe but who are not free at home should have our say before it is too late. If enough of us can get together, we believe we will get our peace and freedom too.” The editorial stated: “We who are aware of the effects of these things, and who love our country look with horror on the death and misery which has resulted from our war policy. We cry out.” “Editorial: U.S. Bankrupt Policy,” The Peacemaker 2:8 (September 1951) in the Millard Collection.

39

Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” Political Affairs 29:3 (1950):

40

Claudia Jones, “Speech to the Court, February, 1953,” Thirteen Communists Speak in Court (New

32-45. York: New Century Publications, 1953), 121. 41

Gargi Chakravartty, “Emergence of Mahila Atma Raksha Samiti in the Forties – Calcutta Chapter,” in Tanika Sarkar and Sekhar Bandyopadhyay (eds), The Stormy Decades: Calcutta (New Delhi: Social Science Press, 2015), 202.

42

Sonali Satpathi, “Mobilizing Women: The Experience of the Left in West Bengal, 1947-61,” PhD. Dissertation, Calcutta University, 2013.

43

Statistics are from the CPI newspaper Swadhinata Patrika cited in Sonali Satpathi, “Mobilizing Women: The Experience of the Left in West Bengal, 1947-61,” PhD. Dissertation, Calcutta University, 2013, 202.

44

Satpathi, 2013.

45

Gita Bandyopadhyay, letter to Betty Millard, October 24, 1951, Millard Collection.

46

Gita Bandyopadhyay, letter to Betty Millard, June 6, 1953, Millard Collection.

47

See the chapter by Su Lin Lewis in this volume, as well as Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019), 21-53.

CHAPTER 3

Résistantes Against the Colonial Order: Women’s Grassroots Diplomacy During the French War in Vietnam (1945-1954) Adeline Broussan

Abstract This chapter focuses on the Vietnamese outreach toward Algerian and French women’s activists during the French war in Vietnam, through the prism of the Women’s International Democratic Federation. This Leftist international platform gathered women from colonizing and colonized countries, which allowed for the development of transnational anti-imperialist solidarity. At these meetings, pro-independence Vietnamese women easily connected with Algerian women who were also actively resisting French colonialism. WIDF also created an ideal space for women’s grassroots diplomacy where women from colonized countries confronted French women with their deeply rooted colonial bias. Indeed, Vietnamese and Algerian speeches paved the way for the dismantling of ingrained colonial culture amongst European Leftist women, who consequently further echoed the voices of anti-colonial resisters in their home country.

Keywords: French War in Vietnam, anti-imperialism, Leftist women, women’s internationalism, WIDF

Mothers and spouses from Europe, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, France … who suffered the atrocities committed by the bloodthirsty brutes of Nazism: … If the bloodiest drama could unfold this way in Europe, if the cruelest and barbarous actions could be committed by the most civilized countries of the globe, it is because even before this war, even during peacetime, this barbarity already existed there at a latent state, it has always existed, in real and permanent ways in the colonies.1

In December 1945, Duong The Hauh2 addressed a crowd of women from forty countries at the first Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) meeting in Paris. In her straightforward address, she reached out to European women who were just recovering from the Nazi occupation and violence. Empathizing with the recent ordeal of European women, she nevertheless wanted them to realize that colonies were not yet rid of “barbarity,” which dated back to European

42 adeline broussan

colonization. At this peace conference, Duong The Hauh confronted both the victory narrative over barbarity and the exceptionalism of Nazi violence by sharing her own experience of colonialization. To her, the reality of living under French soldiers and administrators’ brutal rule was comparable to French women’s experience of Nazi occupation, a point that strongly resonated with Algerian women. Beyond the shared rejection of colonialism, Algerian and Vietnamese women’s destinies were deeply intertwined considering the great numbers of Algerian soldiers sent to fight in Vietnam. Therefore, this conference would be the starting point of a frank and eye-opening dialogue for French women and the place where Vietnamese and Algerian women strengthened their connection to end brutal French rule. Decolonial movements had no real allies in the colonial governments or at the United Nations until they became sovereign nations themselves. Therefore, the WIDF created an ideal space for what I call “women’s grassroots diplomacy.” As a parallel platform, the WIDF gatherings allowed women leaders in decolonial movements to reach colonizing women on equal ground and push their demands to end the colonial occupation. These highly attended international meetings fostered an alternative form of diplomacy and challenged male-dominated foreign relations. The organization relied on masses of women-led groups from all backgrounds who gathered and shared information at a national and local level, thus influencing their national politics through grassroots activism. This flexibility and inclusivity allowed for more freedom since WIDF members were not tethered to diplomatic protocols and power games, unlike men in official diplomatic spaces. Through grassroots diplomacy, colonized women confronted women from colonizing countries to their deeply rooted colonial bias. They exposed the additional layers of oppression and violence they had been fighting since the beginning of colonization. The WIDF debates paved the way for the dismantling of ingrained colonial culture amongst European women, who consequently further echoed the voices of resisters in their home country. Despite its significant role in transnational activism, the WIDF has long remained invisible in Cold War foreign relations history until the 2010s. Francisca de Haan’s groundbreaking works on WIDF led the way to recover this colossal organization’s rich history from a historiography that has so far focused on “hegemonic western liberal feminism.”3 Elisabeth Armstrong’s research on the 1949 WIDF-sponsored Women of Asia Conference has been instrumental in retrieving the centrality of anti-colonialism in the organization, which allowed the development of the “solidarity of commonality.” The overwhelming criticism of colonialism from Asian women’s testimonies – including poor and rural ones – shed light on the power imbalance between women from colonizing and colonized countries and reframed the transnational feminist solidarity discourse in WIDF.4

résistantes against the colonial order 43

While this research draws from the historiography of women’s international peace conferences, WIDF differed from this internationalism in its scope and reached since it gathered women-led groups both from colonizing and colonized countries.5 Recently, the collective volume The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives recovered the legacy of this male Soviet-led international effort, which laid the ground for understanding colonialism under the prism of economic oppression, similarly to the WIDF’s main tenants, in addition to women’s rights.6 Keisha Blain’s Set the World on Fire, and Imaobong D. Umoren’s Race Women Internationalists unearthed unjustly forgotten Black women’s transnational activism.7 They showed how Black women, in solidarity with women in colonized countries in Africa and Asia, rightfully denounced the “global color line which placed people of color at the bottom of the social, economic, and political hierarchy” across the empires, including the American one.8 This chapter also builds on Katharine McGregor’s article on Vietnamese and Algerian solidarity, in which she explored their shared bond against French imperialism. In addition to the WIDF’s reach to the United Nations, McGregor focused on the juxtaposition in WIDF publications of victimization and the empowering representation of Vietnamese and Algerian resistance fighters as cement for the anti-colonial stand.9 In this essay, while concurring with McGregor’s analysis of WIDF’s maternalism and celebration of heroines, I center Vietnamese women’s leadership in getting support from strategic allies in France and Algeria. I set 1945 as the pivotal moment when Vietnamese grassroots diplomats exposed French women to a decolonial discourse. Thanks to a tailored and targeted discourse, they rendered their struggle relatable to French women by comparing the Nazi occupation of France with French colonialism. Concurrently, Vietnamese women connected with Algerian women who shared the same urgency for ending French colonization. Vietnamese women paved the way for a frank debunking of the colonial propaganda, which Algerian women supported and amplified before the official start of their own war of liberation. Vietnamese women diplomats specifically connected with Algerian women via a maternalist approach, crafting a discourse they could echo as mothers, the only credible status for women in the patriarchal French colonial system.

1945: A Missed Opportunity for Peace As World War Two ended in 1945, nationalist movements in colonized countries, hopeful of this evolving world order, saw a window of opportunity for independence. Indeed, the war had significantly destabilized European powers. European metropoles, anxious about any signs of colonial decline, had doubled their efforts to reassert imperial control over their colonies. At the Brazzaville Conference in

44 adeline broussan

1944, the French Committee of the National Liberation had already preemptively reaffirmed its colonial intentions in preparation for the post-Vichy regime. Despite the illusion of a new start with proposed extended political rights of colonized people, Charles de Gaulle, then leader of “Free France,” opened the conference with paternalistic mentions of the “immortal French genius,” meant “to elevate men to the summits of dignity and fraternity.”10 While the discussion focused on the future of French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean islands, the intentions were clear for all French colonies: the French republic had no intentions to end the occupation in its colonies. By 1946, France had designed a revamped colonial system, the French Union, which played on a very vague wording and the appearance of compromise while denying colonized people racial and social equality, as well as real political agency.11 Despite the crucial role of colonial soldiers in supporting defeated France during World War Two, the French government continued to strangle its colonies and prevented them from a fair representation in the post-war diplomatic world. In May 1945, the French colonial government immediately crushed the rising will for Algerian independence during a series of massacres in the Sétif region. French colonists12 in Algeria celebrated en masse the German surrender – after all, Algeria had been the headquarter of the French resistance and the provisional French government’s birthplace in 1943. Yet, the new French government pursued a strict colonial control of Algerian people forced into the French department’s structure. At the time, the French police had once again imprisoned Massali Hadj, the precursor of the independence movement and founder of the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA, meaning Party of the Algerian People). On May Day, his supporters demonstrated in Algiers and Oran to demand his liberation, yet the police and pro-French Algeria colonists attacked the processions. A few days later, the PPA and the broader nationalist movement Amis du Manifeste et de la liberté (AML) organized a similar peaceful demonstration. Yet the colonial camp again attacked the crowd, and the violence brutally escalated and spread like wildfire in Sétif, Guelma, and the surrounding countryside.13 Days of mass violence followed with killings, bombings, pillaging, and arrests.14 The death toll is impossible to certify due to the lack of records and French censorship, yet rough estimates amount to thousands of Algerian civilians casualties.15 The North African troops who were heavily involved in France’s liberation returned to annihilated villages.16 Historian and movement veteran Mohammed Harbi argued that the massacres in Sétif and Guelma were the real beginning of the war of independence, which is essential to understand the Algerian representatives’ state of mind as they ventured to the first WIDF meeting. These protests resulted from the longstanding Algerian resistance against the French17 and remain to these days a significant trauma in Algeria.18 A few months later, the French government reoffended when they disregarded Hồ Chí Minh’s declaration of independence on September 2nd, 1945. This dismissal

résistantes against the colonial order 45

exemplified the imbalance of power in the diplomatic world and proved the tragic consequences of this missed opportunity for a peaceful liberation process. France’s boundless colonial appetite doomed Vietnam to thirty years of political instability and constant war. During the summer of 1945, the Vietnamese liberation movement – unified under the name Việt Minh19 – had defeated both the Japanese invaders and their French collaborators under the Vichy regime. After eighty years of resistance to French colonialism, independence thus appeared to the liberators as the rightful outcome of this Vietnamese military victory. In parallel, the winning allied powers met in Potsdam in July 1945 to decide the future of Axis-occupied territories, including French Indochina.2021 This diplomatic entanglement opened up a timely political vacuum propitious for reclaiming Vietnamese sovereignty hence Hồ Chí Minh declaring independence. Yet restoring France’s colonial pride took priority above all.22 De Gaulle shattered any hope for peace when he sent the newly created French Far East Expeditionary Corps to restore French control over Vietnam with British support.23 Neither China nor the United Kingdom present in Vietnam sided with Hồ Chí Minh. Under the United Nations’ new ideal of world peace, officials from colonized countries did not have real decisional power since political and economic alliances between the imperial countries overshadowed self-determination claims. Therefore, WIDF Vietnamese and Algerian women’s successfully convincing the French Women’s Union (Union des Femmes Françaises, or UFF) to commit to this worldwide anti-colonial effort was groundbreaking. As early as 1945, these WIDF French representatives went against the colonial grain by supporting pro-independence Vietnamese women and therefore acknowledged Hồ Chí Minh as the rightful president of newly independent Vietnam. At the time, they represented a minority. Indeed, the French public opinion remained indifferent toward this “faraway conflict with ill-defined stakes, [and] little connected to day-to-day matters” in the context of postwar reconstruction.24 Additionally, French politicians, blinded by colonial ideology and biased narratives about the supposed French mission civilisatrice, ignored the Vietnamese and Algerian century-long will for liberation. Hồ Chí Minh’s had close ties to the French Communist Party (FCP) from its inception. Nguyễn Ái Quốc (his name at the time) participated in the FCP founding congress in Tours in 1920, where he had spoken up against the colonial “abominable crimes” and capitalist exploitation in Indochina.25 Yet, when he declared independence, the FCP members – especially those in powerful positions like François Billaud, Secretary of Defense in 1947, and France vice-president Maurice Thorez26 – did not support their Vietnamese communist counterparts. An unnamed Vietnamese activist rightly understood that the official diplomatic game was rigged because French communists were “Frenchmen and colonialists first, and communists after.”27 Hence, at the WIDF, colonized women tasked French women to educate

46 adeline broussan

the French masses and shift men in power’s political stand toward decolonization, especially elected communist politicians.

Against the Colonial Order The WIDF was the only genuinely anti-colonial space where French women could unlearn deeply seeded colonial culture and ultimately echo Vietnamese and Algerian women’s voices against French occupation. The platform, connecting leftist women worldwide, defined its mission as the fight against fascism and “to establish a durable peace.”28 In the early Cold War context, “democratic” appeared as the code word for socialist-communist opposition to fascism; and “peace” for anti-colonialism/anti-imperialism. WIDF documents rarely mentioned “communism,” almost certainly because of an avowed desire to attract a broad front of leftist women from the “West,” from the Soviet bloc, and the area formerly known as the “Third World.”29 The large membership was collectively committed to defending the “political, economic, judicial and social rights of women.”30 The organization focused on women’s rights without a gender-only lens – social welfare and anti-imperialism had equal footing with women’s rights in the reports.

Figure 2.1. “Across the oceans, Beyond the borders, They came from all the continents.” Map of WIDF participants, in Heures Claires des Femmes Françaises, February 1949. Courtesy of the French Communist Archives in Bobigny, France.

résistantes against the colonial order 47

Through the Women’s International Democratic Federation, Vietnamese women skillfully practiced grassroots diplomacy to convince French women to support their struggle for independence actively. Vietnamese grassroots diplomats living in France already had connections with French women. The “Union of Viet-Nam Women in France” – likely established in 1946 – provided a constant Vietnamese physical presence in the metropole and overlapped with the all-gender association Liên Viêt (Vietnamese Union) created in 1949. Liên Viêt was the continuity of the Hồ Chí Minh delegation, the group of Vietnamese male diplomats at the Fontainebleau conference who stayed in France in 1946. French officials categorically refused to acknowledge them as interlocutors and denied diplomatic visas.31 Both the Union of Viet-Nam Women in France and Liên Viêt included a broad range of Vietnamese nationals residing in France, regardless of their political color. This women’s union provided Vietnamese representation at the UFF and WIDF congresses, especially those held in Europe in the early years. After the end of the French war in Vietnam, the “Vietnamese Women’s Union” – based in Vietnam – became the primary WIDF representation. Thanks to its metropolitan presence, the Union of Viet-Nam Women in France had formed a tight bond with the Union des Femmes Françaises (UFF, or French Women’s Union) and the Union des Femmes Algériennes (UFA, Algerian Women’s Union). The UFF, a communist women’s organization created in 1944, had played a crucial role in the anti-Nazi resistance despite its erasure in the national narrative and focused on post-war reconstruction. Concurrently, a similar group of communist French settlers created the UFA, which at first mainly gathered European women in the leadership.32 In 1954, the French government banned the UFA due to its anti-colonial stand as the Algerian nationalist movement intensified.33 The first UFF national congress in June 1945 already addressed colonialism thanks to the North African delegates, just a month after the Sétif and Guelma massacres. The unnamed UFA representative detailed and condemned this violence and described the growing poverty and unequal access to food rations for Algerian people compared to the European settler population.34 Although there was no mention of independence yet, the congress ended with demands supporting North African women, focusing on better food distribution and Muslim children’s access to education and healthcare.35 The first UFF congress initiated the WIDF creation process, inviting women from the colonies and allied countries such as the Soviet Union, England, Spain, and China.36 During one of the side sessions, the foreign delegates approved Eugenie Cotton’s proposal to create a committee for an international initiative (Comité d’Initiative Internationale – CII) meant to prepare a world congress of women in the following months (which became the founding WIDF conference). These French roots might explain why the first president, Eugénie Cotton, was French and why

48 adeline broussan

the WIDF headquarters were first located in Paris. Yet, in a 1958 interview, Cotton did not attribute the idea to any specific country or person when asked about the federation’s origins. Instead, she evoked a group of women whose main concern was to avoid any new wars.37 From its first congress, WIDF demonstrated careful attention not only to racial but also class diversity, welcoming representatives from diverse social milieux. As an introduction to the first report, Cotton proudly listed the many occupations of the attendees such as politicians, professors as well as farm workers, factory workers, soldiers and housewives.38 Travelling internationally being so costly, all the women with more means were expected to support the financially challenged ones. For example, the French Women’s Union of Viroflay requested its members to make “all the sacrifices […] including monetary ones” in preparation for the conference of Women of Asia so that the more women could travel to the conference.39 The first WIDF congress held in Paris in December 1945 gave a powerful megaphone to women from colonized countries who experienced inequality in unique ways due to the burden of colonization, incomparable to European women’s struggles. Duong The Hauh, Vietnamese delegate of the “Union of Indochinese Women in Paris,” sent an urgent message to end colonization. She detailed the eighty years of “occupation, oppression, police terror that lowered men to the level of a beast.”40 Beyond the violence, she also unequivocally described the failures of the colonial system, which supposedly intended to develop the colonies, an idea promoted by the propaganda of the mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission): “Mothers and spouses of all countries […] most of you ignore the real face of colonialism […], and it is not your fault. You were trained to think of the contrary. […] The reality is very different. The reality is that in Indochina there is a ridiculously low number of roads, railways, hospitals, schools, and this, after 80 years of colonization. Think about the fact that out of 10 pregnant women, only 2 or 3 can go to a maternity clinic, the rest settles for bonesetters; entire regions completely ignore what a midwife is and only know these old ladies, who cause so many accidents with their practice to the point that a woman dying giving birth almost remains unnoticed. Think about the fact that for a population of 25 million, there was in 1938 just 4 high schools; out of 3000 people, 7 boys and one girl go to public school.”41

Her address paid attention to the specific details of colonial subjection, which made her plea for independence undisputable. In a few words, she deconstructed the entire colonial narrative of bringing civilization to “barbarous” regions of the world. She reached out to French women demanding them to free themselves from the lethal masquerade that colonialism was. She assuaged their guilt by acknowledging the reasons for their misinformation – the colonial propaganda. Yet after restoring the truth, she ended her address with a vivid call to protest against

résistantes against the colonial order 49

“colonial barbarity” and to “not tolerate anymore a man oppressing and mistreating another man in any corner of the world.” Her address was the most specifically anti-colonial because it demanded the end of colonization, not just more rights for colonized people, which was instrumental in reframing the anti-fascist struggle amongst the conference participants. Still recovering from the brutal massacres in Sétif and Guelma, the UFA joined the WIDF from its first congress. Out of the four Algerian delegates recorded in the report, three appeared to be of European ancestry, meaning part of the settler population, which may have significantly diluted the message for independence. For example, Alice Sportisse42 acknowledged the will for independence from colonial metropoles, criticized French racism, and decried colonial violence and destruction in the Sétif region. Yet, her speech focused on making the colonial system fairer instead of decolonizing and contained racialized language such as “non-evolved women” to refer to uneducated poor Algerian women, thus showing the ingrained colonial culture even in French allies.43 After 1947, the UFA changed leadership and centered Muslim women in the organization, allowing a more truthful representation of Algerian women’s issues at WIDF gatherings and political material.44 The resolutions voted at the end of this first congress demonstrated unconditional support for decolonial struggles. They asked women in attendance to lobby their governments for the “respect, for each people, of their right to freely chose, without external interference, the form of governance that suits them.”45 Another resolution encouraged women’s organizations of all countries to “help by any means women in colonized and dependent countries, in their struggle for economic, political, and labour rights.”46 The fact that these resolutions were voted in Paris, in December 1945, with many French women representatives in attendance and leadership, is immensely significant for the anti-colonial movement. Indeed, these French leftist women were part of discussions that would only significantly occur after 1947 within male communist circles, who had been ignoring Vietnamese independence and Algerian will for liberation until then.47 Afterward, the PCF slowly adopted and appropriated the decolonial narrative that French WIDF members had developed when engaging in grassroots diplomacy with Vietnamese and Algerian representatives as early as 1945.48 The anti-colonial stand during WIDF congresses strengthened every year thanks to the women in pro-independence movements who eloquently pleaded for their right to self-determination. At the second congress in December 1948 in Budapest, the language became more direct. The first pages of the six-hundredpage report started with a “Manifesto for the defense of peace:” “The imperialists interfere in the internal affairs of those nations where the people are working for their democratic liberties and national independence. Already the tanks and

50 adeline broussan

the planes, the guns and the armoured cars of the Americans, English, French, and Dutch are launched against the freedom-loving peoples of Greece, Indonesia, Viet-Nam, China, and Malaya.”49

By emphasizing “peace,” the WIDF meant to support decolonial struggles, implying a distinction between colonial military intervention and armed resistance. As McGregor explained, WIDF members acknowledged that “militant action, including armed resistance, and the use of violence to obtain peace was necessary in some circumstances.”50 The manifesto opposed specifically the war-mongers and sided with the people taking up arms to defend their sovereignty. Interestingly, the report also included a list of action steps taken since the first congress. Vietnamese women had successfully convinced French women to demand “the reduction of national armaments and war credits, the banning of atom bomb manufacturing, a ban on war propaganda, the payment of the reparations due to France by Germany and the end of the war in Viet-Nam.”51 WIDF congresses helped French leftist women understand the legitimacy of decolonial struggles, especially for Vietnamese women. Until the French war in Vietnam ended in 1954, Algerian delegates at the WIDF meetings did not address independence as directly as their Vietnamese sisters, yet they contributed to decolonial grassroots diplomacy. They openly discussed how the struggle for Algerian independence was already active (and had always been) years before the official start of the war of liberation. Abassia Fodil from Oran and Baya Allouachiche from Algiers both chaired as secretaries of the UFA in their respective cities and became the leading representatives of Algerian women at WIDF.52 At the 1948 Budapest conference, Baya Allaouchiche, a former anti-Vichy resister and renowned activist in the Algerian Communist Party, described the lives of Algerian women living in sub-standard conditions compared to French and fellow European settler women. She explained that Algerian women did not obtain the right to vote like their French counterparts, who had received voting rights in 1944. She exposed that “education [was] refused to Algerian children” and that peasants lived in great poverty due to the exploitation at the hand of a small group of big French landowners who possessed “almost the entire amount of arable land.” She concluded her speech by assuring that “in the Algerian democratic front which is solidly developing, the women will take the first place so that Algeria may advance more speedily in the way of progress, democracy and happiness.”53 Through this speech, she presented the falsities of the “civilizing mission” in similar ways to the Vietnamese representatives. The decolonial stand at WIDF, which took the form of a unanimous condemnation of European colonialism, was not an easy consensus but the result of a difficult process tainted by French women’s position as colonizers. For example, UFA representative Andrée Ruiz’s detailed 1948 report strongly condemned Algeria’s many inequalities, yet from a French communist and universalist lens. Indeed, she took a strong stand

résistantes against the colonial order 51

against the colonial administration, the capitalist exploitation, and the recent atomic testing in Southern Algeria. Nevertheless, she presented the Algerian workers as a unified people “struggling together for bread, democracy and peace,” which can appear as thoughtless considering the conference’s robust decolonial discourse.54 Her enthusiastic support for Algerian workers failed to acknowledge the intersectionality of oppression, especially considering the deep economic gap between Algerian workers and settler workers. Also, by identifying herself as Algerian, she adopted the colonizing stand and a contested identity that the French government created when it unilaterally decided that Algeria would become three French departments.55 The assembly as a whole in 1948 supported Algerian people in their struggle against the French colonial system. For example, The WIDF Chinese vice-president Tsai-Chang dedicated a portion of her speech to the “workers in Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Lybia, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the Union of South Africa and other countries” who were increasingly fighting “for a free and independent development for their peoples.”56 The resolution titled “on the development of the democratic women’s movements in the countries of Asia and Africa” was adopted unanimously and included both Vietnam and Algeria in the list of countries seeking independence: “In Viet-Nam, Indonesia, Malaya and Burma, the people have taken up arms. In India, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, the Gold Coast, Madagascar, etc., where the rapaciousness of the imperialists is unbounded, national feeling expresses itself on every possible occasion, in mass demonstrations, strikes, and various other forms of action.”57

The conference report concluded with formal demands to the recent United Nations to respect “the principle of equality of nations’ rights and their right to self-government.” Therefore, this 1948 conference pushed colonizing women like Sportisse and Ruiz – who might have been reluctant to the idea of decolonization – to face the overwhelming world support for the colonized women. They could understand their experiences were incomparable to those of Algerian women. The unanimous vote proved that, despite divergences and colonial biases, French women as a group moved toward an increasingly decolonial discourse thanks to the outreach and eye-opening information women fighting for national independence provided.

Résistantes and Resisters At the WIDF conferences, Vietnamese women excelled at grassroots diplomacy. They skillfully dialogued and found commonalities with the women they sought support from, mainly French and Algerian women, whose husbands and sons were sent to fight this unjust colonial war.

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In the case of French women, who were crucial in lobbying their government against the colonial war, Vietnamese women specifically appealed to the shared experience of resistance and occupation. The term “resistance” has been highly debated in the Vichy regime’s context due to the social prestige and heroic status associated with it after the war in a country torn apart between those who collaborated and those who resisted. Here, I use a larger framework defined by Margaret Collins Weitz to represent better women’s participation in the resistance beyond combat positions, encompassing “the many and varied activities undertaken by French women – whether affiliated with a group or not.”58 On the Vietnamese side, women had joined the Việt Minh to fight the Japanese occupation in the early 1940s since the Vichy government collaborated with the Nazi regime and its Japanese allies. After the Japanese defeat, they continued the struggle for independence as the French government attempted to restore the prewar colonial order. Pro-independence Vietnamese women joined the resistance on all fronts. Thái Thị Liên represented Vietnamese women at the WIDF both in 1945 and 1948. She had arrived in Paris as a student in 1946, became president of the “Union of Viet-Nam Women in France” at least until 1948– she then left for Prague, where she started her career as a piano virtuoso.59 Her international experience afforded her excellent knowledge of both Vietnamese and French resistance. In the special WIDF report “The Women of Asia and Africa” – later published as a book, she provided an excellent historical and political overview of Vietnamese women’s struggles and victories. Her chapter about Vietnam listed the many roles which women had in the resistance: in war production, social work, and propaganda, but also on the battlefield as army nurses, food suppliers, messengers, information agents, and “women partisans and troop commanders.”60 Vietnamese women grew up in a culture that had long celebrated women warriors. Historian Bùi Trân Phượng explored the influence of mass education about the exploits of the Trưng sisters, the national heroines who had fought against Chinese rule in AD 40; and Triệu Thị Trinh, a highly-skilled and revered warrior who led an insurrection against the Chinese occupant in 258. Bùi Trân Phượng exposed the continued celebration of these heroines fighting the invaders even during the Confucianist and French colonial periods, both equally patriarchal.61 In the 1930s, Vietnamese women had already joined the nationalist movement. HueTam Ho Tai recovered the fascinating history of Bao Luong, an active member of the Revolutionary Youth League – the nationalist organization Hồ Chí Minh started in Guangzhou in 1925 and the basis for the future Indochinese Communist Party of 1930.62 Bao Luong was the first political prisoner in French Colonial in 1929. In her diaries, she recalled attending a secret Trưng sisters’ festival, thus corroborating Bùi Trân Phượng’s analysis of the importance of these national symbols of resistance.63 This long tradition of celebrating women resisters can explain why

résistantes against the colonial order 53

Vietnamese women naturally responded favorably to Hồ Chí Minh’s call to fight for liberation in all ways possible. In recognition and encouragement of women’s role in the revolution, the Việt Minh officials chose two women – Đàm Thị Loan, a woman guerilla fighter; and Lê Thi, a student part of the Women›s Association for National Salvation – to raise for the first time the national flag during the declaration of independence in 1945.64 This gesture proved that Vietnamese women were welcome and integral to the resistance. In France, women’s role in the resistance is less documented than in Vietnam. Yet, they contributed to the liberation effort in similar positions in the maquis (rural guerilla) as combatants, intelligence, and support services.65 Both the UFF and WIDF counted numerous former resisters and commemorated the fallen ones at the conferences. In her opening discourse in 1945 in Paris, WIDF president Eugénie Cotton acknowledged the resisters from all countries, honoring that “when facing death, the sweetest and most modest of the women appeared as equal to men in their strength and attitude.”66 Hence the fight against fascism and for peace was central to WIDF’s mission but did not oppose the concept of taking up arms since many organizers, by experience, understood the necessity for violence in liberation movements. On the contrary, it paved the way to support women from Vietnam unconditionally and ultimately from Algeria as well. Beyond the shared experience of the resistance itself, Vietnamese women at the WIDF further connected with French women using the recurrent comparison between the Nazi military and the French one. Vietnamese speeches and documents did not address the Holocaust at the time; they focused on the day-to-day violence of the occupation during the Vichy regime. They rose, ahead of their time, the highly debated topic about the exceptionalism of Nazi violence.67 Vietnamese WIDF representatives aimed to demonstrate that the French military and officials in Vietnam had engaged in similar barbarous acts since the colonial conquest, although they did not engage with the Holocaust itself as it was not comparable to their struggle in terms of lethality and genocidal intention.68 Having excellent knowledge of the French experience, Vietnamese activists tried to make their own colonization experience relatable. For example, as a teenage independence fighter, Minh recalled reading “pamphlets about the exploits of French youth under the German occupation” and being “enthralled to learn about these clandestine activities.” She also used the term “maquis” – the French word for rural resistance – when speaking of the Vietnamese underground independence movement.69 Despite the distance to the colonial metropole, Vietnamese resisters were well-informed about the Occupation through newspapers and the constant connection with the Union of Viet-Nam Women in France. With this knowledge, they crafted an argument that would incite French women to support their cause, speaking as resisters to résistantes.

54 adeline broussan

There were indeed striking parallels between Nazi military violence on French soil and French military violence on Vietnamese ground. Colonial brutality dated back to the first years of the French conquest in the mid-1850s. This similarity is what Duong The Hauh clearly articulated at the first WIDF conference in Paris: “If the bloodiest drama could unfold this way in Europe, if the cruelest and barbarous actions could be committed by the most civilized countries of the globe, it is because even before this war, even during peacetime, this barbarity already existed there at a latent state, it has always existed, in real and permanent ways in the colonies.”70 She is here arguing that the French military had always been “barbarous” in colonized countries, and not only at the time of the military conquest since it affected colonized people “in real and permanent ways.” She mentioned the torture at the infamous French prisons Poulo Condor, Lao Bao, and Son La. There, the mistreatment and horrendous living conditions could only lead the many political opponents to hope “for [their] own death.”71 Political repression grew increasingly rampant in colonial Indochina as the nationalist movement strengthened, especially after the bloody police repression in Yen Bay in 1930.72 Thái Thị Liên pushed boundaries with the subject of rape as a weapon of war, which demonstrated a radical stand for colonized women’s rights. At the WIDF congresses, colonial metropoles representatives discovered the specific gendered violence women faced in the colonies like Vietnam. With that intent, Thái Thị Liên described in the fifth chapter of her report – titled “French Atrocities” –, the numerous examples of sexual violence against Vietnamese women as a way to terrorize the population. She collected accounts of mass rapes. She gave specific examples such as French commander Lebris who organized monthly “rape in series,” sending soldiers “most strongly attacked by venereal diseases” “to rape all women whom they meet.”73 She listed many examples to demonstrate the scope of sexual violence against women of all ages. The gruesomeness of these detailed testimonies may have resonated with Algerian women considering the recent research on French rapes as a weapon of terror during the Algerian war of liberation and likely throughout the colonial period.74 Vietnamese WIDF delegates successfully convinced French leftist women to support Vietnamese independence proactively.75 For example, at the 1947 UFF congress in Marseille, representatives from the Union of Viet-Nam Women in France recalled that all French speeches called for peace in Vietnam and adopted the slogan “not one man, not one penny for this dirty war.”76 In 1950, the actions of Raymonde Dien, a young French short-hand typist, also drew media attention and exemplifies a direct application of the WIDF discourse in support of the Vietnamese people. Dien had decided to join a group of one hundred fifty activists in an impromptu attempt to stop a military convoy near Tours. The goal was to block the shipping of weapons to Indochina and to demonstrate widespread opposition to

résistantes against the colonial order 55

this colonial war. In a desperate effort, Dien laid by herself on the rails and successfully stopped the train. During this protest, she was the only person arrested and was subsequently accused of treason by a military tribunal, thus facing the death penalty.77 WIDF secretary Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier publicly supported Dien and pleaded for Vietnamese independence as well. As an Auschwitz survivor, Vaillant-Couturier had previously testified about her experience at the Nuremberg Trial. During her court appearance on behalf of Dien in 1950, she connected her experience to the Vietnamese fight for independence, as she argued on the stand: “When we fought in the Résistance against the Nazi occupant and the traitors of Vichy, we thought it was not only our right to act this way, but also our duty. We now think it is the right and the duty of Vietnamese people to defend their national independence as we defended ours, and like we would be ready to do so again.”78

Therefore, Vietnamese depiction of the colonial occupation and military violence resonated with French women’s recent experience during World War Two. They could relate to the fear of losing family members, food deprivation, and the constant threat of arrest and death. French women also understood that colonization in Vietnam was, in fact, an eighty-year-long “occupation” that needed to end. The army that had just participated in the French liberation behaved in Vietnam as violently as the Nazis and French collaborationists who tormented French women just months earlier. Although the comparison did not address the Nazi genocidal violence and focused on the brutality of the occupation itself, sharing a similar traumatic experience helped shatter the national allegiance that so far had blinded French Communist women to the abuses of French colonialism. As the first people to declare independence from France, Vietnamese women paved the way for other nationalist efforts that were already active, like in Algeria, and educated French women (including those living in Algeria) to face their complicity on the imperial project. Vietnamese grassroots diplomacy prepared French women to proactively support decolonization, which was groundbreaking considering French ingrained colonial bias.

Building Solidarity with Algerian Sisters WIDF congresses nurtured the growing connection between Algerian and Vietnamese women fighting for independence. Hearing about colonial oppression, police brutality, and gendered violence indeed spoke loudly to Algerian women. Yet, the French colonial imprint was slightly different in Algeria: the settler population was much more numerous than in Vietnam, and the status of départment

56 adeline broussan

(as opposed to the colony) restricted access to administrative positions for Algerian people.79 Therefore Algerian people faced heavier French presence and racism, especially in cities. After 1948, the Algerian delegation at the WIDF congresses only included Muslim Algerian women, finally centering colonized voices. Abassia Fodil, a key representative of the Algerian cause at the WIDF, grew increasingly involved in denouncing imperial violence across the world. As a member of the Algerian Communist Party, Fodil organized Algerian women throughout the Oran region. In parallel to the French war in Vietnam, the American war in Korea gathered much attention to the point that WIDF sent an investigative committee to report on the situation in May 1951. Fodil volunteered to join the twenty women on the committee and documented the “monstrous crimes committed by the American interventionist troops and their ‘UN’ allies.” She contributed to the consequent report titled “We Accuse!”80 Her sub-group – comprised of delegates from France, Tunisia, Denmark, and Vietnam – visited Nampho and the Southern Pyongyang Province in May 1951. She witnessed the mass graves of the many civilians killed by the American blanket bombings, mass executions, or torture.81 This Korean experience exposed Fodil to similar exactions at imperialists’ hands abroad and allowed her to collaborate with the Vietnamese delegate Li Thi Quê. Consequently, her very first words at the Copenhagen conference in 1953 showed unequivocal support for Korean and Vietnamese women: “I bring greetings of the Algerian longshoremen’s wives who are fighting untiringly at the side of their husbands for an end to the wars in Korea and Viet-Nam.”82 The rest of her short speech detailed Algerian women’s life conditions under French colonial rule. She listed the exploitation of impoverished workers, especially “Mohammedan” ones, and the lack of hospitals, which caused a high child mortality rate. She concluded with the story of Aicha Dali Bey, who had been sentenced to a hefty fine for publishing an article “demanding the right to life, freedom, and happiness of her people.” The inclusion of Aicha Dali Bey’s story proved that Algerian women were part of the national independence movement, yet they were under high police scrutiny.83 Tragically, Fodil would become such a prominent anti-colonial activist that the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS) – the French right-wing pro-colonial militia in Algeria – organized her assassination in 1961 to silence her voice.84 Throughout the French war in Vietnam, Vietnamese and Algerian women’s trajectories intersected, which greatly encouraged their collaboration. Algerian women proactively supported Vietnamese women’s fight for independence. In 1948, Hoan Than,85 the president of the “Union of Women of Viet-Nam” sent a message directly to the women in North Africa: “Mothers and Women of North Africa! The time has arrived to make an end to these sad spectacles. You should protest energetically against sending North-African troops and war material to VietNam.”86And they listened: the following year in 1949, Algerian women, including

résistantes against the colonial order 57

Abassia Fodil, participated in high numbers in the massive dockers strikes in Oran. The strikers blocked weapons and enlisted soldiers in the ports. The UFA women joined the picket lines for days and formed a human chain facing the infamous French riot police, which arrested several female protesters. Consequently, their comrades followed the detained women and laid on the street in front of the police headquarters to draw attention to the Vietnamese issue by shutting down the traffic. They were successful; the female prisoners were released the same day.87 Elisabeth Armstrong coined this activism as an example of “solidarity of complicity,” meaning that Algerian women, despite their own oppression as colonized people, took responsibility for resisting the exploitation of Algerian soldiers sent to fight other colonized people during the French colonial war in Vietnam.88 In addition to the shared experience of French colonialism, the Vietnamese women reached out to the Union des Femmes Algériennes as mothers. They encouraged Algerian women to persuade their “husbands, brothers and sons” to refuse embarkation through a maternalist argument. France indeed recruited Algerian men in great numbers to fight in the French Far East Expeditionary Corps sent to Vietnam.89 To exemplify the damages the war would cause to their sons, Hoan Than detailed how French officers mistreated and manipulated North African soldiers. She shared information about officers convincing colonial troops to fight “their Viet-Nam brothers” by giving “alcohol to drink before going into battle, which excite[d] their worst instincts and encourage[d] them to commit atrocities and murders.”90 Hoan Than insisted on the responsibility to protect the lives and the mental health of sons worldwide, addressing early on what will later be known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). She also touched upon the power and racial dynamics in the military where French officers sent colonial infantry to dangerous and disturbing tasks. Through this call for solidarity, Hoan Tan unified the cause of both Vietnamese and Algerian mothers against French colonialism. McGregor related the notion of “self-sacrificing mothers” to the victimhood narrative at WIDF meant to demonstrate the ravages of colonialism on women’s rights and lives.91 I would add that both Algerian and French women strategically opposed the war in Vietnam through a maternalist argumentation because motherhood was the only territory in which they could claim expertise in a highly patriarchal society. Through the WIDF, women fighting French colonialism made durable connections. The sentiment of revolt was very similar in both Vietnam and Algeria. In 1949, a CIA document noted the presence of Thái Thị Liên at the third congress of the UFA in Algiers and Blida. With Baya Allaouchiche, she joined the UFA meeting to discuss anti-colonialism, the war in Vietnam, and the Atlantic pact. Unfortunately, the intelligence document lacked details: the writer noted for one of these meetings that “there was nothing worthy of note in the speeches” and summarized another as “the usual propaganda points,” thus proving the dismissive attitude toward

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women’s activism.92 Yet, this crumb of information established the tight connection that Algerian and Vietnamese women built through the WIDF as they struggled for independence. Hoan Than herself had foreseen the future, telling her Algerian sisters, “our victory is sure, and it will speed the liberation of your countries.”93 Indeed, the creation of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN or National Liberation Front) occurred just months after the French defeat in Điện Biên Phủ in May 1954. French historiography considers November 1954 as the “official start” of the Algerian war of independence and the shift year from the war in Vietnam to Algeria. Yet, it is essential to note that in Algeria, like in Vietnam, the fight for independence never ceased from the early stage of colonization and went far beyond the narrow scope of Euro-centric official war dates.94

Conclusion Through skillful and thoughtful outreach, Vietnamese women developed long-lasting decolonial solidarity with French and Algerian women. Vietnamese grassroots diplomats made durable connections that continued to grow until the mid-seventies thanks to a targeted argumentation for the women who had direct ties to this decolonial war. At the WIDF congresses, they made their struggles relatable to fellow resisters by shaping the French anti-colonial discourse by comparing the French occupation of Vietnam with the Nazi occupation of France, thus debunking the harmful propaganda surrounding the benevolence of French colonialism. Additionally, they provided Algerian women with an argumentation centering motherhood that they could reuse in their own communities to counter French jingoism. For these reasons, UFF and UFA women acknowledged and supported Vietnamese independence as early as 1945 and the other calls from the women fighting for national self-determination worldwide. Women’s grassroots diplomacy at the WIDF was groundbreaking because, on this platform, Vietnamese women’s trailblazing diplomacy strengthened the solidarity with other colonized women in resistance. Centering 1945 helps expose the failure of mainstream male diplomacy who ignored Vietnamese and Algerian will for independence due to obtuse Eurocentric and paternalistic colonial biases. These failed opportunities for peaceful decolonization prompted thirty years of bloody wars in Vietnam, and Algerian people suffered eight years of devastating and traumatic war. WIDF did not succeed in stopping the decolonial wars, yet it created a unique space where the voices from the colonies resonated as loudly as the ones from colonizing countries. It was a platform of exchange where colonized women could reach out and educate strategic allies. The WIDF reports unearth the unfiltered voices of all colonized women who fearlessly debated the veracity of the

résistantes against the colonial order 59

“civilizing mission” and exposed how colonialism was an attack on women’s rights. Therefore, it is crucial to reclaim these women’s narratives globally resisting and dismantling the colonial order as early as 1945.

Notes 1

Duong The Hauh, WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 176.

2

In this essay, Vietnamese names will be spelt in quốc ngữ (Vietnamese alphabet) for accurate spelling and pronunciation unless I could only access the latinized spelling as is the case for Duong The Hauh.

3

Francisca de Haan, “Continuing Cold War Paradigms in Western Historiography of Transnational Women’s Organisations: The Case of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF),” Women’s History Review 19:4 (2010): 547-73.

4

Elisabeth Armstrong, “Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41:2 (2016): 305-31.

5

Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

6

Michele Louro et al., eds., The League Against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2020).

7

Imaobong Denis Umoren, Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).

8

Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom

9

Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 5. and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965.,” Women’s History Review 25:6 (2016): 925-44. 10

Charles de Gaule’s opening speech, Discours de Brazzaville, Brazzaville Conference, January 30th, 1944. Accessed online https://mjp.univ-perp.fr/textes/degaulle30011944.htm.

11

Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 30.

12

This chapter refers to people of European descent in Algeria as colonists, and only uses “Algerian” to refer to the Muslim, Amazigh, and Jewish population. In many primary sources at the time French and Europeans would refer to themselves as “Algerian,” hence the clarification of my use of these terms.

13

John Talbott, The War Without a Name: France in Algeria, 1954–1962 (New York: Knopf, 1980), 21-22.

14

“Intervention d’Alice Sportisse au nom de la delegation algérienne,” WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 143.

15

Mohammed Harbi, “La Guerre d’Algérie a Commencé à Sétif Le 8 Mai 1945,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2005.

60 adeline broussan

16

K.H Adler, “Indigènes after Indigènes: Post-War France and Its North African Troops.,” European Review of History 20:3 (2013): 463-78.

17

Resistance which had never ceased since the premises of colonization.

18

Mohammed Harbi, “La Guerre d’Algérie a Commencé à Sétif Le 8 Mai 1945,” Le Monde Diplomatique, May 2005.

19

The Việt Minh was created in 1941 but drawing from activism in the mid-1930s in Vietnam and by proxy China as developed. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 255.

20

French Indochina comprised Vietnam, Lao, and Cambodia.

21

The Chinese republican troops led by General Lu Han occupied the North of the sixteenth parallel for six months, and the British and Indian troops under General Douglas Gracey’s command occupied the Southern half. Meanwhile, defeated Japanese and French administrators remained present, thus creating a confusing international presence on Vietnamese soil. Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 216.

22

At the time, the Provisional Government of the French Republic under De Gaulle’s initiative labored to restore French splendor: it struggled to place France in the winning camp, tried to nullify the Vichy regime and to erase the national humiliation of the Nazi occupation. Brocheux Pierre. Brocheux and Claire Duiker, Ho Chi Minh: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 109-110.

23

Christopher Goscha, The Penguin History of Modern Vietnam (London: Penguin Books, 2017), 217.

24

Alain Ruscio, “L’opinion Française: Sondages et Témoignages,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 29 (1991): 36.

25

Jean-Pierre Biondi and Gilles Morin, Les Anticolonialistes: 1881-1962 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1992), 116.

26

Alain Ruscio, Les Communistes Français Et La Guerre D’Indochine: 1944-1954 (Paris: Harmattan, 1985), 160.

27

Edward Rice-Maximin, Accommodation and Resistance: The French Left, Indochina and the Cold War 1944-1954 (Westport: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1986), 25.

28

Statuts officiels de la FDIF, November 1945, 261J9/4, Folder 2 “Les relations entre la FDIF et l’ONU,” Archives communistes, Bobigny, France.

29

De Haan first retrieved the roots of this organization which originated from European (France, United Kingdom, Belgique, Spain, and Italy) and Communist-led nations (Yugoslavia, China, and the Soviet Union); and soon included in the leadership women from the Global South, namely Korea, Nigeria, and Egypt. This openness allowed for constant exponential growth: the WIDF started with forty countries represented in the 1945 founding congress, to seventy countries in 1960 and peaked in 1975 with one hundred forty-one countries. Francisca de Haan, “The Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF): History, Main Agenda, and Contributions, 1945-1991” (Alexandria, 2012), 16.

30

Statuts officiels de la FDIF, November 1945, 261J9/4, Folder 2 “Les relations entre la FDIF et l’ONU,” Archives communistes, Bobigny, France.

31

Marius Montet, “Letter to Tran Ngoc Dhahn, ” Paris, October 15th 1947, 14 slotfom/5, Archives Nationales, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, France.

32

Lucette Hadj-Ali, Itinéraire d’une Militante Algérienne, Edition du (Alger, 2011).

33

Pierre Jean Le Foll-Luciani, “«J’aurais Aimé Être Une Bombe Pour Exploser «. Les Militantes Communistes Algériennes Entre Assignations Sexuées et Subversions Des Rôles de Genre (19441962),” Mouvement Social 2:255 (April 1, 2016): 35-55.

résistantes against the colonial order 61

34

“Intervention de la déléguée algérienne, Premier Congrès de l’Union des Femmes Françaises,” Juin 17-21 1945, Paris, Dossier Billoux 288J, Archives du Parti Communiste Français, Bobigny, France.

35

“Action pour l’Afrique du Nord, Premier Congrès de l’Union des Femmes Françaises,” Juin 17-21 1945, Paris, Dossier Billoux 288J, Archives du Parti Communiste Français, Bobigny, France.

36

“Premier congrès de l’Union des Femmes Françaises,”Ciné-Archives, 13 min., Fonds audio-visuel du PCF, mouvement ouvrier et démocratique, Juin 1945, accessed on March 12 2019, https://www. cinearchives.org/Films-447-741-0-0.html

37

“Interview of Eugénie Cotton,” Undated (very likely 1958 as it is in preparation of the fourth WIDF Congress), Dossier Cotton-FDIF, 1AP199-272 (B199-270) Archives du Féminisme, Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris, France.

38

Eugénie Coton, “Introduction”, WIDF International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, x-xi.

39

Cahiers de l”UFF Viroflay, date unknown, 336J 40-42, Folder “Marcel Cohen” Archives Communistes, Bobigny, France.

40

Duong The Hauh, WIDF International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 176.

41

Duong The Hauh, WIDF International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 176.

42

Elected member of the Algerian Communist Party and Secretary General of the Algerian Women’s Union. Le Foll-Luciani, Pierre Jean. “«J’aurais Aimé Être Une Bombe Pour Exploser «. Les Militantes Communistes Algériennes Entre Assignations Sexuées et Subversions Des Rôles de Genre (19441962).” Mouvement Social 2:255 (April 1, 2016): 35-55.

43

“Intervention d’Alice Sportisse au nom de la délégation algérienne,” WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 143.

44

Lucette Hadj-Ali, Itinéraire d’une Militante Algérienne, Edition du Tell (Alger, 2011). Part III. Accessed on http://www.socialgerie.net/spip.php?article1447#7

45

“Resolution of the International Congress of Women on the Tasks for democratic Countries in the Struggle to definitively abolish fascism, for stable and durable peace, for freedom and democracy,” WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 216.

46

“Resolution of the International Congress of Women on the economic, judicial and social situation of women and the necessary measures to improve this situation,” WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 297.

47

Two of the UFF members, Jeannette Vermeersch and Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, were elected in the French Parliament under the PCF’s colors, yet their contribution to internal party debates have not been located.

48

After leaving the government cabinet, Thorez, then a member of the French Parliament, waited until 1949 to make amends for the PCF “colonial tendencies” and acknowledge the legitimacy of

62 adeline broussan

communist comrades in colonized countries fighting for independence. Ruscio, Les Communistes Français et La Guerre d’Indochine; 1944-1954, 48. 49

Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948, (Paris, Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), 12, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com.

50

Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945-1965,” Women’s History Review 25:6 (2016): 925-44, 928.

51

Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948 (Paris, Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), 27, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com.

52

Malika El Korso, “Une Double Réalité Pour Un Même Vécu,” Confluences Printemps (1996), 103.

53

Baya Allaouchiche’s Address, in Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948 (Paris, Ile-deFrance: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), 450-451, accessed on Alexanderstreet. com.

54

Andrée Ruiz’s Address, in Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948 (Paris: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), 532, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

55

Still today, the naming of French settlers in Algeria during the colonial period remains a point of contention in historiography.

56

Tsai-Chang’s Address, in Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948 (Paris: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), P483, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

57

Resolution “on the development of the democratic women’s movements in the countries of Asia and Africa”, in Second Women’s International Congress WIDF 1948 (Paris: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1949), 534, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

58

Margaret Collins Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940-1945 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1995), 9.

59

Hà Tùng Long, “Chuyện chưa kể về NSND Thái Thị Liên – người thầy, người mẹ vĩ đại của NSND Đặng Thái Sơn” Dân Trí, 20 November 2017. Accessed online July 27, 2020. https://dantri.com.vn/ van-hoa/chuyen-chua-ke-ve-nsnd-thai-thi-lien-nguoi-thay-nguoi-me-vi-dai-cua-nsnd-dang-thaison-20171120095348091.htm

60

WIDF, The Women of Asia and Africa (Budapest: WIDF, 1948), 57-58.

61

Triệu Thị TrinhPhuong, Bui Tran. “Femmes Vietnamiennes Pendant et Après La Colonisation Française et La Guerre Américaine: Réflexions Sur Les Orientations Bibliographiques.” In Histoire Des Femmes En Situation Coloniale, edited by Hugon Anne. Paris: Karthala, 2004, 73.

62

Ho Tai, Hue-Tam, Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010, 38. (electronic edition)

63

Ho Tai, Hue-Tam, Passion, Betrayal, and Revolution in Colonial Saigon: The Memoirs of Bao Luong. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010, 65. (electronic edition)

64

Duong Thi Thoa (Le Thi), and Mark Sidel. “Changing My Life: How I Came to the Vietnamese Revolution,” Signs 23:4 (1998): 1017-29: 1026.

65

Weitz, Sisters in the Resistance: How Women Fought to Free France 1940-1945, 11-17.

66

Eugénie Cotton’s opening speech, WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass. P XVIII.

67

After World War Two, and especially in the French context of the post-Vichy regime, French society collectively “othered” the war’s violence by pointing fingers solely toward Germany and Austria. This shaming of the foreign invaders intended to hide the reality of French collaboration and active participation in the Holocaust. Indeed, France actively participated in the arrest, deportation, and

résistantes against the colonial order 63

genocide of 76,000 French Jewish people during the Vichy regime. Therefore the comparison may not have resonated with survivors of the Shoah, still mourning the genocide of one-quarter of the French Jewish population. 68

For reference, Thomas Kühne’s article on colonialism and Holocaust explores the larger vivid discussions debating the legitimacy of Nazi metaphors in the field of genocide studies and post-colonial studies. Thomas Kühne, “Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, Causations, and Complexities,’ Journal of Genocide Research 15:3 (2013): 339-62.

69

Patricia D. Norland, The Saigon Sisters: Privileged Women in the Resistance (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2020), 49.

70

Duong The Hauh, WIDF, International Women’s Congress: Minutes of the Congress held in Paris, from November 26 to December 1, 1945 (Paris: FDIF, 1946), Women’s International Democratic Federation Records. Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass, 176.

71

Ibid.

72

Andrée Viollis, Indochine S.O.S. (Paris, Gallimard, 1949), P 47-49.

73

The Women of Asia and Africa (Paris: WIDF, 1948), p 59

74

Raphaëlle Blanche, “Des Viols Pendant La Guerre d’Algérie,” Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’Histoire 75 (2002): 123-32.

75

Vietnamese women had asked to stop the sending of troops and military supplies, which became one of the UFF’s primary tasks. French women also prioritized fundraising for Vietnamese women’s access to WIDF gatherings, especially to cover the costs of the Vietnamese delegates’ travel to the Women of Asia Conference in 1949.

76

Surveillance note by J.R. Debord, director of the Police and Sûreté Fédérale, Haut Commissariat de France pour l’Indochine, “Activités de l’Union des Femmes Vietnamiennes de France,” September 19th, 949. Folder INDO HCI 2HCI/236, Archives Nationales de l’Outre-Mer, Aix-enProvence, France. This surveillance document translated the seventh edition of Phu Nu, a Union of Women of Vietnam in france’s publication dated of July 15th 1949 which related the UFF congress of 1947.

77

Raymonde Dien, Héroïne de la paix, symbole du combat pour la justice et la liberté, Editors: Secours Populaire Français and Union des Femmes Françaises, date unknown (potentially 1951), 308J17, Folder “Raymonde Dien” Archives Communistes, Bobigny, France, 10-11.

78

Raymonde Dien, Héroïne de la paix, symbole du combat pour la justice et la liberté, Editors: Secours Populaire Français and Union des Femmes Françaises, date unknown (potentially 1951), 308J17, Folder “Raymonde Dien” Archives Communistes, Bobigny, France, 23.

79

Marc Ferro, Le Livre Noir Du Colonialisme : XVIe-XXIe Siècle : De l’extermination À La Repentance (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2003), 666.

80

“We Accuse!” (Berlin: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1951), 1-2, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

81

“We Accuse!” (Berlin: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1951), 29-33, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

82

Abassia Fodil’s Speech, in “As One! For Equality. For Happiness. For Peace,” World Congress of Women Copenhagen June 5-10, 1953 (Copenhagen: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1953), 154, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

83

Abassia Fodil’s Speech, in “As One! For Equality. For Happiness. For Peace,” World Congress of Women Copenhagen June 5-10, 1953 (Copenhagen: Women’s International Democratic Federation, 1953), 155, accessed on Alexanderstreet.com

84

Malika El Korso, “Une Double Réalité Pour Un Même Vécu,” Confluences Printemps (1996), 103.

85

Name likely misspelled.

64 adeline broussan

86

The Women of Asia and Africa (Paris: WIDF, 1948), 63-64.

87

Lucette Hadj-Ali, Itinéraire d’une Militante Algérienne, Edition du Tell (Alger, 2011). Part IV. Accessed on http://www.socialgerie.net/spip.php?article1447#7

88

Elisabeth Armstrong, “Peace and the Barrel of the Gun in the Internationalist Women’s Movement,” Study of Women and Gender: Faculty Publications 18:2 (2019): 261-77.

89

Foreign soldiers composed two third of this French military corps, with the highest proportion of Algerian, Tunisian, and Moroccan soldiers, as well as Senegalese soldiers. A total of 1,609,980 men were sent to fight in Indochina. “Expeditionary Corps,” in The Indochina War 1945-1956: Historical Dictionary, UQUAM, accessed online, http://indochine.uqam.ca/historical-dictionary/480-expedi�tionary-corps.html#_ftn1

90

The Women of Asia and Africa (Paris: WIDF, 1948), 63-64.

91

Katharine McGregor, “Opposing Colonialism: The Women’s International Democratic Federation and Decolonisation Struggles in Vietnam and Algeria 1945–1965.,” Women’s History Review 25:6 (2016): 925-44, 933.

92

CIA Information report “Recent Activities of the Union des Femmes d’Algérie,” July 22, 1949, accessed online on https://www.cia.gov/readingroom. Courtesy of Elisabeth Armstrong.

93

The Women of Asia and Africa (Paris: WIDF, 1948), 63.

94

I am grateful for Abdelkader Berrahmoun enlightening perspectives on the naming and dating of the “war in Algeria” which misrepresent the continuity of resistance of the Algerian people.

Asian-African Solidarity It is a law of human society To meet and talk together Since solidarity Is the breath we breathe It is a law of life To work and eat together Since the rice and bread we share Is indispensable to friendship To work together, eat together (water is the bread we drink) Is the law of laws The sphere of liberated people It is a law of human society To build and build Friendship of all continents Freedom for each nation This is the harmony of all harmony The oppressed people of Asia and Africa Sitor Situmorang Transl. Bintang Suradi Dedicated to the Second Conference of Afro-Asian Writers Indonesia Sings of Afro-Asia (Jakarta: League of People’s Culture Indonesia, 1962).

CHAPTER 4

Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom Su Lin Lewis

Abstract Between 1952 and 1956, Asian socialist intellectuals met via the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC), an event and a permanent organizational body based in Rangoon. The initial conference drafted a plan for a post-colonial welfare state that protected individual and political freedoms. It upheld internationalist principles of human rights and self-determination and campaigned for anti-colonial solidarity and gender equality. Nationalism was to be a framework for the realization of democratic socialism, envisioned as a «third way» out of the Cold War. This article focuses on the role of Indonesian and Burmese socialist intellectuals in enacting this vision, and the ways in which they were sidelined, consumed, and eventually defeated by the fractious politics of the post-colonial era.

Keywords: democratic socialism, decolonization, anti-colonial solidarity, internationalism, Southeast Asia

In a photograph taken in 1953, Sutan Sjahrir arrives off an airplane in Rangoon and is greeted warmly on the tarmac by Burmese socialist leaders U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, as well as his close friend Ali Algadri, the Arab-Indonesian chargé d’affairs. Sjahrir had, for several months, served as Indonesia’s first Prime Minister, negotiated the country’s independence at the United Nations, and put in place its first constitutional guarantees; but he had been sidelined from power by Sukarno, a political rival since the 1930s. U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein, meanwhile, were powerful ministers in the new Burmese government. Along with Ram Manohar Lohia and Asoka Mehta, who had broken away from the Indian National Congress to start their own socialist party, they had together planned a conference dedicated to the cause of Asian socialism. With 200 delegates arriving from as far away as London and Tokyo, they sought to use the Asian Socialist Conference to promote socialism as the path out of the mounting international rivalry between “capitalist democracy” and “totalitarian Communism.”

68 su lin lewis

Figure 4.1. Sjahrir arrives for the Asian Socialist Conference. Left to right: Ali Algadri, Sutan Sjahrir, U Ba Swe, and U Kyaw Nyein (Sjahrir Family Collection).

In the 1950s, Burma was an intellectual hotbed for Afro-Asian socialism and anti-colonial solidarity. Rangoon was, then, one of Southeast Asia’s most cosmopolitan cities, a hub on transcontinental air routes. It hosted visits from the Moscow and San Francisco Ballet, Chinese intellectuals, Philippine artists, Japanese performance troupes, and Yugoslav musicians. It was also the first country in post-colonial Asia or Africa to be ruled by a nominally Socialist Party. Along the lines of Yugoslavia, it proclaimed its foreign policy as overtly neutralist. As such, Burma attracted the attention of socialists from all over the world, along with European social democrats, American and Soviet intelligence officers, and AfricanAmerican and Chinese trade union leaders attempting to influence its leaders and its people with propaganda and promises of aid.1 Representatives of Tunisian, Kenyan, and Rhodesian freedom movements travelled to Burma, sometimes at U Ba Swe’s expense, to share information about their struggles and request financial and military assistance.2 Yet the Asian Socialist Conference, and Burma’s broader role as a hub of post-colonial networking, has largely been overshadowed by the Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955. There is no other conference in global history that has garnered

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 69

as much attention in its symbolic display of Third World solidarity, and none that so enhanced the global prestige of an emerging group of post-colonial leaders.3 Sukarno, Nehru, Zhou Enlai, and Nasser all performed the role of international statesmen who embodied the spirit of Third World nationalism.4 Along with Kwame Nkrumah, who was never at Bandung but is often remembered there,5 these were the darlings of the Third World, their faces splashed on the cover of Time magazine throughout the 1950s. In celebrating the anti-colonial spirit of the figures so associated with Bandung, the political rivalries out of which these leaders emerged on center stage tend to be forgotten. We must therefore ask what other currents of thought have been silenced in making Bandung such a defining moment of the post-colonial era. Kyaw Zaw Win has argued that the 1953 Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) served as a “precursor” to Bandung, highlighting parallel issues of human rights, anti-colonialism, and Asian-African solidarity that appeared on the agenda of both events.6 Yet there were also key differences in the resolutions of both conferences, primarily in the ASC’s outlining of an Asian welfare state and the promotion of equal rights for both women and men. While Bandung adopted some of the most high-profile internationalist resolutions of the ASC, it was also both a break and a parallel project. Bandung distinguished itself from the ASC’s project of democratic socialism by carving out a nationalist trajectory, visibly centered around charismatic male political leaders with populist appeal. By the mid-1950s, socialist intellectuals had become increasingly marginalized from mainstream nationalist politics, by both failing, ironically, to secure mass support for their parties from electorates and by their censorship and own disillusionment with politics. This applied to parties across the socialist world who had taken a prominent role as delegates in Rangoon in 1953. When he appeared in Rangoon in 1953, the Yugoslavian intellectual Milovan Djilas was tipped to become Tito’s successor; that same year, he began airing unorthodox views and would soon become Yugoslavia’s most prominent dissident.7 Moshe Sharrett, the leader of Israel’s socialist Mapai party, would by 1956 leave politics in disagreement with David Ben Gurion’s military escalation of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unlike the high-profile 1955 Bandung conference, delegates at the Asian Socialist Conference understood conferences to be ephemeral events, whose “spirit” needed to be sustained through regular contact and the circulation of information. As such, the ASC was not a one-off event but became an organizational body, with its secretariat based at Rangoon. From here, it published a number of periodicals and pamphlets to reach Asian as well as African audiences, including Socialist Asia, and the Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter. Bureau meetings were held in Hyderabad and Tokyo, as well as the Burmese hill station of Kalaw, after a failed attempt to hold a meeting in Bandung due to visa restrictions imposed by Sukarno’s government. A

70 su lin lewis

Second Asian Socialist Conference was held in Bombay in November 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis and Hungarian Uprising. As both an event and a “permanent” organizational body, the Asian Socialist Conference maintained connections through the circulation of information and ideas, and a commitment to a more peaceful international world order both immediately before and after Bandung. This might lead us to ask of conferences in the Afro-Asian era, why are some conferences more visible than others, and how do they entrench state-centered narratives? Were notions of individual freedom and democracy incompatible with the state-centered socialism advocated by post-colonial governments? How did the fractious politics of the post-colonial state get in the way of the socialist dream of a “Third Force”, an alternative movement to Cold War power blocs? And finally, what were their legacies? While socialists may have dropped out of the political scene, their ideas nonetheless held important intellectual influence. Along with the 1947 Asian Relations Conference, the Asian Socialist Conference provided first-hand experiences in the field of international diplomacy between new post-colonial nations. While the intellectuals examined here were deeply committed to the promises of the United Nations in advocating self-determination, world peace, and human rights, they were also its fiercest critics when its founders failed to live up to those ideals. As such, they embodied the spirit of international cooperation and drew from an older lineage of socialist internationalism, radically remade for the post-colonial world. Focusing on the efforts of this new, post-colonial generation of socialist intellectuals in the 1950s, in parallel to the epochal Bandung conference, enables us to think about alternative visions and paths outside teleological narratives of post-colonial nationalism, dominated by key political leaders. Burmese and Indonesian socialist intellectuals, along with their Indian and Japanese counterparts, cultivated some of the most concrete and traceable networks in early Cold War Asia, and began a project of Third World solidarity committed to the end of colonialism across Asia and Africa. Moreover, they sought to make space for individual freedom and human dignity against imperialism and what they saw as the totalitarian impulses of European and Japanese fascism and Soviet communism. Their politics would, at times, be criticized by their compatriots as elitist and lofty, but their most lasting legacies came in their efforts to build a world free of exploitation, one that valued individual freedoms within egalitarian states.

Rangoon: The Intersection of Asian Socialist Networks In the 1950s and 1960s, conferences were essential in creating notions of solidarity and collective purpose among Asians and Africans. They were facilitated by the growing accessibility of air travel, and the spending power of new post-colonial

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 71

governments and political parties to engage in international diplomacy, particularly with leaders and activists in other newly decolonized nations. The arc of conferences of the post-colonial era began in Delhi in 1947 with the Asian Relations Conference, hosted by Jawaharlal Nehru. It was here that Asian socialists first mooted the idea of a special conference to discuss a common program for the development of Asia. Nehru gave Sjahrir, then Indonesian Prime Minister, a grand welcome at the airport. The Indonesian delegation, however, was led by Sjahrir’s political rivals, and Sjahrir began engaging in discussions with other socialist intellectuals from elsewhere in Asia. It was felt, Sjahrir later recounted, that “the ideology for a united Asia should have a more integrated content.” 8 The emerging ideological solidarity between socialist parties occurred as Indian, Indonesian, and Burmese socialists sought to carve out a place within the messy and divisive realm of post-colonial politics. Rapid transitions to parliamentary democracy were accompanied by heightened political factionalism that drastically split the unified fronts of anti-colonial resistance. Socialist parties competed with communists, religious parties, the military, and mass nationalist parties centered around charismatic leaders. While socialist parties in Burma and Indonesia had once been aligned with more hardline Marxists during the Japanese resistance era and after, they had now split due to differences in ideology and strategy. The idea of creating a “Third Force” to counter the excesses of communism and capitalism emerged in the post-war era, both in Europe, in the radical wing of the post-war British Labour party, and in Asia.9 While the memory of colonial subjugation animated their anti-colonial sentiment, Asian socialists were simultaneously committed to the idea of the “Third Force”, seeing the spread of socialism as a peaceful solution to the antagonistic forces of the Cold War. Moreover, they believed that Asian socialists could succeed where Europe failed. In advocating for an end to European colonialism in Southeast Asia and Africa, they also sought to spread the socialist message to the post-colonial world and steel it against interference from America and the Soviet Union. The leaders of Indonesian and Indian socialist parties studied the workings of socialism both at home and abroad. Sjahrir, the head of the Indonesian Socialist Party, spent his student years in interwar Europe, working with trade unions and the youth wing of the Dutch Social Democratic Workers’ party. He returned to Java and began working extensively with the Indonesian labor movement.10 He led part of the resistance movement against the Japanese and founded the Socialist Party through a merger with Amir Sjahrifuddin’s “Socialist” party in 1945.11 That year, Sjahrir published Our Struggle, a fiery manifesto criticizing collaborators with the Japanese (and implicitly Sukarno), and calling for a constitution that would guarantee the broadest possible democratic rights.12 It predicted the economic dislocation of the post-colonial world, and the emergence of “a new kind of

72 su lin lewis

imperialism” in the fundamental struggle between “neo-capitalism or socialism.”13 Sjahrir’s technocratic faith in a mixed economy, a socialist state that made room for private enterprise, ultimately collided with Amir’s more populist and orthodox commitment to socialism.14 The party split in 1948; Amir sought mass support and formed coalitions with the Indonesian Communist Party, while Sjahrir cultivated a “cadre” party to develop an ordered plan for the development of the state.15 Within the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), noticeable divisions emerged between Sjahrir’s elite Jakarta intellectual circle, and the more grassroots East Java group.16 While Sjahrir helped found the Asian Socialist Conference, gave key speeches, and wrote for its publications, socialists from East Java played an active role in the everyday machinery of the ASC. The delegation to the 1952 Preparatory conference was led by Djohan Sjahroezah, a veteran journalist and revolutionary leader who had first connected Sjahrir with the labor movement, led oil worker unions, and maintained close links with members of the Indonesian Communist Party. Wijono, initially a member of Amir’s circle, had once encouraged the legendary Indonesian Marxist Tan Malaka to head the Socialist Party,17 and would later become Joint Secretary-General of the ASC. While both were deeply committed to Sjahrir, their backgrounds indicate different but interconnected approaches to politics: Sjahrir’s Jakarta circle helped provide the intellectual basis of the modern state, while the East Java circle led the cultivation of popular support and raised awareness among grassroots labor and underground movements. Like Sjahrir, the founders of the Praja Socialist Party in India also cut their political teeth in the world of anti-colonial internationalism in Europe. Ram Manohar Lohia had studied in 1920s Berlin, a haven for anti-colonial activists in Europe and later the operative center for the League Against Imperialism.18 In the 1930s Nehru appointed Lohia, then an active member of the Indian National Congress (INC), to the party’s foreign department, where he cultivated ties with freedom movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. After the assassination of Gandhi, his mentor, Lohia left the INC in 1948 to help form a progressive alternative in the Congress Socialist Party, joining with the Kisan Mazdoor Praja Party.19 The new Praja Socialist Party, led by Lohia, Jayaprakash Narayan, and Asoka Mehta, was by 1952 the major opposition party to the INC. While Nehru is generally associated with generating the idea of “Non-Alignment”,20 Lohia had put forth his idea of a “Third Camp” in 1950, which would act as a bloc on the inter-governmental level, and at the popular and party-political level would take the form of a more dynamic “Third Force.”21 Both ideas would be taken up in the writings and speeches of his Indonesian and Burmese colleagues. For Lohia, it was Asia, and later Afro-Asia, that could begin a “Third Camp” with a clean state, one which, unlike Europe, could adopt a position of genuine neutrality.22 Due to colonialism, Asia had fundamentally different problems of economic development than Europe.23 Mehta, meanwhile, looked towards

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 73

Europe and “evolutionary socialism”, seeing democratic socialism as a reply to the “dehumanisation caused by totalitarian communism.”24 In 1951, Lohia and his party travelled to Japan to meet with delegates of the Japanese Socialist Party, split into Right and Left factions due to ideological differences over the origins of the Korean War.25 As Heonik Kwon has argued, the Korean War was the “first violent manifestation of the bipolar global order”, one that provoked heated public debate over its origins both domestically and internationally.26 The Japanese Socialist Party’s Left faction became more vocally committed to unarmed neutralism; it quickly committed itself to Lohia’s notion of an Asian “Third Force”, taking a more anti-American and pro-Asian stance in the midst of America’s occupation in post-war Japan.27 The Right, meanwhile, rejected “third force neutralism” on account of its fears of communism, looking instead to actively promote the spread of democratic socialism and affiliate with the Socialist International. Both sides were united in denouncing their “fascist” opponents, distancing themselves from the policy pursued by Japanese militarists in the past, and believed in the importance of building ties with socialist counterparts in Asia, not least because of their interests in cooperative economic development. Unlike Sjahrir and Lohia, the founders of the Burma Socialist Party were schooled not in Europe but in Rangoon University, a hotbed of anti-imperial sentiment by the 1930s.28 U Nu, U Ba Swe, and U Kyaw Nyein had all been students in the 1930s, with U Ba Swe leading a major anti-colonial protest that brought together students with oil workers. In 1944, born out of the resistance to the Japanese, they formed the AFPFL, a coalition between socialists and communists, and supporters in peasant associations, trade unions, and women’s, youth, and ethnic organizations, with the Burma Socialist Party formed in 1945.29 As with the Japanese Socialist Party, the Korean War was also an important flashpoint in splitting the AFPFL coalition after the war. In a surprising deviation from its neutralist policy, Burma voted with the General Assembly to condemn North Koreans as aggressors (a vote on which India and Indonesia abstained).30 This split the Burma Socialist Party in 1950, with a large faction forming the Burma Workers and Peasants Party (BWPP), lambasting the government as “serfs of the capitalo-expansionists” and pledging to uphold MarxistLeninist principles.31 The following year, Burma held its first elections, with the AFPFL winning an overwhelming victory, and the BWPP in opposition. The ideological competition between charismatic national leaders, socialists, and communists escalated in the post-war period amidst the jockeying for political power. Burma’s post-war government became locked in a civil war with the Burmese Communist Party, which they believed to be taking orders from Moscow. As head of the Burma Socialist Party, as well as the largest organization of Burmese trade unions, U Ba Swe criticized his former allies in the Burmese Communist Party, while remaining close to the labor movements with whom he had cultivated close

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ties. As he told an American journalist in 1952, his opposition to Soviet communism stemmed in part from a visit to the Soviet Union and Poland in 1949; while he had once respected Stalin, the Soviet Union’s ambitions in Eastern Europe were akin to Japanese imperialism in Southeast Asia.32 U Kyaw Nyein, meanwhile, had been invited to Yugoslavia in 1952, which under Tito had famously refused to become a Soviet satellite.33 While both U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein still considered themselves Marxists, both were wary about the new threat of Soviet imperialism, and looked with both admiration and fear at their powerful Chinese neighbour. Rangoon thus became a transnational hub for like-minded socialists from Indonesia, India, Burma, and Japan to engage in the work of socialist internationalism with an Asian inflection. The speech given by U Kyaw Nyein to delegates at the preparatory meeting stressed a legacy of common suffering, and the need for Asian Socialist Parties to look to each other to solve common problems. Echoing Lohia’s notion of a “Third Camp”, U Kyaw Nyein argued: “It is for Asian Socialist Parties to head a Third Camp, and try their level best to save the world from the Third Great War while they still can. It is for the Asian Socialist Parties to offer an alternative to Capitalist Democracy and Totalitarian Communism namely in the form of Democratic Socialism… World Public Opinion will be with us.”34 The idea that Asian socialists continued to cultivate the support of “public opinion”, in favour of peace, was a central principle of the organization. The Preparatory Meeting resulted not only in an agreement to co-organize the First Asian Socialist Conference but also to act as an information hub, gathering news about Asian socialist parties from Cairo to Tokyo. From 1952, a fortnightly bulletin, Socialist Asia, published news of various socialist parties and preparations for the conference, as well as short articles by core members of the committee on various themes related to socialism, the “Third Force”, and post-colonial politics. The First Asian Socialist Conference took place across a full week, between January 6-15, with meetings and seminars held at City Hall (see fig. 4.2). Official delegates included the Japanese, Indonesian, Burmese, and Indian socialist parties as well as the Pan-Malayan Labour Party, Socialist Party of Pakistan, the Progressive Socialist Party of Lebanon, the Socialist Party of Israel (Mapai), and the Socialist Party of Egypt. “Observers” came from Tunisia, Gold Coast, Uganda, Algeria, Kenya, and Nepal. Invitations were also sent to nationalist parties in Syria, Iraq, Gold Coast, and Nigeria, who expressed solidarity with the Asian socialist project but were unable to afford the flight. As the former Prime Minister who had presided over Burma’s independence, Clement Atlee, representing the Socialist International, was the most high-profile guest at the conference and hosted by U Nu. The Burmese press lauded Atlee’s experience as a “social worker in the slums of East London” to ratify his socialist credentials.35 Also present as “fraternal delegates” were members of the Socialist International, the International Union

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 75

Figure 4.2. Rangoon City Hall, c. 1945 (Creative Commons).

of Socialist Youths, and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, and the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism. While European socialists, as Imlay and Peter van Kemseke have shown,36 engaged with Asian socialists to expand and globalize their membership, Asian socialists had used the Socialist International and its contacts to extend their own networks across “Asia”, broadly conceived as extending from Japan to Israel, Egypt, and Lebanon. Unlike other conferences of the Afro-Asian era or even conferences of the Socialist International,37 the Asian Socialist Conference was conducted in English, without translators. This speaks to the multilingualism of its participants and the fluency of delegates schooled in British colonial institutions and mission schools. Saul Rose, who was at the conference, noted that because English was the official language, as at the Asian Relations Conference, “The conference was rarely delayed by the need for translation. Still more important, the participants were able to meet and talk informally and without intermediaries outside the conference rooms.”38 These informal, fluid conversations led to an emerging sense of affinity between conference delegates and worked to build a collective shared purpose. Rose argued that the “advantage accrued to the massive and talkative Indian delegation”. The numbers reflect some truth in this: the Praja Socialist Party sent 77 delegates, compared to the 26 delegates of the Indonesian Socialist Party, the second largest

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group. Rose noted that a disadvantage was suffered by Japanese, Indonesians, and Yugoslavia’s Milovan Djilas. But Djilas’ ideas were nonetheless communicated fluently in the press, and he hosted a number of seminars and debates during the conference. Indonesian socialist intellectuals were schooled in Dutch, with some students learning English and other modern European languages in government secondary schools in Batavia and Yogyakarta.39 Some, like Sjahroezah, were also journalists, able to practice their English as they read the Reuters and AP wires and other English-language newspapers in the region to report on regional and international news. English versions of speeches given in other languages were to be provided with the help of the delegations concerned.40 This gathering of intellectuals and politicians did not take place solely behind closed doors. A mass rally took place with 100,000 members of the Burmese public in attendance; the high number was likely attributable to U Ba Swe’s chairmanship of the Burma Trade Union Congress and its large organizational reach.41 Speeches from Asian and African socialist leaders drummed up support for anti-colonial solidarity. Margaret Pope, representing the Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism, spoke on behalf of delegates from Morocco who were unable to attend.42 While committee meetings were held during the day, lively seminars, open to the press and the public, were held in City Hall in the evenings. In his seminar on “Nationalism and Internationalism”, Sjahrir gave a broad overview of the development of European and Asian nationalism and spoke on the necessity of the United Nations as a governing world body, inciting a lively discussion between Scandinavian, Yugoslavian, and Asian socialists on the challenges of international cooperation.43 Atlee’s seminar on parliamentary democracy was interrupted by fiery Indian intellectuals like G.K. Reddy, who accused European socialists of failing to apply universal socialist principles in upholding colonialism.44 Taieb Salim gave a rousing seminar on “Freedom Movements in Africa”, urging all socialists to end the “massacres taking place in Tunisia and Morocco” and imploring Asian socialists to impress upon the Socialist International the urgency of putting an end to the violence; this resulted in a bitter clash with French socialist André Bidet, carrying the discussion past midnight.45 The formation of the Asian Socialist Conference had generated excitement among European socialists, who sought a more active engagement with the decolonizing world. Due to increasing disenchantment with European regionalism, European socialists put the development of the “Third World” on its foreign policy agenda, seeking to bring the Asian Socialist Conference into its fold.46 During the conference, Asian socialists continually argued that they had different goals than European socialists due to shared histories of colonialism and the agricultural base of their economies. This is vividly captured in a story recounted by Indonesian socialist Hamid Algadri in his memoirs about one of the British Labour Delegation waking him up in his hotel room late at night to find out why Asian Socialists were refusing

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to unite with the Socialist International.47 Algadri, confused, had told him he was not the right person to ask, but that he was inclined to agree with the resolution, based on the great differences in wages, rights, and living standards between the British and Indonesian laborer. When the European socialist outlined plans for providing aid to “underdeveloped areas”, Algadri asked why, realistically, would British workers want to give up part of their hard-earned rights and income to help socialists in Asia, and that in comparison to the Asian laborer, the European laborer was a “capitalist” from the viewpoint of income and salary.48 After a moment of silence, the European acknowledged that he was beginning to understand the Asian Socialist position and left.49 This vignette captures the skepticism with which Asian socialists viewed the Socialist International and its failure to recognize the different contexts and struggles facing workers in the colonial world, and echoes points made by Asian feminists in refusing to be co-opted within European-led international women’s movements.50 In the end, delegates at the ASC resolved not to join the Socialist International, but agreed to coordinate with the body as a separate organization. In an analysis of the conference that appeared in Indonesian socialist periodicals, the socialist intellectual Soedjatmoko argued that the conference’s great triumph was in overcoming the diversity of views on socialism within Asia. While socialism in Japan developed within an industrial economy, he argued, a gulf of experience existed between colonized and non-colonized countries. Socialism in India could not be separated from the influence of Gandhi, while socialism in Egypt was characterized by hostility towards the West. The Indian socialist party, he argued, was somewhat “impractical”, having not had the experience of governing. And yet, he concluded, Asian socialists had come together with an awareness of their differences, convinced about the unity of the socialist movement as an antidote to both communism and capitalism. While Asian socialists were united in the shared history of colonialism and the underdevelopment of the economy, they were conscious that the Socialist International would not be able to meet their needs.51 Nationalism, he argued, was a ‘framework’ (rangka) for the struggle of socialism in Asia. The views of European socialists, who saw anti-colonialism as the key concern of Asian socialists, failed to consider their end goal: that liberation was a pathway for a newer, better socialism attuned to the realities of Asia and Africa.

Drafting the Post-Colonial State and a New International Order If the Bandung Conference outlined the principles of diplomatic and economic cooperation between emerging nations of the Third World, then the Asian Socialist Conference was first and foremost concerned with outlining the ideal character of the post-colonial state, one that valued collective social welfare as well as individual

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rights. Despite the claims of European socialists that Asian socialists were always divided, and “agreed on little else”52 than anti-colonial nationalism, this set of resolutions indicates a strong collective belief in the welfare state as a basis of social security, along with protection of democratic rights. While the European welfare state provided a model, Asian socialists devised these plans in committee meetings that did not include European counterparts, and they echo many of the rights enshrined in the first constitutions of Indonesia, Burma, and India. Sjahrir, who had drafted Indonesia’s 1949 constitution, enshrined his faith in parliamentary democracy when he travelled throughout Europe as a student and activist. In Sjahrir’s political hierarchy of the 1950s, Scandinavian countries were at the top, while France and Britain were generally absent; this world-view disregarded the U.S. and the Soviet Union, who had not yet made it into the community of welfare states.53 While Sjahrir seemed to have jettisoned the British model, Mehta and Lohia made frequent reference to the success of Scandinavia and Labour Britain at providing a model that catered for the welfare of all. Meanwhile, in Burma, U Nu’s democratically elected and neutralist postwar government put forth an 8-year plan of social and economic improvement called Pyidawtha, a uniquely Burmese solution rather than, in U Ba Swe’s words, a “carbon copy of Russian or Chinese revolutionary patterns”.54 The adoption of the welfare state model, then, signaled a method of cutting across the warring camps of the Cold War. The first set of resolutions defined socialism as distinct from totalitarianism, which would be realized through democratic means. Socialism would uphold the “democratic rights of the people, namely freedom of speech, of organization, of assembly, of faith and conscience, of election of representative bodies”, rights to be “granted to all”.55 It would, crucially, imply the right of opposition parties to exist and operate. It would safeguard basic economic and social rights, including the right to work, free medical care, support for the elderly, and the “right of children and the young to good care”, and the right to decent housing.56 In recognition of the different applications of socialism in different country-contexts, it advocated mutual collaboration between socialist movements. In particular contrast to the Bandung resolutions, which make no mention of women’s rights, the Asian Socialist Conference advocated full equal rights to women regardless of caste or creed, and pledged “to be the vehicle of ensuring to women full equality of rights and dignity of position”.57 Elsewhere, the resolutions acknowledged “the social and political handicaps under which women in Asia suffer”, and advocated that Asian socialists “should combat prejudice and ignorance which militate against enjoyment of equal rights by women.”58 As members of a modern and cosmopolitan elite, these socialist intellectuals were keen to portray themselves as attuned to progressive ideals of gender equality.59 Given the prominence of the Burmese and Indonesian delegations, the more

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deeply rooted Southeast Asian perception of women as having “high status” also needs to be taken into account, as do Lohia’s radical views on gender and caste equality in India.60 Moreover, unlike in Bandung, where women were prominently “invisible”, as Shimazu has noted, female delegates did attend the ASC, including six Indian female delegates and at least three Japanese female delegates.61 Maria Ulfah Santoso was also part of the Indonesian delegation; Santoso was not only Indonesia’s first female cabinet minister, but a close friend of Sjahrir; the two had studied together in the Netherlands when Santoso was pursuing a law degree. The participation of these women, and their friendships and collegiate relationships with leading male socialists, no doubt contributed to the shaping of the ASC resolutions on equal rights for women. The socialist state, built on equality between peoples, was to be mirrored in the international realm by the equality of states. The second set of resolutions thus centered on “Asia and World Peace.” Again, the resolutions advocated democratic means, rather than revolution, as the key to Asia’s reemergence in world politics after recovering from the “yokes of imperialism and feudalism”.62 They pledged an end to colonial rule, citing the struggle against colonial rule as the essence of human protest against subjection, degradation, and poverty. While Asian socialists upheld the principles of the UN Charter as the basis for world peace, they also acknowledged the imbalances and processes of polarization manifest in the structure of the United Nations (particularly the exclusivity of the Security Council). More forcefully, it was up to Asian nations to enable and uphold the principles of the UN charter as a basis of justice, peace, and equality. Resolutions also advocated coordination and cooperation of Asian countries, recognizing shared conditions of agricultural prominence and low productivity, and the need to own the means of production. Finally, as with Bandung, this set of resolutions argued for the importance of human rights, which were associated with the struggles against colonial oppression.63 For these Asian socialists, the basis of the state rested on a rational, egalitarian social order, rather than a revolutionary spirit. The focus on anti-colonial nationalism did not preclude an appreciation for minority rights: this was encapsulated in the belief that the state would address the equality of all, irrespective of caste or creed. We see in the resolutions on “Common Asian Problems” condemnation of religious and communal fanaticism, cautioning against the rise of religious and ethnic nationalism. We see reference to the rise of “political apathy” in Asia and the need for “political education” and “purposeful action.”64 Along with a condemnation of foreign exploitation and feudalism, underlying many of these resolutions was a distrust of the “ignorance of the common masses”65 in becoming victims of foreign exploitation, indigenous feudalism, and extremism. To counter this, the state’s task was to ensure all citizens would engage in economic and political

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activity. While Asian socialists were fundamentally concerned with addressing exploitation caused by ignorance and lack of information, this attitude towards the public was precisely what led to accusations of elitism and consequently caused socialist parties to lose elections, as we shall see. While recognizing its roots in European socialism, Asian socialists advocateda different vision of development: “While the democratic, egalitarian and distributive impulses and achievements of European socialism evoke the admiration of Asia, Asian socialism must be dynamic instead of gradual, and, if necessary, must develop its own methods of peaceful mass action.”66 The basis for agrarian development in Asia included radical land reforms that abolished feudalism and landlordism, introducing cooperatives, agricultural finance, and collective farms. The Israeli experience of the kibbutz was an important model for Asian socialists, as were European “co-operatives” and indigenous models of village cooperation. Economic development relied on a planned economy that ensured ownership and control over the means of production, and “preferably State ownership of that sector of economy where capital tends to accumulate, such as financial institutions like banks and insurance companies, big industries and foreign trade.”67 This, again, mirrored the experience of the post-colonial Burmese state, which, well before Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Company, had begun to nationalize a number of foreign assets and activities, including foreign-owned transport and teak firms that had reaped the profits from Burma’s raw materials. The final set of resolutions laid the basis for the support of liberation movements in Southeast Asia and the African continent. Asian socialists sought active cooperation with freedom struggles to “give these movements a socialist orientation” and safeguard them from the designs of Capitalists and Communists. They urged representatives of the Socialist International and International Union of Socialist Youth to take a firm stance on the question of colonialism and end the repression of liberation movements in Asia and Africa. The ASC demanded that detained nationalist leaders in Malaya and Kenya be immediately released, that freedom of assembly and the press be immediately restored in Kenya, and that the demands of the Uganda National Congress for elections be immediately granted. It condemned policies of racial supremacy in South Africa, and expressed full support for liberation movements in Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. There was a significant omission of Indochina in its list of Asian countries to be liberated from colonialism.68 But reports of the conference that appeared in Indonesia show that Indochina was clearly discussed as a critique of French colonial policy.69 In a subsequent bureau meeting at Hyderabad, Kyaw Nyein expressed his frustration that Ho Chi Minh, to whom the Socialists had once maintained close relations, had been pushed further towards Russia and China, partly because of India’s refusal to take a stand on the French re-occupation of Indochina, as they

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had with the Dutch re-occupation of Indonesia; the Indonesian delegate agreed that the ASC should take a stand on Vietnamese independence, regardless of Ho’s commitment to communism.70 The ASC decided it could not look on passively at the situation in Indochina; a “fact-finding” mission was planned for the following year to gather information to mobilize world public opinion.71 After ten days of committee meetings, the groundwork of Asian socialism was thus set forth in the conference’s joint resolutions. The ASC was to be the vehicle to ensure that the world lived up to the internationalist principles of the United Nations and promote the self-determination of all nations in the interests of world peace. At its heart was the democratic socialist state, one suited to each country’s local conditions, which would enable every individual, regardless of ethnicity, religion, or class, to develop to their fullest potential with adequate access to education, health, and social services. It would temper the excesses of unfettered capitalism and foreign exploitation through nationalization of specific industries and focus on grassroots development from the village level up; it would avoid the totalitarian impulses of Soviet communism through its basis in democratic institutions that protected freedom of speech and association. As Soedjatmoko had observed, nationalism was to be the rangka, the framework, for the spread of democratic socialism throughout the post-colonial world. Whether the public would endorse this vision was another story.

Transnational Networking and National Implosion The outcome of the Asian Socialist Conference was an agreement to establish a permanent Secretariat at Rangoon. An office was set up at 4 Wingaba Road, the address of the Burma Socialist Party, in a leafy residential area of Rangoon near the home of the assassinated nationalist leader Aung San. U Ba Swe was unanimously elected as Chairman of the ASC, but over the next three years, the work of the ASC was shared between a dedicated set of socialist organizers, all in place by the end of 1953. The General-Secretary of the ASC, from Indonesia, was Wijono, who settled in Rangoon for several years with his wife Sujatin, active in both the socialist and women’s movement in Indonesia. U Hla Aung, formerly a member of Burma’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, became Joint-Secretary alongside his duties as a Burmese delegate to the United Nations. Madhu Limaye and Madhav Gokhale, active in the Praja Socialist Party, consecutively served as Joint Secretaries from India, along with Roo Watanabe and Chisato Tatebayashi from the Japanese Socialist Party. In 1954, after its second bureau meeting in Hyderabad, the ASC agreed to the establishment of the Anti-Colonial Bureau, specifically dedicated to supporting liberation movements in Malaya and Africa. The African connection,

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as Gerard McCann examines elsewhere in this volume, was solidified through the figure of James Markham of the Gold Coast’s Convention People’s Party, who joined the group at 4 Wingaba Road. With the publication of Socialist Asia, between 1952 and 1957, and the AntiColonial Bureau Newsletter, edited by Markham between 1954 and 1955, Rangoon became an information hub for socialism and anti-colonial solidarity. Subscriber numbers proved disappointing compared to the number of circulars sent out to socialist parties around the world.72 But these publications nonetheless served as an important outlet for the more active members of the Asian Socialist Conference to exchange ideas and reach out to new audiences. The ASC office hosted a number of international visitors, aided by the prominence of Rangoon on international air routes. The ASC’s foot-soldiers engaged in a flurry of transnational networking across Asia and Africa. In 1953, Wijono travelled to Stockholm for the Third Congress of the Socialist International, where he criticized European socialist parties for refusing to take a strong stance against colonialism. After travelling to Central Africa and Gold Coast in December 1953, U Hla Aung addressed the UN General Assembly. Referring to the continuing colonial exploitation he had witnessed on his travels in Africa, he accused the collective conscience of the world of being “dulled by its preoccupations with the cold war” and criticized the United States for failing to intervene.73 In 1954, Wijono led the afore-mentioned mission to Indo-China and Malaya with Watanabe and Markham to study social, economic, and political conditions in both countries. In various international fora, these representatives campaigned vigorously against the continuation of colonialism and the need to de-escalate Cold War tensions through disarmament and allegiance to the principles of the United Nations. These protests proved effective: by 1956, arguments within the Socialist International – particularly between British and Scandinavian socialists against the French – made reference to the disenchantment of socialist brothers in Asia with European socialists’ colonial policies.74 Speaking to the journalist and activist Alijah Gordon, U Ba Swe showed how conscious ASC members were of their influence on European socialists: “For the first time they are beginning to take positions against colonialism, against imperialism…. They are criticizing one another, this is a result of our refusal to join them until they have taken a clear-cut stand on the question of colonialism.”75 Despite these overtures to internationalism, one of the most discernible tensions emerging within the Asian Socialist Conference was between delegates from Israel and Arab nations, both considered part of “West Asia.” At the first conference, Egyptian delegates had walked out of the conference due to the presence of Israel’s Moshe Sharrett. Israel’s presence was due in part to the close ties with Burma as new socialist nations in the post-war period. Rose noted that while socialist parties from Indonesia and Pakistan had been wary about Israel’s presence at the

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conference, the personable nature of the Israeli delegates changed their minds.76 By the time of the Hyderabad meeting in August 1953, overtures to Arab parties had been made, stemming from the close relationship between Indian and Lebanese socialists; Kamal Djumblatt, the head of Lebanon’s Progressive Socialist Party, had visited India in 1951, writing a joint manifesto with Praja socialists rejecting colonialism as well as militaristic and xenophobic nationalism, and promoting the Third Force as an instrument of peace.77 Djumblatt and his wife attended the Hyderabad meeting as delegates and spoke to the challenges faced by socialists in West Asia, struggling against military dictatorship, local feudalism, and imperialist intrigues in a strategic and rich oil-producing region.78 He advocated that the ASC send greetings to all West Asian Socialist parties, whether dissolved, underground, or in exile, and support the position of Egypt on Suez. Other tensions emerged at the meeting, including the question of how to deal with Communist China: Mehta and Djumblatt argued that the ASC should not have any contact with Chinese communists because of their closeness to Soviet Russia, while the Burmese referred to Mao’s movement as independent, arguing that if denied outside contacts China would be pushed even further into the Soviet camp.79 The third bureau meeting of the Asian Socialist Conference was planned in Bandung for April 1954; however, Sukarno’s government refused to grant visas to Israeli socialists for fear of offending Arab nations, to which it was cultivating close ties. In an official statement, the Indonesian Socialist Party cited other reasons, including Sukarno’s fear of offending Indonesian communists, and the refusal by Indonesian political parties to give Indonesian socialists the publicity which the holding of the conference in Indonesia would have given them.80 That April, Prime Ministers of Indonesia, Burma, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka met in Colombo for an informal discussion of the impact of the Cold War in Asia. It was here that Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo proposed holding an Asian-African Conference in Bandung the following year. Israel was not invited to Bandung, despite the protests of U Nu. It is difficult to know whether the Indonesian Nationalist Party’s push to hold the conference in Bandung was at all influenced by the activities of the Asian Socialist Conference, to which one of its rival parties belonged, but it is notable that Sastroamidjojo proposed it the same month that the Asian socialists were to hold their third bureau meeting in Bandung, and that the more famous 1955 Asia-Africa conference happened exactly one year later. Throughout the 1950s the PSI functioned as a “brains-trust”, in which its policy recommendations were read carefully by Indonesia’s political elite.81 Sastroamidjojo may well have been aware of the conferences and recommendations emerging from Rangoon for a “Third Force” and “Afro-Asian solidarity”. Regardless, the Bandung Conference worked towards the political marginalization of the PSI in Indonesia: one of its major impacts on the Indonesian political scene was its benefit to Sastroamidjojo’s government and the PNI in the 1955 elections.82

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With the plan to hold the meeting in Bandung cancelled, the ASC’s third bureau meeting was subsequently moved to Kalaw, a breezy former hill station in Burma’s Shan state. U Ba Swe began the conference in Kalaw with strong criticism of the Indonesian Government’s action in obstructing the meeting, as well as a criticism of the Pakistan Government for refusing visas to delegates from the Praja Socialist Party to attend the National Conference of the Pakistan Socialist Party.83 The ASC issued a statement “deploring the actions of national governments seeking to obstruct the principles of democracy and international understanding”, arguing that the “division of Asia along communal lines cannot but have disastrous consequences.”84 In these early years of post-colonial democracy, the transnational ties among socialists across Asia were hampered by the policies of national governments able to police their borders and dictate who came in and out. Ideological fissures between Asian socialists also deepened at the Kalaw meeting. U Kyaw Nyein drew headlines for his bold description of Soviet imperialism as “neo-colonialism,” more dangerous than the old imperialism in being “more ruthless, more systematic, and more blatantly justified in the name of the world Communist revolution.”85 Lohia publicly disagreed, objecting to any implication that “one or other form of imperialism was less bad” and pointing to the “barbaric” actions carried out by capitalist imperialisms in Indochina and Kenya.86 U Kyaw Nyein tempered his assertions in response, arguing that both forms of imperialism should be rejected, but Asian socialists should not forget the danger of Soviet imperialism. For both Lohia and Kyaw Nyein, despite their apparent differences, maintaining a sense of neutrality between the two camps was of utmost importance. This disagreement did not preclude resolutions made at the meeting, including a “Declaration on Colonialism” that upheld the right to self-determination as recognized by the United Nations Charter. Referring to freedom fighters around the world, the declaration stated: “All genuine democrats fully share with these fighters their passionate desire for human rights and freedom, and therefore associate themselves with the struggle against colonial oppression and for a world order free from slavery, hunger, political terror and war.”87 While the ASC pledged its commitment to the principles of internationalism, many of its socialist parties faced continuing domestic struggles in coming to power. Apart from the Burmese socialists, the core group of members to the Asian Socialist Conference were not only losing elections to bigger, more populist-nationalist parties, but suffering splits within their own ranks. The Praja Socialist Party, once an effective opposition to the Congress Party, had split by 1955. Critics accused the party leaders of espousing their own political salvation, indulging in “fruitless abstractions.” But India’s ruling Congress Party, by 1955, committed itself to the establishment of a socialist pattern, and in the ensuing years co-opted various members of the Praja Socialist Party within its ranks,88 while others would play an

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active role in protest and activist movements.89 In Indonesia, membership of the Indonesian Socialist Party had grown to 50,000, but the Communist Party had ten times as many members and the Indonesian Nationalist Party had membership in the millions. In September 1955, a few months after the Bandung conference, the Indonesian Socialist Party stood for elections, and lost miserably. This was partly due to a lack of campaigning, with Sjahrir refusing to engage in “cheap politics” and “demagogy”, while Sukarno’s Indonesian Nationalist Party cultivated a cult of personality around its leader, employing nationalist symbols, slogans, and theatricality.90 The PSI had focused on establishing itself as an intellectual “cadre” party that sought to educate the people; popular mobilization would come later.91 Meanwhile, Burma’s formidable Socialist Party suffered a shock after General Elections in April 1956, where the AFPFL coalition scraped a majority but lost a large number of seats to an opposition left-wing coalition known as the National United Front. U Ba Swe blamed communist insurgents in the countryside, who helped members of the opposition in villages and spent “fantastic sums of money” swaying people to their side.92 In the atmosphere of the early Cold War, as local communist parties gained power by providing an alternative to the economic dislocations of the post-colonial era, the technocratic ideals of democratic socialism proved a hard sell. In November 1956, the Asian Socialist Conference convened its second major conference in Bombay, the industrial heartland of India’s Socialist Party.93 New delegations appeared from Cambodia and Ceylon. Delegates from further afield included Joseph Murumbi from Kenya and a member of the Popular Socialist Party of Chile. There were notable absences, particularly from Arab nations. Two major events formed the international backdrop of the conference: the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian Revolution. A subcommittee of representatives from India, Burma, Indonesia, and Japan drafted an initial resolution on the two crises. The following day, U Ba Swe (fig. 4.3), now Burma’s Prime Minister, opened the conference with a speech lambasting Britain and France, as members of the Security Council, who had “wantonly attacked Egypt… All moral codes and human decency on which the UN was founded were thus shattered.”94 He highlighted the struggle of both Poland and Hungary in seeking independence from Soviet control. Meanwhile, he paid tribute to the United Nations Organization and its agencies for raising living standards and upholding human rights. Despite all its teething problems, the Asian Socialist Conference still saw itself as the guardian of international peace, particularly when those who held power on the UN security council failed to live up to its ideals. The following year saw the collapse of the democratic socialist vision in Indonesia and Burma. In 1957, Sukarno instituted his policy of “Guided Democracy”, undoing Sjahrir’s constitutional guarantees. In 1959 he reintroduced the Constitution of 1945, which gave the President full executive powers. He dissolved parliament and

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Figure 4.3. U Hla Aung, Genda Singh, U Ba Swe, and Wijono presiding over the Bombay Socialist Conference (IISH Collection).

banned both the liberal Islamic party Masjumi and the Indonesian Socialist Party in 1960. Privately, in a position paper to his PSI colleagues, Sjahrir communicated his fears of violence and the emotional pull of ethnic-based regionalist movements as detrimental to the unity of Indonesian public life, and his “sickness” at the military repression that followed.95 In 1962, under rumors of a “PSI conspiracy”, Sjahrir was put under house arrest, along with other socialist intellectuals. Rosihan Anwar, a journalist close to Sjahrir, talked with an “Asian diplomat”, utterly confused about what had happened to Sjahrir, who “together with Nehru, was the famous man of Asia… Could the problems between him and Sukarno possibly make him vanish like this?”96 In prison, Sjahrir buried himself in the literature of Marx, Rosa Luxemberg, and Max Weber before suffering a stroke and losing his ability to speak and write.97 After his death far from Indonesia in 1966, in a hospital in Geneva, Sjahrir’s body was returned to Indonesia and given a state funeral, presided over by Sukarno, still formally in office in the aftermath of the military coup that brought Suharto to power. In Burma, after a decade of tensions, the AFPFL, led by U Nu, finally split apart in 1958. In the midst of economic distress and political fallout, Ne Win was asked to provide a “caretaker government”, as U Nu renounced his worldly possessions

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and temporarily resorted to the life of a Buddhist monk. During this time, Ne Win ruthlessly put down the disorder emerging in both the countryside and the city and arrested a number of political leaders from U Nu’s and U Ba Swe’s groups. The press published a letter where Ba Swe openly consented to an extension of Ne Win’s term in office until elections could be held in 1960. U Nu’s party captured a majority, with Ba Swe and Kyaw Nyein’s faction losing miserably; members of the public believed they had become too close to the military. In 1962, Ne Win overthrew U Nu’s democratically elected government and seized power. Ba Swe was detained for a short while, and then released to live in retirement in Rangoon, passing away in 1987. Kyaw Nyein, meanwhile, was detained by the military government for some years, and released only in January 1967. After years of cultivating a vision of the democratic socialist state both within Burma and across Asia, and professing a commitment to internationalism and the UN Charter on human rights, Burmese socialists found themselves in a xenophobic prison, one at least partly of their own making.

Conclusion In an article published soon after the 1953 Kalaw Conference, Edward Lawyone, the editor of Rangoon’s popular Nation newspaper and a cautious supporter of the Asian Socialist Conference, suggested that socialists had not “proved themselves revolutionary enough to capture the masses in a period of great political ferment in the area.” Where socialism grew well in the “sheltered climate of advanced political democracy”, he argued, it “appears to lack the dynamism to cope with more violent political situations”.98 Asian nations were coping with rapid political transitions against the backdrop of turbulent Cold War geopolitics. Domestic cleavages were exacerbated by responses to Cold War flashpoints, as the broad leftist coalitions born out of anti-colonial struggles, split into two over the Korean War, Vietnam, and the continuing popular appeal of international communism. In Burma and Indonesia, this was fed by a propaganda war waged by American and Soviet intelligence officers, with one bloc smearing Marxist ideology and upholding “freedom” alongside capitalism, and the other engaged, in the words of an ex-Soviet diplomat in Rangoon, in the “penetration and subversion of local regimes, direct and active participation in the struggle between different political parties.”99 Indonesian and Burmese socialists, active proponents of neutralism, were particularly vulnerable to the rise of military-backed authoritarian regimes. These regimes borrowed ideas from socialist intellectuals but abandoned the democratic values which they advocated so strongly. Whereas Burmese socialist intellectuals of the 1950s were keen to learn from the experiences of socialist, communist, and democratic countries, Ne Win – under the guise of a ‘Burmese Way to Socialism

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– closed off Burmese civil society from the outside world. The ascendancy of Suharto in a U.S.-backed 1965 military coup decimated the Indonesian Communist Party, resulting in the mass killing of an estimated half a million Indonesians suspected of having communist sympathies, and resulting in an erasure of the left in state-led narratives of Indonesian history. Some Indonesian socialists remained silent, some became fierce critics of the Suharto regime, and others were co-opted as modernizing technocrats. In its early years, the ASC had provided a venue for some of the most thoughtful intellectuals in a region stretching from Cairo to Tokyo to come together for a momentary escape from fractious realm of national politics. They devised a collective and humanist vision for post-colonial society that was equitable to all men and women, regardless of religion or ethnicity, providing for the welfare of all. The ASC devoted itself to the cause of national liberation, seeking out information and personal connections about socialist parties and freedom movements throughout Asia and Africa. As they fought ideological and propaganda battles at home, delegates at the ASC remained committed to the idea that the model of democratic socialism would constitute a way out of the Cold War. In an interview given to the American journalist Louis Fischer, U Ba Swe stated “we do not believe in a group of Third Force governments but in people’s force, the force of the people who want peace.” Fischer protested, “but that will take fifty years”. Ba Swe responded, “Maybe not fifty years, twenty years. If we are lucky we will get there.”100 Asian socialists believed that the force of public opinion would be behind their vision, but that this would take time. They did not foresee a rapid fall from power, but nonetheless their vision of an alternative “third way” was one that continued to have purchase. One political leader took on the ASC’s technocratic legacy at the Young Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay in1965. Lee Kuan Yew argued that this first generation of Asian socialists had been too preoccupied with democratic parliamentary practice and the welfare state.101 Democratic socialists in the Afro-Asian world required new solutions to problems of poverty and inequality, rooted in a ruthless commitment to productivity, economic planning, public service, and self-determination – ideals that moulded Singapore.102 Meanwhile, after the political defeat of this early generation, some socialist intellectuals joined the world of international technocracy, including Soedjatmoko, who served temporarily in the United Nations alongside U Thant, third Secretary-General of the United Nations, and once political secretary to both U Nu and U Ba Swe. Legacies were also evident in civil society protests that flared up to contest authoritarian rule in Burma and Indonesia, in which the students and children of socialist intellectuals participated. 103 These national and internationalist ideals may have roots in these earlier visions of social equity and political freedom, which stretched upwards from village to state, and across the Afro-Asian world.

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 89

Notes An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume. 1

See Su Lin Lewis, ‘“We are not copyists’: Socialist Networks and Non-Alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Journey to Japan and Burma”, Journal of Social History (2019).

2

Alijah Gordon, On Becoming Alijah (Kuala Lumpur: Alijah Gordon, 2003), 291.

3

Christopher J. Lee ed. Making a world after empire: the Bandung moment and its political afterlives (Ohio University Press, 2010); Seng Tan and Amitav Acharya, eds. Bandung revisited: The legacy of the 1955 Asian-African conference for international order (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008); Sally Percival Wood, “‘CHOU GAGS CRITICS IN BANDOENG’ or How the Media Framed Premier Zhou Enlai at the Bandung Conference, 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 44:5 (2010): 1001-1027.

4

Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as theatre: staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2014): 225-252.

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 4:2 (2013): 261-288.

6

Kyaw Zaw Win, “The 1953 Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon: precursor to the Bandung Conference” in Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane, Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Victoria: Monash University Publishing, 2010).

7

Joshua Muravchik, “The Intellectual Odyssey of Milovan Djilas” World Affairs 145:4 (1983): 323-346.

8

Sutan Sjahrir, ‘Reflections,’ Socialist Asia 2:10.

9

Jonathan Schneer, “Hopes Deferred or Shattered: The British Labour Left and the Third Force Movement, 1945-49” The Journal of Modern History 56:2 (1984): 198-226.

10

Rudolf Mrázek, Sjahrir: Politics and exile in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1994), 75-77 and 93-95; Jafar Suryomenggolo, Organising under the Revolution: Unions and the State in Java, 1945-48 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2013), 66-67.

11

See George Kahin, Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1952), 158; Benedict Anderson, Java in a Time of Revolution: occupation and resistance, 1944-1946 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972); J.D. Legge, Intellectuals and Nationalism in Indonesia: A Study of the Following Recruited by Sutan Sjahrir in Occupied Jakarta (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1988), 171.

12

Anderson, “Introduction”, in Sutan Sjahrir and Benedict Anderson, Our Struggle translated and with an introduction by Benedict Anderson (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1968), 24.

13

Sutan Sjahrir, “Our Struggle”, in Our Struggle translated and with an introduction by Benedict Anderson (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1968), 24.

14

Legge, 176.

15

On the PSI’s approach to politics, see Herbert Feith, The Decline of Constitutional Democracy in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell, 1962), 130.

16

Interview with Ita F. Nadia, February 16, 2017 (activist and daughter of Dayino, in Rangoon as part of the ASC Preparatory Committee for some months). On Djohan Sjahroezah see: Legge, 100-107; Riadi Ngasiran, Kesabaran Revolusioner: Djohan Sjahroezah Pejuang Kemerdekaan Bawah Tanah (2015); and Anderson, Java, 205.

17

Anderson, Java, 282 fn 38.

18

See Frederik Petersson, “Hub of the Anti-imperialist Movement: the League Against Imperialism and Berlin, 1927–1933,” Interventions 16:1 (2014): 49-71.

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19

Saul Rose, Socialism in Southern Asia (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).

20

Luthi, “Non-Alignment,” 203.

21

Lohia, The Third Camp in World Affairs (Bombay: Praja Socialist Party, 1950), 45.

22

Ibid, 49-50.

23

Gopal Krishan, “Rammanohar Lohia: An Appreciation,” Economic and Political Weekly 3:26/27 (1968), 1109.

24

Mehta, ‘Final Lap’, Socialist Asia 1:4 (1952), 15; Asoka Mehta, Studies in Asian Socialism (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1959). Differences between Lohia and Mehta’s thought are also noted in Talbot Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960 (Oxford: OUP, 2017), 448.

25

J.A. Stockwin, “The Neutralist Policy of the Japan Socialist Party,” PhD diss., Australian National University, 1964.

26

Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

27

Stockwin, 2.

28

Aye Kyaw. The voice of young Burma (Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1993).

29

See Kyaw Zaw Win, “A History of the Burma Socialist Party (1930-1964),” Dissertation (School of History and Politics, University of Wollongong, 2008).

30

Frank N. Trager, “Burma’s Foreign Policy, 1948-56: Neutralism, Third Force, and Rice” The Journal of Asian Studies 16:1 (1956), 91.

31

Ibid.

32

Interview with U Ba Swe by Louis Fischer, 1 Oct 1952, RG84 Burma U.S. Embassy Files, 1950-52 Box 7, NARA.

33

Alvin Rubinstein, Yugoslavia and the Non-Aligned World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970)

34

U Kyaw Nyein, “Common ties that bind us together”, Socialist Asia 1:3 (1952).

35

“Asian Socialist Conference: Atlee’s Forthcoming Visit to Rangoon”, The Burman, 19 December 1952.

36

See Imlay, Socialist Internationalism and Peter Van Kemseke, Towards an Era of Development: The Globalization of Socialism and Christian Democracy, 1945-1965 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006) and Imlay, The Practice of International Socialism.

37

Patrizia Dogliani, “The Fate of Socialist Internationalism,” in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

38

Rose, 7.

39

Legge, 119.

40

‘Report of the First Asian Socialist Conference’ (Rangoon, 1953), 90. (Henceforth ‘First ASC Report’)

41

Photo caption, New Times of Burma, 13 January 1953

42

“Asian Socialist Conference Sponsors at BAA Stadium”, New Times of Burma, 13 January 1953.

43

Soetan Sjahrir, Nationalism and Internationalism (Rangoon: Asian Socialist Conference, 1953).

44

‘Relations between European and Asian Socialists: Lively Discussions at City Hall’, New Times of Burma, 14 January 1953. ‘Political Harangues Mar Socialist Seminar’, The Nation, 14 January 1953.

45

“Tunisian Sounds off on colonialism issue”, The Nation, 10 January 1953.

46

See Van Kemseke and Imlay, The Practice of International Socialism.

47

This is likely Saul Rose, the only other official delegate in the British Labour Party apart from Atlee.

48

A similar point is made in Lohia, Third Camp, 6-7.

49

Algadri Memoir, 80.

50

See, for instance, Sumita Mukherjee, The All-Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian women and their leadership of a pan-Asian feminist organisation. Women’s History Review 26:3 (2017) 363-381.

51

Sudjatmoko, ‘Socialis Asia’, Sikap 4 (26 January 1953, reprinted from Siasat).

asian socialism and the forgotten architects of post-colonial freedom 91

52

Imlay, 1110.

53

Rudolf Marzek, Sjahrir: politics and exile in Indonesia. No. 14. Cornell University Press, 2018, 429.

54

Maung, Maung. “Pyidawtha Comes to Burma.” Far Eastern Survey (1953): 117-19.; U Ba Swe, The Burmese Revolution (Rangoon: Union of Burma Information Department, 1952), 4.

55

First ASC Report, 94.

56

Ibid, 94.

57

First ASC Report, 94.

58

Ibid, 99.

59

Kumari Jayawardene, Nationalism and Feminism in the Third World (Zed, 1986)

60

See Barbara Andaya, The Flaming Womb: Repositioning women in early modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu, 2006); Chie Ikeya, “The ‘Traditional’ High Status of Women in Burma: A Historical Reconsideration.” Journal of Burma Studies 10:1 (2005): 51-81; on Lohia see Jaya Shrivastava, ‘Locating Lohia in Feminist Theory’ in Economic and Political Weekly (February 2014).

61

Naoko Shimazu, “Women ‘Performing’ Diplomacy at the Bandung Conference of 1955’ in Darwis Khudori (Ed.), Bandung at 60: New Insights and Emerging Forces (Yogyakarta: Pustaka Pelajar, 2015).

62

First ASC Report, 95.

63

On post-colonial engagements with rights discourses see Roland Burke, “‘The compelling dialogue of freedom:’ Human rights at the Bandung conference.” Human Rights Quarterly (2006), 947-965, 962.

64

First ASC Report, 99.

65

Ibid, 98.

66

Ibid, 99-100.

67

Ibid.

68

Trager, “Burma’s Foreign Policy”, 95.

69

Despatch from the U.S. Embassy, Jakarta to Department of State re: “Abadi comments on the Rangoon Socialist Conference”, 20 January 1953. RG 85 U.S. Embassy, Burma 1953-1955 Box 3. NARA asyumi report.

70

’Report of the Bureau Meeting of the Asian Socialist Conference held at Hyderabad’ in Myanmar National Archives AG-15/3(3) Acc-062 (henceforth Hyderabad Report).

71

Ibid.

72

Rose, 239; Hyderabad Report.

73

“The Problems of the Colonial Peoples”, Anti-Colonial Bureau 6 (1955).

74

Imlay, 1118.

75

Gordon, 321.

76

Rose, 9.

77

“The Right of the Way”, Socialist Asia 2:10 (1954), 10-11.

78

Hyderabad Report.

79

Ibid.

80

“Statement of Partai Sosialis Indonesia: On the Failure to Convene the Conference Bureau Asian Socialists in Indonesia” in FO 371/11928 Reports on Meetings of the Asian Socialist Conference, TNA.

81

Feith, 130.

82

The point is made in Feith, 392 and Mackie, 20.

83

Kalaw report (IUSY). «Asian Bureau May Formulate Plans for Korea, Indochina», The Nation, May 26, 1954.

84

“Bureau A.S.C. Statement” in International Union of Socialist Youth Archives folder 1511, IISH.

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85

Despatch from British Embassy, Rangoon to Anthony Eden, 1954 in FO 371/111928; A Timely Definition’, The Nation, 25 May 1954).

86

Lohia speech to the ASC Bureau meeting in Kalaw, 1954 (TNA).

87

Report of the ASC Bureau Meeting in Kalaw, 1954 (Myanmar National Archives).

88

“The Praja Socialist Party in India: A Final Assessment.”

89

See Kent-Carrasco, “A Battle Over Meanings”, 384.

90

Mrazek, 430; Feith, 316.

91

Feith, 130.

92

Gordon, 316.

93

John Patrick Haithcox, Communism and Nationalism in India: M.n. Roy and Comintern Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 228.

94

Dispatch from Embassy, New Delhi to Department of State, Washington DC. 26 December, 1956. RG 84 Burma: U.S. Embassy General Records, 1953-1958 UD2186, NARA.

95

Sjahrir ‘Peninjauaun dan Pernilaian’ (1958), as quoted in Mrazek, 453.

96

Rosihan Anwar, Sebelum Prahara (1962), as quoted in Mrazek, 465.

97

Mrazek, 473-480.

98

‘Asian Socialists and Realism’, The Nation, 26 May 1954.

99

A. Kaznavcheev, Inside a Soviet Embassy (Lippincott, 1962).

100

Interview with U Ba Swe by Louis Fischer.

101

Lee Kuan Yew, press conference selections in A Socialist Solution for Asia (Singapore Ministry of Culture, 1966), 24.

102

Lee Kuan Yew, “A More Equal and Just Society for Asia,” A Socialist Solution for Asia (Singapore Ministry of Culture, 1966), 24.

103

Examples include the Malari incident in Indonesia, a student protest often blamed on socialist intellectuals, and the 1974 student uprising in Myanmar, in which U Ba Swe and U Kyaw Nyein’s children participated (and were consequently imprisoned). U Kyaw Nyein’s daughter Cho Cho Kyaw Nyein was active in the 1988 democracy movement.

CHAPTER 5

Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa’s ‘Bandung Moment’ Gerard McCann

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.1 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.2 Hundreds of less-feted tours around Asia by African trade unionists, journalists and students

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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. The Bandung conference dominates and simplifies the understanding of this Afro-Asia. Rachel Leow remarks how Bandung became ‘easy metonymy: Bandung the place, Bandung the spirit – Bandung the moment, Bandung the history. Anticolonialism and transnational solidarity were all theatrical parts: Bandung was the diplomatic debut of newly decolonized peoples on a bipolar world stage, full of agency and vigour’.3 The quinquagenary in 2005 unleashed a wave of scholarship.4 The Bandung conference was conceptually portable: an arena to reify new Asian post-colonial states, an anti-colonial iteration of global human rights debate, a teleological origin story for the non-aligned movement and resurgent south-south cooperation.5 More recent interventions reconstruct a more complicated Bandung conference than related in Wright’s ‘urtext’ and much early twenty-first century ‘Bandung studies’ towards recognition of the more conflicted vocabularies of several Asian, although not yet many African, statesmen.6 The statism of Bandung was but one of many crucibles of Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1950s, a decade of multiple internationalisms within and beyond freedom movements and post-colonial states. Chris Lee argues that ‘Bandung’ served as an unstable ‘communitas’ – a community of feeling – based on the shared experience of Western imperialism. Bandung intended to ‘provide a distinct, even utopian, alternative to the preceding era through a discourse of Afro-Asian solidarity’.7 The voices of Africans in this communitas are underrepresented in the scholarship given the volume at which they spoke in its layered transnational communities of affinity. Africans are staged but not often heard in this ‘Bandung moment’. Naoko Shimazu illustrates how Asian organizers incorporated Africans into the public choreography of the Bandung conference.8 The colourful West African kente attire of the Gold Coast delegates attracted more attention than their complex ambitions. Robert Vitalis busts myths of African participation, noting how many commentators falsely believed that Nkrumah himself attended such is its mystique.9 Antoinette Burton requires acknowledgment of both cooperation and tension within this Afro-Asian milieu, particularly recognition of hierarchical Asian assessments of African modernity.10 Such scholarship impels us to foreground African perspectives in detail, to listen to those Africans who co-constructed that ‘Bandung moment’ at the same time as they were shaped by it. This chapter tracks their journeys and experiences to centre the Afro in Afro-Asian. The canon of Africanist decolonization also lacks textured narratives of AfroAsianism. Hitherto dominant African national(ist) historiographies, suspicious of the transnational, stand testament to the anxieties of neocolonialism inherent in

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power asymmetries between African states and global networks over the twentieth century.11 Moreover, fractious African-South Asian race relations in eastern and southern Africa – tensions forged under colonial rule – informed older Africanist aloofness to Asian influence on processes of decolonization.12 Innovative work by Fred Cooper and Gary Wilder centres the extra-continental imaginings of African decolonization, leaning toward the contingencies of Eurafrican contact. 13 In long-standing traditions of pan-Africanism, a rich literature grows on the intersections of African-American civil rights activism and African freedom struggle.14 There is a blind spot for multivalent Afro-Asian linkages, beyond sites of South Asian diaspora in Africa, in these new globalist remappings of African decolonization. Through an analysis of the travels of African activists in Asia (and beyond) over the 1950s, this chapter examines how Africans engaged and made useable AfroAsian relationships to deconstruct colonialism and engineer alternative futures. In the 1950s, Africans ‘moved between nationalism and internationalism in a manner that defies scholarly obsession with this supposed dichotomy [and] channeled their own forms of internationalism through these expanding networks’.15 This piece eschews the elite diplomatic approach to the ‘Bandung era’, principally told from Asian interlocutors such as the former Indian diplomat G.H. Jansen who lauded Nehruvian realism against more ethereal articulations of the ‘Bandung spirit’.16 Such narratives frequently conceive Bandung as a site of geopolitical competition in shifting Cold War terrain. Other recent work situates Bandung as an arena of emerging Afro-Asian hierarchy and jockeying for global post-colonial position.17 Frank Gerits concludes that ‘Nkrumah dreaded Asian paternalism and Arab competition because it threatened his own power base … and was concerned with how Asian paternalism towards Africa might affect his pan-African project’.18 Delving beneath the international relations of Bandung, Nehru or Nkrumah in favour of a focus on more dialogical communities of anti-colonial affinity, it is clear that competition and realism did not hamper African entry into, and use of, the Afro-Asian world. Mobile African activists, still under colonialism, crisscrossed anti-imperial routes on their own terms and to their own ends. They swerved the tutelary paternalism of their Asian collaborators to breathe in an atmosphere of experimentation and institutional creativity. Jim Markham absorbed precedent and resource in socialist Asia to plan pan-African community and give meaning to Ghana’s technocratic post-colonialism. This was not threat to early Nkrumaism but means to help create it; defining the detail of African independence through international and transnational connection. This is heritage ignored in teleological narratives of introverted African nationalisms and Afro-Asian demise written from the 1960s onwards. This chapter concentrates then not on the big men, but rather on their junior colleagues and facilitators, the behind-the-scenes actors who personally travelled

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to the frontlines of emerging anti-colonial affinity. In Part I, Apa Pant, independent India’s first High Commissioner to Africa from 1948 to 1954, sat at the coalface of forging friendships with African leaders through the provision of educational opportunities. These pragmatic tools of Nehruvianism were seized enthusiastically by African leaders to scramble technocratic capacity as a form of anti-colonialism. Part II focuses – for the first time – on African roles in the Asian Socialist Conference through Jim Markham’s Rangoon stay, 1953-1955. It demonstrates the potency of leftist internationalisms in moulding ideological and material forms of Afro-Asian and African cooperation. Finally, as the geographies of Afro-Asian solidarity radicalized and splintered in the late 1950s, Part III considers how African agents, like Joseph Murumbi of Kenya, worked the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation, based in Cairo, and soon the pan-African epicentre of Accra, to definite and enact African statehood on African terms. Mobile African nationalists opportunistically traversed the conferences of Asia’s ‘Bandung moment’ to extract resource, example and solidarity to buttress their local struggles against empire and imagine their own post-colonial modernities. This chapter takes their view from the corridors of celebrated anti-colonial institutions over those from the more famous grand conference podiums.

Nairobi to Delhi South Asian networks – a ‘Greater India’ within the imperial Indian Ocean – served as the first conduits of Afro-Asian political connection in the early twentieth century.19 The diasporic politics of imperial citizenship in Gandhi’s South Africa and the proliferation of Indian National Congress (INC) branches throughout the British Empire defined early Indian political association with Africa from the 1890s to 1920s.20 From the 1930s, the intersections of Indian nationalism and African anti-colonial protest increasingly animated the INC. In 1936, the new INC Foreign Department, under the direction of Ram Manohar Lohia, liaised in earnest with leaders around the pan-African world. Lohia corresponded with George Padmore, the Trinidadian point-man of the Pan-African Federation London branch, and its vice-president, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.21 Through Padmore, Lohia expressed Indian sympathy with pan-African discontent at the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and supported the grievances of the Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society. On Nehru’s insistence, Lohia sent copies of the INC fortnightly foreign affairs newsletter to Du Bois in Atlanta.22 In 1948, less than a year after Indian independence, Apa Pant arrived in Nairobi as India’s High Commissioner to East and Central Africa. His full-throated commitment to African nationalism soon eclipsed his mission to solder the estranged Indian

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Figure 5.1. Apa Pant (center) with Kenyan nationalists Jomo Kenyatta (left) and Achieng Oneko (right) (Wikimedia Commons).

diaspora to the new Indian nation-state.23 To the British anxiously looking on, Pant was Nehru’s ‘blue-eyed boy’, the charming son of a Maharaja, subverting rejuvenated postwar developmental colonialism.24 British officials repeatedly censured Pant for meddling in African politics, leaning on Nehru through the Commonwealth to transfer him.25 A far-fetched Colonial Office memo even argued that Pant’s deputy, Mohammed Altour Rahman, was a Soviet agent complicit with Mau Mau.26 Pant ignored British warnings and befriended a range of African leaders. Most vigorously, Pant supported the Kenyan African Union (KAU), founded in 1942, under Kenyatta with whom Pant developed a cordial relationship (fig. 5.1).27 Pant was especially close to Pio Gama Pinto, the radical trade unionist and journalist, whose career spanned Indian, Goan and African anti-colonial movements. Born in Nairobi in 1927, Pinto attended school in Goa and Mysore, and served in the Indian air force during WWII. From Bombay, he helped found the Goa National Congress to combat Portuguese colonialism, fleeing back to Kenya in 1949 under threat of arrest. He worked on the radical Kenyan Asian newspapers, The Daily Chronicle and Colonial Times, and was soon imprisoned under Kenya’s Mau Mau emergency regulations. Before his assassination in 1965, the alleged result of his socialist radicalism and association with President Kenyatta’s political rivals, Pinto played key strategic roles in KAU and independent Kenya’s first ruling party, KANU. The KANU newspaper Sauti ya Africa, published through Pinto’s ‘Pan-African Press’,

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was born in part with finance from Pant. Pinto became Pant’s passport to Kenya’s anti-colonial leadership and fixer for Kenyan nationalists in search of Indian allies and resources. In 1953, the Indian parliamentary Council for Africa republished Kenyatta’s Kenya: The Land of Conflict (1944) for an Indian audience and advocated the rapid expansion of African scholarships at India’s universities. From 1954, Peter Wright, a teacher and former British contractor to the Kenyan Education Department, directed Asia’s first African studies centre at Delhi University at the invitation of Nehru. An old friend of Pant at Oxford University, Wright was a rare European deported from Kenya in 1952 for criticism of colonial education policy and liaison with subsequent Mau Mau detainees.28 Pant and Wright became a convivial double-act, sponsoring and often hosting India’s African students in Nairobi and Delhi. Educational provision was a key pillar of India’s quotidian engagement with Africans to compensate for colonial underdevelopment and a talismanic marker, in New Delhi at least, of Indian-led anti-colonial solidarity. On a tour of central Kenya in 1949, Pant struck up a warm comradeship with one of Kenya’s most prominent leaders, Mbiyu Koinange, founder of the African Teachers’ College at Githunguri, the central facility for the massive Independent African Schools movement in Kenya. In late 1949, Koinange embarked on a funded tour of India to learn more about educational advancement.29 Pant wrote to Delhi that ‘I cannot but stress again the extreme importance and value of such a visit … if we have to stop the recrudescence of such events that have overwhelmed us in South Africa, it is essential that immediately from now on we have not only to win the sympathy and love of these people but by definite actions prove to them our comradeship’.30 Koinange visited sites from the Tata Iron Mills in Bihar to handicraft villages in Nagpur. The Indian and Kenyan press covered his trip in detail, linking KAU and INC as sister parties. Educational uplift and anti-colonial politics formed a dyad that defined Indo-African solidarity. Such partnership was not, however, entirely a matter of Indian soft power supply. African demand also drove interactions. In September 1946, a collection of Kenyan agitators from KAU, the Kikuyu Central Association and Luo newspaper Ramogi Luo wrote to Nehru to congratulate him on the establishment of his interim government in advance of Indian independence. They praised Gandhian non-violence and India’s achievement of freedom as a wider ‘historic moment for the emancipation of the oppressed and down-trodden coloured people of the whole world’, having heard Nehru’s speeches broadcast on All-India Radio. The petitioners quickly cut to the chase, demanding urgent Indian commercial, agricultural and technical instruction because ‘we have been kept pitifully backward educationally.’ Nehru published a warm reply in the Hindustan Times two weeks later.31 Momentum built. In October 1948, over 300 East Africans applied for Indian

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scholarships. This progress alarmed the competing British Council such that the Kenyan government reluctantly agreed to coordinate certain activities with the Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR).32 R. Mugo Gatheru, a Kenyan student who won a place in Allahabad in 1949, recalled his fascination with India’s caste-based wealth disparities and expressed mild ennui at the paternalism of his teachers. He also stressed an existential sense of liberation derived from education in an independent land. Being in India was ‘a tremendous experience to me emotionally and psychologically. There, for the first time in my life, I felt a free man – free from passes or being pushed here and there as if I was an undesirable animal’.33 In 1953, Kenyan leader Ajuma Oginga Odinga toured India, sponsored by the ICCR. His report expressed equal enthusiasm for India’s burgeoning factories, historic railways and cutting-edge universities as Gandhian hagiography.34 On his 1958-59 state tour of India, Nkrumah lauded Indian agro-industry and the modernist architecture of Chandigarh. The Bhakra Dam in Himachal Pradesh made a particular impression as his plans for the Volta Dam in Ghana took shape.35 African correspondence with, and reminiscence of, India in the 1950s imagined political solidarity and technocratic advancement as a continuum. The destinations of African students to 1950s India is telling: the Wardha Cottage Industry School; Javadpur Soap Works, Calcutta; Leather Technical Institute, Madras, in addition to more traditional academic paths at the Delhi School of Economics that propelled the career of future Malawi president Bingu wa Mutharika in the 1960s.36 African petitioners bombarded Pant with requests for technical opportunities denied by colonialism. In October 1948, Pant praised the enlightened cooperatives of Kilimanjaro’s Wachagga Chief Petro, who in turn demanded immediate Indian scholarships to address the paucity of non-missionary, skilled education in northern Tanganyika.37 In 1947, the Ethiopian Emperor sent his own mission to Bombay to recruit Indian teachers, 300 of whom taught in Ethiopia by 1955.38 The number of African students sponsored in the first years of the ICCR scheme was small and overwhelmingly male. In 1953, only 16 out of 296 East African applicants secured places in India. Partly, such low rates pertained to opaque and obstructive colonial processes to acquire passports. Prominent Indian businessmen occasionally paid costs through the East African Indian National Congress. The detention of Kikuyu youths during Mau Mau denied many successful applicants. Of those 296 applicants in 1953, 229 were Kenyan given Pant’s Nairobi base.39 Pant’s incessant calls for additional finance often fell on deaf ears amongst the accountants of India’s Ministry of External Affairs. Still, a glitzy week-long African students conference in Delhi in December 1953 catered to over 100 scholars. Four zonal offices in Aligarh, Benares, Bombay and Madras administered student welfare and annual holiday camps in Mahabaleshwar, Kodaikanal, Simla and Darjeeling hill-stations. Student numbers grew rapidly. By 1965, half of the 5000 overseas

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students in India hailed from Africa, and with specific opportunities for women, through old ICCR scholarships and the new Indian Technical and Educational Cooperation (ITEC) development programme.40 African leadership shaped the character of such opportunities, a process of negotiation over dictatorial Indian largesse. In 1958, 62 of 101 Kenyan candidates for studentships in India accepted interviews by a committee that included Tom Mboya and Oginga Odinga, among the first African members of the Kenyan legislative council after the 1957 elections, and Julius Kiano, the first Kenyan to gain a PhD (in California) and first African lecturer at the Royal Technical College in Nairobi. Mboya insisted, against Indian guidance, that age and marital status should not be impediments to success given that colonial underdevelopment held back African ‘youths’ well into their 40s. Medicine, agriculture and civil engineering must be the priority degrees for Kiano.41 These Afro-Asian networks ran on personal relationships. From 1957-59, Kenyan H.P. Kabutu used his studentship in India to eclectic technical effect. He enrolled at Sibpur Polytechnic, Bengal Engineering College, before joining the Times of India in Delhi for printing training. He gained broadcasting experience at All-India Radio in his spare time.42 His stay in Delhi was arranged by Peter Wright, Pant’s old pal from Oxford and Nairobi. Pinto introduced Pant to his friend and fellow Goan-Kenyan Joseph Murumbi, who was appointed acting General-Secretary of KAU after the detention of Kenyatta and his allies in October 1952. Pant sponsored Murumbi’s visit to India, where Murumbi had been educated as a child, to escape arrest in Kenya in 1953 (see Part III). In Delhi, Murumbi called for a bespoke East African scholarship scheme. He cited the expulsion of striking students at Makerere University College, Uganda, in June 1952 as a sign of growing colonial repression in the region.43 As Afro-Asian embrace moved beyond Afro-Indian contact zones, personal affinities between Asian and African freedom fighters gelled formal Afro-Asian cooperation. African engagement with Asian institutions of the 1950s twinned the importance of anti-colonial solidarity with the technocractic needs of possible African post-colonies. Numerous African activists like Murumbi, tied into older Afro-Indian educational networks in the pre-Bandung era, directly shaped the expansion of Afro-Asian collaboration into the mid-1950s.

Rangoon to Bandung This solidarity was not without a twang of tutelary condescension. Pant reported home that African recipients of scholarships ‘look to India with hope and they trust that India would, as a big brother, lead them to realize their most ardent dream of self-development and of freedom’.44 Such moralist rhetoric merged Indian diasporic,

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Afro-Asian and geopolitical reformism, packaged neatly in Nehru’s first intervention (on South Africa) at the United Nations in 1946.45 But, for Africans, the utility of Afro-Asian solidarity did not have to relate to the ethics of global governance and invocations of non-aligned destiny. In the early 1950s, African student-activists like R. Mugo Gatheru could sideline paternalism to embrace opportunities to construct the content of their freedom. They collaborated with independent Asians on their own terms. Cosmopolitan, liberated Asian cities were key, and historiographically much overlooked, hothouses in which to debate African post-colonial futures. From 1956 to 1958, the liberation of Sudan, Ghana and United Arab Republic added more proximal havens to evade late-colonial control in Africa. One important hub in the early 1950s was Burma’s capital, Rangoon, the ‘intellectual hotbed of Afro-Asian socialism’, headquarters for the Asian Socialist Conference (ASC) and, briefly, home to Jim Markham of the Gold Coast.46 Markham is elusive for such an important pan-African organizer. He was a rarely named behind-the-scenes administrator, grainy in the photos (fig. 5.2), who slips through the archival cracks as an enabler of more famous leaders like Padmore and Nkrumah. We do know that Markham studied journalism on a Gold Coast government scholarship at Regent Street Polytechnic, London, from where he interned at The Observer.47 On his return home, Markham worked as sub-editor of the Gold Coast Express and editor of Accra Evening News, the organ of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP). He was detained with Nkrumah for sedition under the 1950 State of Emergency and did the bureaucratic heavy lifting for the CPP’s 1951 legislative assembly election campaign.48 Markham maintained close relations with Padmore in London, who, amongst numerous pan-African roles, was correspondent for the Accra Evening News. Markham and Padmore enjoyed a productive working collaboration, central to Ghana’s pan-African diplomacy throughout the 1950s. Their success owed much to Markham’s Asian sojourn. In late 1953, as Ghanaian nationhood came slowly into focus, the CPP decided to send Markham to Burma, an independent socialist state from 1948. Markham arrived in Rangoon at a febrile moment of leftist organization in Asia. In 1951, on the sidelines of the International Labour Organization’s Asian regional conference, leading socialists of India, Indonesia and Burma liaised to discuss the formalization of their alliance. In August 1952, a new journal Socialist Asia laid out a manifesto for the fledgling Asian Socialist Conference (ASC). It chimed perfectly with Markham’s political leanings. Anti-imperial to the core, the ASC vehemently opposed both European imperial and Soviet totalitarianism. It defined itself, by contrast, as a social democratic enabler. It instilled in the decolonized and dependent ‘a sense of confidence in their own organized struggle … the innate importance of the individual as a man; socialist revolution with “human values”, a means of self-fulfillment’.49

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In January 1953, 200 delegates arrived in Rangoon for the inaugural ASC gathering from the socialist parties of Burma, Egypt, Indonesia, India, Israel, Lebanon, Malaya, Pakistan and two factions from Japan.50 Ten fraternal delegates from the Socialist International, International Union of Socialist Youth, Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism and League of Communists of Yugoslavia also attended. Six observers from African freedom movements – the Algerian People’s Party, Tunisian Destour Party, Ugandan National Congress and Kenya African Union – accepted invitations.51 The business of Rangoon was divided into three, merging geopolitical questions with technocratic affairs in a similar fashion to India’s African outreach. Committee A tackled socialist theory, world peace, and intra-Asian cooperation. Committee B dealt with agrarian and economic policy. Committee C, the site of major African participation, addressed solidarity with freedom movements, particularly in Algeria, Kenya, Malaya, South Africa, Tunisia and Uganda. The most vocal African participant was Taeib Slim of the Tunisian Neo-Destour Party, who was on a monthlong publicity tour of South Asia. E.M.K. Mulira of the Uganda National Congress addressed the mass rally that concluded the conference. He warned that the achievement of Asian liberation intensified colonial plans to create ‘the Dominion of Capricornia’ in plans for the white settler-led Central African and East African federations. This was new imperialism ‘under cover of development’, attested by the suppression of Koinange’s independent schools movement in Kenya. Afro-Asian unity could break Capricornia.52 The anti-colonial concerns of Committee C assumed increasingly prominence in the ASC between 1953 and 1956 thanks to the efforts of Burmese MP and head of the ASC administration, U Hla Aung and Markham. In August 1953, the second ASC Bureau meeting in Hyderabad, India, quickly moved beyond the headline issue of Chinese Kuomintang troops in Burma to the urgent need of establishing a discrete Anti-Colonial Bureau (ACB) to support African liberation movements. Ram Manohar Lohar, the former head of the INC foreign department in the 1930s, served as a committee member of the new ACB. He repurposed his INC linkages to freedom movements across Africa and Asia to new socialist ends after he departed the INC in 1948 to form the Congress Socialist Party and Praja Socialist Party in India. Lohia emphatically judged colonial violence ‘a hundred times more inhuman than the African Mau Mau’. In honour of his mentor, Gandhi, he called for ‘an African satyagraha to lay the foundation of a new civilisation’.53 Less philosophically, U Hla Aung embarked on a two-month tour of Africa en route to the UN in New York, where he spoke at the invitation of British anti-imperialist MP Fenner Brockway. U Hla Aung visited Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda, Congo, Northern Rhodesia and Gold Coast. Across Africa, he cultivated relationships with anti-colonial leaders to learn the distinctiveness of African nationalisms and identify common problems to orientate ASC outreach. He committed to support

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nascent pan-African cooperation both in the successful institutional precedent and material resources of the new ASC. In December 1953, he attended a regional ‘Pan-African Conference’ in Lusaka at the invitation of Harry Nkumbula, President of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. It proved to be a disappointment compared to Nkrumah’s pan-African gathering in Kumasi, Gold Coast, a few days before, at which U Hla Aung was also a guest on his tour. He lamented that the British ‘mercilessly wrecked’ the poorly attended Lusaka meeting by restricting the travel of delegates from Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Southern Rhodesia. His speech in Lusaka castigated the deplorable stranglehold of settler power in southern Africa relative to the brighter prospect in West Africa.54 Back in Burma, he condemned linked policies of educational deprivation and economic exploitation that characterized the Central African Federation, Kenya and Algeria.55 The bright spot on U Hla Aung’s Africa trip was his time in Gold Coast where he met Markham. As a result, the ASC mooted the idea of supporting a quick-fire (but unrealized) pan-African conference in Khartoum in 1954 to build on the momentum of the Gold Coast Kumasi meeting.56 Markham was the pivot of this Afro-Asian alliance. In 1954, the ASC appointed him one of three Joint-Secretaries. Markham coordinated freedom movements in the new Anti-Colonial Bureau (ACB). Roo Watanabe of the Japanese Socialist Party (Right) led economic policy. U Hla Aung ran general administration. The wider Coordination Committee of the ACB comprised six ASC officials, including Lohia, Reuven Barkatt of Israel, Tandiono Manu of Indonesia and Peter Williams of Malaya. Five representatives for freedom movements also sat on the committee, including Nnamdi Azikiwe (later first president of Nigeria) and Kenya’s Joseph Murumbi. The ACB mouthpiece was Markham’s monthly Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter (ACBNL), the Africa-facing sister publication of the ASC’s Socialist Asia. It assumed three functions. Most overtly, it encouraged broad anti-colonial comradeship, notably through the annual ASC Dependent Peoples’ Freedom Day in October. Secondly, it provided a forum for African nationalists to present their grievances and anti-colonial histories to Asian allies. Finally, and most tellingly for Markham, it was an emerging database. ACBNL articles were often historically and empirically dense, primers for a myriad of African domestic political contexts. These reports were largely unattributed, collated or written by Markham himself. The ACB was a sorting-house where Markham enjoyed institutional resource to marshal old pan-African allies such as Padmore, but also channels to recruit and learn from brethren situated beyond the Black Atlantic and colonial metropole. Kenneth Kaunda (later the first president of Zambia) and Walter Sisulu (later South African ANC deputy president) utilized the ASC as a sympathetic anti-colonial connecting place, their details absorbed into Markham’s databank. From this hub in Rangoon, Markham researched pan-African possibility, populated his contact book, and

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assessed the useable strands of Afro-Asian community in the building of pan-African and Gold Coast/Ghana liberation. In July 1954, Markham embarked on a ten-week ASC fact-finding tour of Malaya, Indonesia and South Vietnam alongside Watanabe and Indonesia’s Wijono, the ASC Secretary-General. Menahem Bargil of the leftist Israeli Mapai, who was on a similar mission, accompanied them on some legs.57 The British, nervous that Markham had until then flown under their radar, confessed him to be the ‘most impressive’ member of mission with ‘acute understanding of wider problems’ facing the Malayan Federation.58 An intercepted letter to Nkrumah demonstrated how Markham interpreted his findings for West African purposes. He warned how British and American firms expanded into cocoa plantation in Malaya to diversify away from the depressed global rubber market. Markham advised that Gold Coast prioritize pre-emptive economic strategies to protect itself.59 Coupled with the irritant of Pant in East Africa, British officials worried that Asian ‘infiltration’ of West Africa through the ASC set a troubling continental portent.60 There were sometimes differences in anti-colonial tone between the central leadership of the ASC and Markham’s ACB. British intelligence concluded the ACB was not socialist at all, but ‘anti-colonial ganging up’ of which Markham was the prime bully.61 Certain officials felt that Burma and Israel, ‘sound on communism’, brought moderation to more radical African agitation.62 Markham was a most outspoken ASC leader on colonial matters, preferring direct action to the deep socialist theory of India’s Lohia and Madhav Gokhale. Markham directed his ire at two of the ASC’s key allies: the Socialist International (SI), founded in 1951, and the British Labour Party. Alignment with European socialists had presented a conundrum for the foundational ASC. Former British prime minister Clement Attlee, widely respected in Burma for his role in the nation’s independence, attended the 1953 Rangoon conference as a representative of the SI and guest of honour. The socialist parties of Israel, Japan (Right) and Malaya affiliated with the SI before joining the ASC. Egyptian, Indian, Indonesian and Pakistani ASC members resisted formal connection to the SI. For them, the SI was too obsessed with European and Cold War affairs to be the principal vehicle for their anti-colonial visions of international socialism. Gokhale and Wijono eventually pushed through a compromise policy of loose ‘liaison’ over formal affiliation to ensure ASC-SI cooperation despite consistent ASC criticism of the SI’s weak approach to imperialism.63 Markham was vociferous in his criticism of European socialists’ refusal to properly denounce colonialism alongside communism. He declared that their empty rhetorical statements lacked the ASC’s commitment to social work, trade unionism and economic cooperatives as tools of liberation. Vague European sympathy over demonstrable action risked the translation of anti-colonial resentment into overt sympathy with communism, to which Markham was committedly opposed to the

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extent that he had turned down a place at Masaryk University, Brno.64 In a piece for Socialist Asia in 1955, one of few articles explicitly bearing his name, Markham let loose that: ‘Anti-communism needs freedom first and this is what metros need to understand to avoid world violence. It is only in an independent country that democratic socialism can take shape to combat the evils of communism … dependent peoples have nothing to safeguard or defend against the evils that tend to further enslave them because they are already enslaved’.65

For Markham, abstract European denouncement of imperialistic Soviet communism distracted from the fact there was already actual European colonialism in place. Its destruction was the more urgent task over Cold War posturing. Freedom required tangible acts, not words. His old friend in London, George Padmore, was on the same page. Across 1954, he wrote several articles curated by Markham for Asia. On topics as diverse as British Guiana and Anglo-Egyptian confrontation in Sudan, he proved sensitive and provocative to his Asian readership. In June 1954, celebrating Nkrumah’s success in constitutional reform, he compared the ‘tribalist separatism’ of Gold Coast’s Muslim northern chiefs who challenged Nkrumah to ‘Pakistan manoeuvres’.66 Like Markham, Padmore presented the practical, real-world boons of Afro-Asian solidarity. His June 1954 piece on Singapore argued that the recent victory in excluding the territory’s Eurocentric chambers of commerce from special constitutional representation drew direct influence from achievements in Gold Coast.67 In October 1954, the Kenya Government proscribed Socialist Asia after an incendiary May 1954 Padmore article on Mau Mau, commissioned by Markham. The Colonial Office (CO) lamented the Kenya Governor’s knee-jerk reaction given the ASC’s helpful position on communism, the bogey justifying the ban in Nairobi. For the CO, the Kenyan move threatened the willingness of the Burmese to rein in Africanist radicalism and might alienate Burma wholesale.68 Padmore and Markham had not pulled their punches. Padmore’s article, reporting the British parliamentary delegation to Kenya, compared police brutality to the ‘Black and Tans’ in Ireland. Padmore argued, moreover, that Mau Mau forced the British parliament to acknowledge the Kenyan protest. ‘Unless Africans resort to direct action, their rilers refuse to recognize – much less redress – their grievances’. Without opening up the fertile Highlands to African farmers, reopening Koinange’s schools and ensuring parity of political representation, Padmore contended, ‘the necessary psychological changes’ to end the bloodshed could not occur.69 Markham did not focus single-mindedly on emotive questions of colonial violence. Like the Wachagga in Tanganyika seeking Indian scholarships from Pant in 1948, the ASC also provided avenues for African leaders to render abstract

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Figure 5.2. Jim Markham The Mainichi (Tokyo), 2 December 1954.

anti-colonialism pragmatically meaningful for economic development. This was the Committee B business of the 1953 Rangoon Conference, as necessary to Markham’s anti-imperialism as his denunciations of white settler dictatorship in the Central African Federation for Harry Nkumbula. In a letter to Nkrumah in 1954, Markham boasted that a key advantage of his ASC stint was access to Israeli diplomats in Rangoon given close relations between the new socialist states of Burma and Israel. Markham lauded the ability of the Israelis to help develop irrigation, mechanization and electrification. ‘Burma is drawing much of its projects from the Israel plan’ and, he argued, Ghana must do the same.70 This coincided with the establishment of the Israeli Afro-Asian Institute for Labour Studies and Cooperation in Tel Aviv, at which hundreds of Africans would study trade, industry and kibbutz agriculture over the next decade.71 Unlike the Indian scholarships of the late 1940s, from the outset, Israel specifically included women as a vital constituent of the vocational student body. Markham’s emphasis on the ASC as a body to facilitate African industrialization was foremost in his interview with Japan’s The Mainichi newspaper (fig. 5.2) in December 1954.72 His ASC liaison sketched the blueprint of Gold Coast participation at Bandung and Nkrumah’s state tour of India in 1958. Nkrumah placed Markham on the Gold Coast’s three-man observer delegation to the Bandung conference under Kojo Botsio, Nkrumah’s key ally and later Ghana’s second foreign minister, and alongside the writer Michael Dei-Annang. Nkrumah politely declined an invitation, given the delicacy of independence negotiations with Britain. The participation of the Gold Coast observers in their bright kente

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Figure 5.3. Gold Coast delegates at the Bandung conference 1955 (Bandung Bulletin 5, 1, 1955, Foreign Ministry of Indonesia. Wikimedia Commons).

brought theatricality and globalist affirmation to the closely choreographed Asianled gathering.73 Padmore reported Botsio to have ‘stolen the show’ at the opening session in his splendid green robes set against the dull beige and khaki of the Chinese and Egyptians.74 Dei-Annang confided anxiety to the British that Botsio might ‘commit blunders’ to endanger Nkrumah’s negotiations. Dei-Annang subsequently confessed that he had struggled to restrain Botsio from speaking out on wider African issues in light of ‘inert’ Ethiopian and Liberian delegations.75 But, beyond the plenary session grandstanding, Botsio had a more precise agenda revealed at a champagne party he threw at his hotel and attended by the leading Indian diplomat Krishna Menon, Indira Gandhi and delegates from Ceylon, Lebanon, Sudan, Liberia and Ethiopia. At the soirée, the Indian delegation noted his keen interest in Indian civil engineering, Bollywood film industry and technical scholarships.76 Markham, whom the British judged ‘might have been decidedly less correct had he been on his own’, sought advice from the Indian guests on the practicalities of the Indian Independence Act, procedures for setting up a constituent assembly and arrangements for retiring

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British civil servants.77 Participation at Bandung for Gold Coast was not entirely, or even principally, about theatrical geopolitical performance. It had gritty practicality. Following the success of the 1954 legislative assembly elections and the 1953 Kumasi pan-African conference, Nkrumah accelerated plans for a more significant pan-African gathering. In August 1955, four months after Bandung, he recalled Markham to Accra to serve as secretary of a new ‘Pan-Africa office’ to arrange a conference that year. Almost immediately, the CPP reluctantly put the scheme on hold to tackle the more pressing domestic challenge of the new ‘National Liberation Movement’. Against Nkrumah’s designs, this largely Ashanti alliance lobbied the British for a federal structure for self-rule to protect their interests in lucrative cocoa farming, the ‘Pakistan manoeuvres’ Padmore lamented in 1954.78 Markham continued to work on reinforcing pan-African connections as Gold Coast’s chief pan-African bureaucrat before the arrival of Padmore as Nkrumah’s adviser on African affairs in 1957. Markham’s central role in administering the quotidian affairs of Nkrumah’s early pan-African offensive – exploiting his databank of international contacts, assembling monthly bulletins and compiling memoranda – owed much to his time at the ASC. In Rangoon, he developed skills in transnational administrivia, populated his contact book, and assessed the successes and travails of Burmese statehood and pan-Asianism. In 1955, Markham informed a British diplomat that he had flipped on his opposition to the retention of British technical experts in Gold Coast to ‘avoid the mistakes made by the newly independent countries of Asia’.79 Markham’s ‘Bandung moment’ in Asia exposed him to an arena of example, resource and indeed failure to conceive Ghana’s own internationalist future.

Bombay to Cairo Markham’s departure to a full-time pan-African organization did not signal the end of African linkage to the ASC and wider networks of Afro-Asian solidarity. Now representing the ‘West African Conference’, he served on the coordinating committee of the second ASC conference in Bombay, 1956.80 The ASC was, however, changing. It became more attuned to the global crises of social democracy and escalating Cold War, the fodder of the Rangoon 1953 Committee A (socialist theory and world peace) over the more Africa-facing Committees B (economic policy) and C (freedom movements).81 In Bombay, the Hungarian Revolution and Suez Crisis dominated fractious anti-colonial debates.82 African affairs continued to feature prominently in public proceedings, but the nature of backstage African ASC participation shifted. The vectors of African internationalism were more energetically multidirectional in Bombay than in Rangoon to urgently press for statehood.

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Numerous African participants travelled to the ASC Bombay conference. The Uganda National Congress, prominent guests at the 1953 Rangoon gathering, elicited sympathy for its boycott of foreign goods to protest the deposition and exile of the Bugandan king, Kabaka Mutesa II, by Uganda’s Governor. It argued that Afro-Asian solidarity could prevent Ugandan incorporation into a Kenya-led white settler federation, a fear that had provoked the Kabaka constitutional crisis, 1953-1955.83 The American peace activist Alijah Gordon travelled to Bombay, fresh from a stay in Cairo during Suez. She befriended Joseph Murumbi, who spoke in an ‘emotional tone’ of Kenya’s travails and his comradeship with the Tunisians and Egyptians he encountered on his travels in London and Cairo.84 The journeys of the cosmopolitan Murumbi exemplified the fluidity and promiscuous reach of anti-colonial socialist solidarity over the 1950s. The Kenya-born son of a Goan trader and Masai leader’s daughter, he attended school in South India and worked in the Somali gendarmerie during WWII. He returned to Kenya in 1952 and filled an administrative void in KAU left by the detention of Kikuyu leaders during Mau Mau. As related in Part I, Murumbi fled Kenya in 1953 to India to study community development and publicize Kenya’s freedom struggle.85 En route from Delhi to London, he stayed in Cairo for a month, where he dined with Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently inaugurated an office for the Uganda National Congress in support of African liberation. In 1954, two provocative articles in Anwar Sadat’s nationalist daily, Al Gomhuria, ‘went to town with publicity’ celebrating Murumbi, inaccurately, as a Mau Mau leader. After seeing the bulky surveillance file of his trip to India and Egypt on a visit to the Colonial Office, Murumbi himself soothed the British with his ostensibly more moderate strategies to expedite Kenyan self-determination.86 In Britain, Murumbi worked with socialist Labour MP Fenner Brockway and stayed with the West African Students Union, founded in 1925, and which, in 1946, co-hosted a joint anti-imperial conference with Nkrumah’s London-based West African National Secretariat. Murumbi served as Assistant Secretary of the Congress of People’s against Imperialism (COPAI), for whom he lectured at the 1954 International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) summer school in Switzerland.87 Murumbi became Secretary in the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), successor to COPAI, and ‘probably the first African refugee to lead a major British political organization’.88 He spoke at the World Conference for Colonial Liberation in Margate in November 1955, an event co-sponsored by the MCF, ASC and IUSY and attended by Nkumbula and Kaunda.89 Through these overlapping socialist networks across Afro-Asia and Europe, Murumbi attended the ASC in Bombay, an institution for which he served on the ACB coordinating committee with Markham since its inception in June 1954.90 In a time of Cold War peril and late colonial restriction, African nationalist movements required international strategies and mobility to press their cases.

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With the symbolic victory of Suez in 1956, Cairo loomed large as an anti-colonial hub.91 Unlike India, Egypt was an overland journey (via Sudan, independent from 1956) for East Africans. The British could not patrol such borders as vigorously as the region’s sea and air links. Cairo was also conveniently geographically positioned – between Africa and Asia, and well connected to Europe – as a stopping point in multi-legged anti-colonial world tours on expanding and cheaper air transportation networks. In 1954, Munukayumbwa (Munu) Sipalo from Northern Rhodesia, an African law student in India through a scholarship arranged by Pant and Wright, became General-Secretary of a new ‘Africa Bureau’ in Delhi, aligned to the ASC. Sipalo soon established an ‘African Liberation Committee’ in Cairo to facilitate pan-African institutional growth.92 Sipalo used his bases in Delhi and Cairo to connect African nationalists to Soviet and Chinese diplomats. He travelled widely, working with the IUSY, whose 1956 colonialism conference he attended in Prague, with a stop in London on the way, on behalf of the All-India African Students Federation. Through these links, Sipalo travelled to Bombay for the ASC, which had long opposed the Central African Federation in Sipalo’s homeland, as an anti-colonial test case. Afro-Asia comprised a tangle of strands in Sipalo’s global web of connections to expedite Zambian independence as he returned to Lusaka and the executive of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress in 1957.93 With mounting Cold War paranoia, colonial governments restricted African access to institutions such as ASC, despite British Labour Party insistence that African participation in international socialism was the best means to hem in communism.94 Brockway was particularly vocal, imploring the Colonial Office to return the confiscated passport of Paulo Muwanga, youth president of the Uganda National Congress, a former student in India, and an invitee to the ASC Bombay conference and IUSY gatherings in Vienna and Tampere, Finland, in 1956.95 Uganda’s Governor refused, citing Muwanga’s alleged links to Russian agents through Sipalo in Delhi and Cairo. Brockway further protested the denial of passports for Nkumbula and Kaunda for Bombay. In the Guardian, Brockway argued that president of the Uganda National Congress Ignatius Musaazi had been permitted to attend the 1953 ASC Rangoon gathering and was now an upstanding member of the Uganda Legislative Council.96 Muwanga wrote to sympathetic IUSY leaders, insisting that attendance at IUSY camps remained the only way he could speedily learn the nuances of branch organization to grow Uganda’s youth movement.97 Muwanga’s chief correspondent was Menahem Bargil, IUSY Joint Secretary General, the Israeli socialist who had accompanied Jim Markham on the fact-finding tour of Southeast Asia in July 1954. Bargil also tapped Murumbi for contacts for the IUSY 1957 Africa tour, recollecting IUSY fraternal delegations at the ASC.98 Despite Asian and African criticisms of weak European socialist commitment to decolonization, Sipalo, Muwanga and Murumbi

where was the afro in afro-asian solidarity? africa’s ‘bandung moment’ 111

entrepreneurially navigated overlapping, and sometimes conflicted, networks of anti-colonial solidarity to advocate and help fund their own liberation movements. The character of Afro-Asianism morphed into the late 1950s as livelier and more discordant geopolitical environments emerged with accelerating decolonization and tightening Cold War. The establishment of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) in Cairo in 1957 created a significant platform, closer to home for African nationalists, for this pacier and more radical Afro-Asian connection. Nasser donated a bespoke building in Cairo for freedom movements to work cheek-by-jowl. The inaugural AAPSO conference in 1957 and Afro-Asian Youth Conference in 1959, both in Cairo, attracted keen attention in sub-Saharan Africa. Tom Mboya and Arwings Kodhek in Kenya pushed members of their Nairobi Convention Peoples’ Party and Nairobi African District Congress toward Egypt. Like invitees from Zanzibar, the British denied passage on the false grounds that AAPSO was a ‘communist front’ in hoc to the Soviet Union, even though Mboya stressed that his delegates specifically intended to denounce the attending Soviets.99 Control of movement was partial. Networks of African student-activists spread across the world dictated that colonial states could not shut everyone out of anti-imperial internationalism. Indeed, African students played on British disquiet to secure Afro-Asian patronage. John Kamwithi and George Sedda, Kenyan residents in Kampala, Uganda, and former students in Perugia, Italy, ‘escaped’ the British through Sudan to join AAPSO.100 From their adopted home in Cairo, they translated their polemics against ‘settler barbarism’ into idioms comprehensible to international audiences.101 At the 1959 Afro-Asian Youth Conference, Sedda called for a UN resolution to investigate British war crimes against Mau Mau. There was some truth to British assessments that Kamwithi and Sedda were maverick exiles, estranged from mainstream East African politics.102 When they attended the 1958 All-African People’s Conference (AAPC) in Accra as AAPSO representatives, Nkrumah’s selection for AAPC Chairman, Tom Mboya, rejected them as agents of Nasserite manipulation as competition between Ghana and United Arab Republic for pan-African leadership rumbled on.103 Nevertheless, AAPSO represented an important platform on which to agitate for pragmatic African self-determination in a similar fashion to the ASC before. Munu Sipalo worked Nehru’s Delhi, Nasser’s Cairo and the IUSY’s Prague simultaneously in 1956. Tom Mboya dipped into AAPSO alongside the Indian scholarship committee in Kenya and AAPC in 1958. African nationalists expediently phased in and out of such competing institutions as they probed internationalist opportunities for specific, local ends. The strapline anti-colonial issues at the 1957 AAPSO conference in Cairo remained Algeria, South Africa and, of course, Palestine. The more fine-grained resolutions pertained to injustices in the global economy such as regulating exchange rates to bolster trade within the Afro-Asian bloc.104 A range of specialist AAPSO

112 gerard mccann

gatherings – the Afro-Asian Economic Conference (Cairo, 1959) or the Afro-Asian Jurists’ Conference (Conakry, 1962) – occurred on the fringes of central AAPSO meetings to debate the practicalities of freedom. At the third AAPSO conference in Tanganyika in 1963, Joseph Murumbi, now Treasurer of the Kenyan African National Union, briefly lauded the political achievements of anti-colonialism in East Africa as its three nations won independence. He directed more of his attention towards pointed criticism of the new European Common Market, which ‘underlined pernicious heritage of colonial economy’ and ‘neocolonialist menace’ in preventing African access to European markets. He advocated closer Afro-Asian trade, specialist regional technical committees and sharing economic planners across Afro-Asia and Latin America.105 As the geographies of African internationalism shifted towards the pan-African world into the late-1950s, Afro-Asian networks continued to provide early independent African states with means to gird themselves against the palpable threats of neocolonialism.

Conclusion: Accra Deep fissures formed in the Afro-Asian community. In 1958, Subimal Dutt, senior Indian diplomat at Bandung, expressed support for the AAPC but noted ‘it is hoped that the emergence of an African personality would not come in the way of Asian– African cooperation’.106 At the 1963 AAPSO conference in Moshi, Tanganyika, Nyerere celebrated historical solidarity, but stressed the ‘different roads to independence and different routes to reach the one goal of economic and social well-being … each country must work out these things for itself’.107 Estrangement set in between now independent African nations and tutelary Asian leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement, established in 1961.108 The 1960s witnessed a more acrimonious decolonizing world. Disagreements on the leadership, nature and method of anti-colonialism split emerging Afro-Asian and pan-African institutions. Nyerere and Nkrumah disagreed on the pacing, scale and sequencing of pan-African engineering.109 Nkrumah’s Accra lacked zeal for Zimbabwean freedom fighters, who called for bolder interventions to address the junction of settler colonialism and Cold War in southern Africa.110 A lukewarm attempt to hold a second Bandung-scale Africa-Asia conference in Algiers in 1965 stalled amidst the chaos of Ben Bella’s overthrow as the first president of Algeria by his former ally Houari Boumédiène. Nkrumah’s own deposition in 1966, following a coup staged while he was abroad for a diplomatic meeting with Ho Chi Minh, underlined the extent of domestic and international fragmentation. A second generation of leaders sought to contain the dialogical transnational connections that had undermined colonial states.111 By the late 1960s, the range of internationalisms

where was the afro in afro-asian solidarity? africa’s ‘bandung moment’ 113

that nourished liberation struggles in the 1950s became interpreted as neocolonialist peril in numerous African states. Introverted nationalisms turned away from the networks described in this chapter. More militant Afro-Asian solidarities unfurled in more heated Cold War conditions. The 1950s was a more open, permissive era when African freedom fighters traversed blurred state/non-state Afro-Asian, European, American and pan-African institutions. They navigated overlapping dialogical internationalisms, osmotic at their edges. This latitude afforded experimental space and precedent to imagine freedom at an abstract level and, in the same thought, plan the Africanist specificities of its content. The very appeal of socialism was as much its internationalism as the nuance of its spectral ideologies. Intense bursts of connection at anti-colonial conferences from Rangoon to Cairo cemented relations, sustained at a distance through correspondence, print and radio.112 Gatherings afforded opportunities to network intimately. This was especially important for the large numbers of local participants, otherwise disconnected from Afro-Asian institutional life, who dominated attendance lists of the conferences. Personal bonds bound these communities. Emotional connections and human relationships mattered in ways missed or dismissed in most existing scholarship on decolonization and the Cold War.113 Murumbi’s friendships with Pant, Pinto and Brockway or Markham’s relationships with U Hla Aung and Padmore sustained thicker lines of affinity than created through a common reading of Socialist Asia. New travel routes facilitated the interpersonal connections of the ‘Bandung moment’. In 1953, U Hla Aung visited Lusaka and Kumasi on his way to the UN in New York. Murumbi stopped off in Cairo en route to London. Mobility and internationalist affinity gave agency. This necessitated clever navigation as colonial states fought doggedly to police unstable borders as the empire crumbled. Such mobile, and often young, activists also had to negotiate the constraints, power asymmetries and limitations of the anti-colonial international institutions with which they liaised. But, in the 1950s, it was through such interpersonal connections and experiments across the world ‘that the global politics of the day permeated into the everyday politics and informed state-formation’ in Africa.114 Witnessing the failures of Burmese statehood shaped Markham’s designs for Ghana. India’s universities, ASC and AAPSO were discrete institutions for their patrons. But, for mobile African activists they were obviously linked; a network of enmeshed institutional opportunities to translate the solidarity of transnational community into actual liberation. Munu Sipalo studied in Delhi, set up in Cairo and travelled to the ASC Bombay conference in 1956 to bolster his Zambia African National Congress. Sipalo liaised with Paulo Muwanga of Uganda, who corresponded with Fenner Brockway and Israel’s Menahem Bargil of the IUSY. Bargil had travelled with Markham to Malaya in 1954 and asked Murumbi in London for help to

114 gerard mccann

plan the 1957 IUSY tour of Africa. African nationalists simultaneously exploited Nasser’s AAPSO and Israel’s Afro-Asian Institute for Labour Studies in the late 1950s. African leaders skillfully traversed entangled international institutions to build their post-colonialisms, sidelining geopolitical competition or hierarchy, as far as possible, in the pursuit of their goals. Such journeys married global politics with the need to develop tangible skills for post-colonial statehood. Murumbi’s request for Indian studentships for East Africans or Markham’s use of the ASC as a pathway to Israeli development assistance for Ghana were means to critique empire, but also to define the form of the independent future. Anti-colonial politics was development and vice versa. These institutional spaces of decolonizing connection were, in part, zones of foreign policy strategy for the big ‘third worldist’ statesmen like Nehru or Nasser. For the Africans followed here, the networks of affinity below and across states in the ‘Bandung moment’ did not have to be about a grab for world power or leadership of the post-colonial order. These networks presented something more locally useable. The Gold Coast delegates theatrically sporting their kente on the Bandung stage (fig. 5.3) sat alongside the besuited Markham in a backroom office explaining the need for rapid African industrialization to a Japanese newspaper (fig. 5.2). The Afro in Afro-Asian solidarity demanded something pragmatic and urgent over the ethereal and geopolitical from the ‘Bandung spirit’. In Rangoon and Bandung, Markham saw first-hand Asian modes of post-colonial comportment, the intricacies of transnational administration and the parameters of ideological possibility across ethnicity, place and nation. He assessed the pan-African playing field and useable strands of pan-Asian examples. In the late 1950s, Accra emerged as a premier hub of the pan-African world, the final resting place of Du Bois. On his return from Asia, Markham laid the organizational groundwork for the Bureau of African Affairs, the government department that generated the densest paper trail of the Ghanaian state and organized the landmark AAPC.115 Markham’s central role in administering the daily affairs of the ASC translated into a bureaucratically and technocratically attuned pan-Africanism at home. AfroAsianism of the early 1950s informed the pan-Africanism of the late decade. The Bandung era crumbled into the 1960–1970s under the pressures of Cold War, geoeconomic shock and insurmountable differences in nationalist orientation across the ‘third world’. And yet, looking back on the disappointments of post-colonialism, we should not dwell entirely on the withering of diverse internationalist projects after the 1950s in Asia and Africa. As Gary Wilder urges, we should ‘identify in them a vitality that could inspire and expand the range of political possibilities’.116 Jim Markham of the Gold Coast composing the first Anti Colonial Bureau News Letter in Rangoon in June 1954, embodied, for a time, such thick decolonial possibilities.

where was the afro in afro-asian solidarity? africa’s ‘bandung moment’ 115

Notes 1

An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume.

1

Asian Socialist Conference, Anti-Colonial Bureau Newsletter no. 1 (1954): 1.

2

R. Wright, The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (Cleveland: World Pub., 1956).

3

R. Leow, “Asian Lessons in the Cold War Classroom: Trade Union Networks and the Multidirectional Pedagogies of the Cold War in Asia,” Journal of Social History, 53, no. 2 (2019): 429.

4

For an overview see C.J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010).

5

D. Chakrabarty, “Legacies of Bandung: Decolonisation and the Politics of Culture,” Economic and Political Weekly 40, no. 46 (2005); R. Burke, “‘The Compelling Dialogue of Freedom’: Human Rights at the Bandung Conference,” Human Rights Quarterly 28, no. 4 (2006); V. Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2008).

6

M.P. Bradley, “Richard Wright, Bandung, and the Poetics of the Third World,” Modern American History 1:1 (2018).

7

Lee, Making a World: 25-27.

8

N. Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2013): 225-252.

9

R. Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong),” Humanity 4:2 (2013): 261-288.

10

A. Burton, “Epilogue,” in Making a World, ed. Lee, 354.

11

J. Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

12

Although see S. Aiyar, Indians in Kenya: The Politics of Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015) for a notable exception.

13

F. Cooper, Africa in the World: Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); G. Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).

14

E.g. Y. Richards, Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004); F.C. Wilkins, “Beyond Bandung: The Critical Nationalism of Lorraine Hansberry, 1950–1965,” Radical History Review 2006 95 (2006).

15

The Afro-Asian Networks Collective, “Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 176-82. I. Milford, G. McCann, E. Hunter & D. Branch, “Another World? East Africa, Decolonisation, and the Global History of the Mid-Twentieth Century,” The Journal of African History 62:3 (2021).

16

G.H. Jansen, Non-Alignment and the Afro-Asian States (New York: Prager, 1966).

17

Vitalis, “The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah”: 270-276.

18

F. Gerits, “Bandung as the Call for a Better Development Project: US, British, French and Gold Coast Perceptions of the Afro-Asian Conference (1955),” Cold War History 16:3 (2016): 270-271.

19

S. Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

20

N.V. Rajkumar, Indians Outside India: A General Survey (New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee, 1951).

21

See L. James, George Padmore and Decolonization from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War, and the End of Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

116 gerard mccann

22

Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML), New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee (AICC) papers first installment, FD8/1936: R.M. Lohia to W.E.B. Du Bois, 20 July 1936.

23

D. Sutton, “‘Divided and Uncertain Loyalties’: Partition, Indian Sovereignty and Contested Citizenship in East Africa, 1948–55,” Interventions 9, no. 2 (2007): 276-88.

24

A. Pant, A Moment in Time (Bombay: Orient Longman, 1974), 64.

25

The National Archives, London (TNA): FCO/141/14553: Secretary of State for Colonies to Governors of Trinidad, Jamaica, Mauritius, Fiji, Gold Coast, Nigeria, Singapore and Malaya, 23 December 1953.

26

Aiyar, Indians in Kenya, 192.

27

G. McCann, “From Diaspora to Third Worldism and the United Nations: India and the Politics of Decolonizing Africa,” Past & Present 218, suppl. 8 (2013): 258-80.

28

United Kingdom. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, vol. 508, 26 November 1952.

29

A. Pant, Undiplomatic Incidents (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1987), 20; TNA: CO/537/5764: Political Intelligence Summary, Central African Department, April 1950.

30

National Archives of India (NAI), New Delhi: F. 19-1/49-AFRII: Pant to Subimal Dutt, Additional Secretary, Ministry of External Affairs, 20 January 1949.

31

NAI: 25-25/46-O.S.I: Henry Muoria, George Ndegwa, George Karioki, Zabula, J. Kariuki and Mbiyu Koinange to Jawaharlal Nehru, 16 September 1946.

32

NAI: 20-24/48-O.S.I: Pant to Dutt, 28 August 1948.

33

R. Mugo Gatheru, Child of Two Worlds: A Kikuyu’s Story (London: Heinemann, 1966), 130.

34

A. Oginga Odinga, Two Months in India (Nairobi: New Kenya Publishers, 1966).

35

“Bhakra Dam fascinates Prime Minister Nkrumah,” India News (Accra), 15 January 1959.

36

NAI: 20-24/48-O.S.I: Pant to Dutt, 28 August 1948.

37

NAI: 18-68/49-AFRII: Pant to Dutt, 18 October 1949.

38

D.V. Patel, Impressions of My Tour in Europe and East Asia (Bombay, 1955), 29.

39

NAI: MEA R&I section 3(23)-R81/55: Education Report for East and Central Africa, 1953-54.

40

Indian Council for Africa, India and Africa: Perspectives of Cooperation (New Delhi: Haya Hindustan Press, 1967), 36-43.

41

Kenyan National Archives (KNA), Nairobi: OP/EST/1/697: Minutes of meeting of the Indian Scholarships Local Selection Committee, India House, Nairobi, 23 September 1958.

42

NMML: Apa Pant papers second installment: M.J. Desai to Mukul Mukherjee, 31 July 1959.

43

NAI: MEA AII/53/1641/3101: B.N. Nanda to M.A. Rahman, 13 November 1953.

44

NAI: 6(217)-GI/49: Pant to Nanda, 7 January 1953.

45

M. Mazower, “Chapter 4,” No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

46

See Lewis in this book.

47

M. Sherwood, “Kwame Nkrumah: The London Years, 1945-47,” Immigrants & Minorities 12:3 (1993): 164-94.

48

See TNA: FCO/141/4933: Nkrumah’s activities, 1947–51. This was the result of CPP rejection of the 1949 constitution, which contravened British wartime promises on educational and welfare provisions for military service.

49

Socialist Asia 1:1 (1952): 1-6.

50

The ASC could therefore boast 602,000 members: 283,000 from India, 150,000 from Indonesia, 120,000 from Japan, 16,000 from Burma, and the remainder from Israel, Lebanon, Malaya, Pakistan and Vietnam. Three Years of the Asian Socialist Conference (Bombay: ASC, 1956), 5.

51

Report of the First Asian Socialist Conference, Rangoon (Rangoon, ASC, 1953), 111-112; Pant, Undiplomatic Incidents: 44-46.

where was the afro in afro-asian solidarity? africa’s ‘bandung moment’ 117

52

Socialist Asia 2:4 (1952): 20; Socialist Asia 2:5 (1953): 10. This referred to the ‘Capricorn African Society’, a multiracial pressure group established in Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia, Kenya, Nyasaland and Tanganyika by liberal white settlers in the 1950–1960s.

53

ACBNL no. 7 (1955): 4.

54

Socialist Asia 2:10 (1954): 44; ACBNL, no. 5 (1955): 4; TNA: CO/936/351: Monthly Northern Rhodesian Intelligence Report, December 1953.

55

“ASC Joint Secretary Meets the Press. Views on African Struggle against Colonialism,” New Times of

56

Socialist Asia 2:9 (1954).

57

ACBNL, no. 1 (1954): 1.

58

TNA: CO/936/351: Federation of Malaya Political Intelligence Report, August 1954.

59

TNA: FCO/151/5050: Markham to Nkrumah, 11 September 1954.

60

TNA: FCO/151/5050: R.A. Brown, Ministry of Defence, Gold Coast to Chief Secretary, Lagos,

Burma, 2 February 1954; ACBNL, no. 6 (1955): 4-5; no. 9 (1955): 3-4.

16 February 1954. 61

TNA: CO/936/351: Colonial Office Memorandum on the Asian Socialist Conference, 29 September 1956.

62

TNA: FCO/317/111928: Keith Oakeshott, British Embassy Rangoon to J.G. Tabourdin, South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, 22 December 1953.

63

Preparatory Committee of Second ASC Congress, Three Years of the Asian Socialist Conference (Bombay: ASC, 1956), 3-6; Lewis in this book; I. Talbot, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

64

The Eastern Bloc would provide rich educational opportunities, exploited by enterprising African nationalist leaders, for thousands of African students over the 1950s-60s. Some 1500 would study in Eastern Europe from Kenya alone. D. Branch, “Political traffic: Kenyan students in eastern and central Europe, 1958–69,” Journal of Contemporary History (2018).

65

J. Markham, “The Heart of the Matter,” Socialist Asia 3:9/10 (1955): 11-13.

66

G. Padmore, “Gold Coast Revolution,” Socialist Asia 3:2 (1954): 14-18.

67

G. Padmore, “New Constitution for Singapore,” ACBNL, no. 1 (1954): 7-8.

68

TNA: FCO/371/116974: Ban on Socialist Asia in Kenya, October 1954.

69

Socialist Asia 3:1 (1954): 16-20. This was likely a pointed reference to British assessments of Mau Mau as psychological crisis among the Kikuyu. E.g. J.C. Carothers, The Psychology of Mau Mau (Nairobi: Government Printers, 1955).

70

TNA: FCO/141/5050: Markham to Nkrumah, 11 September 1954.

71

Programme of Studies, 8th International Course of Afro-Asian Institute for Labour Studies and Cooperation, 1963–1964, (Tel Aviv: AAILSC, 1964), 2.

72

“Self-rule nearly gained by African Gold Coast,” The Mainichi (Tokyo), 2 December 1954.

73

Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre”: 225-52.

74

G. Padmore, “Gold Coast Steals the Show at the Afro-Asian Conference,” West African Pilot (Lagos), 22 April 1955.

75

TNA: FCO/141/5051: F.E. Bruce Cummings to Governor, Gold Coast, 6 April 1955 & F.E. Bruce Cummings record of talk with Mr. Dei-Annang, 2 May 1955.

76

NAI: 19(2)/55-AFRII, Subimal Dutt record of conversation with Kojo Botsio, 30 April 1955.

77

TNA: FCO/141/5051: Chancery, British Embassy Djakarta to FO South East Asia Department, 5 May 1955.

78

W. Thompson, Ghana’s Foreign Policy, 1957–1966 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5.

79

TNA: CO/936/351: Chancery, British Embassy Rangoon to FO South East Asia Department, 15 March 1955.

118 gerard mccann

80

TNA: FCO/151/5050: Commissioner for Police to Governor, Gold Coast, 10 October 1956.

81

See ASC, Information Bulletins (Bombay), July 1956 to June 1960.

82

TNA: FCO/371/123269: British Embassy Belgrade to FO Southern Department, 8 December 1956.

83

ACBNL, no. 1 (1954): 2-3.

84

A. Gordon, On Becoming Alijah: From the American Revolutionary War through Burma, 1957 (Kuala

85

KNA: Joseph Murumbi collection MAC/KEN/81/1: Visit to India, 1953; “Kenya Security Methods,”

Lumpur: A. Gordon, 2003), 275-76. The Times (London), 18 April 1953. See I. Milford & G. McCann, “African Internationalisms and the Erstwhile Trajectories of Kenyan Community Development: Joseph Murumbi’s 1950s,” Journal of Contemporary History 57:1 (2022). 86

Murumbi’s recollections in K. Rothmyer, Joseph Murumbi. A Legacy of Integrity (Nairobi: Zand Graphics, 2018), 63-67.

87

International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam: International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) Papers Box 1357, Uganda: Freddie Moller, Secretary IUSY to Joe Zeke, Kampala, 15 October 1954.

88

H. Adi, “African Political Thinkers, Pan-Africanism and the Politics of Exile, c.1850–1970,” Immigrants & Minorities 30, no. 2-3 (2012): 281.

89

ACBNL, no. 16 (1955): 1-4.

90

TNA: FCO/141/6887: Profile of Joseph Murumbi, September 1957.

91

Abou-El-Fadl in this book.

92

For Sipalo’s movements and schemes, see I. Milford Harnessing the Wind: East and Central African activists and anti-colonial cultures in a decolonising world, 1952-64 (PhD thesis, European University Institute, 2019): 77-85

93

TNA: CO/936/352: R. Armitage, Nyasaland to Secretary of State for Colonies, 2 November 1956. Sipalo was expelled from the NRANC in September 1957 by Harry Nkumbula and, with Kenneth Kaunda, formed the breakaway and more radical Zambia African National Congress, later UNIP.

94

See F. Brockway, African Socialism (London: The Bodley Head, 1963).

95

Muwanga was arrested for sedition for an article in the Ugandan paper, Emambya Fsaze.

96

“No passport,” Manchester Guardian, 11 December 1956; TNA: CO/936/352: Summary of letter from Muwanga to Brockway, 15 November 1956.

97

IISH: IUSY Box 1357, Uganda: Paul Muwanga to Menahem Bargil, IUSY Secretariat, 16 June 1956; Bargil to Muwanga, 20 September 1956.

98

For more details see I. Milford, “More than a Cold War scholarship: East-Central African anticolonial activists, the International Union of Socialist Youth, and the evasion of the colonial state (1955–65).” Stichproben: The Vienna Journal of African Studies 34 (2018).

99

“Banned delegates,” Colonial Times (Nairobi), 9 January 1958.

100

“Kenya Man goes to Cairo,” Sunday Post (Nairobi), 29 December 1957.

101

TNA: FCO/141/6734: Makerere Students’ Political Association Minutes, c. April 1957.

102

TNA: FCO/141/6734: The Afro-Asian Movement as it affects Kenya, January to May 1959.

103

TNA: FCO 141/7064: Report on All-Africa People’s Conference, December 1958; Vitalis, “The midnight ride of Kwame Nkrumah.”.

104

Report of Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Cairo (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1958), 238-46.

105

J. Murumbi, “Kenya’s Economic Problems: Need for Establishing New Contacts,” Afro-Asian Bulletin 5:5-8 (1963): 5-9.

106

NMML: Subimal Dutt papers s. no. 86: ‘Asian-African Cooperation – Retrospect and Prospect’.

where was the afro in afro-asian solidarity? africa’s ‘bandung moment’ 119

107

Report of Third Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, Moshi, February 1963 (Cairo: AAPSO, 1963), 21.

108

McCann, “From Diaspora to Third Worldism”: 273-76.

109

C. Chachage, “African Unity: Feeling with Nkrumah, Thinking with Nyerere,” Pambazuka News, 9 April 2009.

110

J.S. Ahlman, “Road to Ghana: Nkrumah, Southern Africa the Eclipse of a decolonizing Africa,” Kronos, 37 (2011).

111

J. Byrne, Mecca of Revolution Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

112

J.R. Brennan, “Radio Cairo and Decolonization of East Africa, 1953-64,” in Making a World after Empire, 173-95.

113

See Stolte and Raza in this book; P. Gupta, C.J. Lee, M.J. Moorman, S. Shukla, “Editors’ Introduction,” Radical History Review, 131 (2018).

114

Branch. “Political traffic”: 830.

115

J S. Ahlman, “Managing the Pan-African Workplace: Discipline, Ideology, and the Cultural Politics of the Ghanaian Bureau of African Affairs, 1959–66,” Ghana Studies 15 (2012): 366-67.

116

Wilder, Freedom Time: 199.

CHAPTER 6

Asia as a Third Way? J.C. Kumarappa and the Problem of Development in Asia Yasser Nasser

Abstract Unsatisfied with the trajectory of Indian development in the early 1950s, famed Gandhian economist and activist Joseph Cornelius (J.C.) Kumarappa did not turn to the Soviet Union or the United States as examples to follow. Rather, he looked closer to home to find a more suitable model of development. This chapter tracks the way that J.C. Kumarappa saw China and Japan in particular as two different visions of an ‘Asian’ solution to India’s problems with food security, land management, and industrialization. It argues that for Kumarappa, ‘Asia’ was defined primarily by the issue of underdevelopment, but that he was uninterested in either of the two dominant models being imported into the region – American laissez-faire capitalism and Soviet-style central planning – in favor of a locally run, village-based development plan that could serve as a viable ‘third way’.

Keywords: Kumarappa, Asianism, Third Way, socialism, development

By the early 1950s, the famed Gandhian economist and political activist Joseph Cornelius (J.C.) Kumarappa felt that India was confronting a profound crisis. Kumarappa believed that the country, having recently been rent apart by Partition and deprived of Gandhi’s moral leadership, lacked the political program necessary to ensure that independence would be accompanied by economic empowerment. Gandhi’s constructive workers had been made either politically irrelevant or captured by the interests of Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party, the questions of land reform and food scarcity seemed no closer to being solved, and plans for economic development largely focused on heavy industry and top-down industrialization drives. Amidst all this, even as Congress paid lip service to the image of Gandhi and his calls for self-sufficiency, India had begun accepting American aid. Observing the field from his position as the leader of the long sidelined All-India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) at his experimental Pannai Ashram, Kumarappa despaired that few Indians seemed willing to “build our new-born nation on a firm social foundation of equality and self-respect restoring to everyone the dignity of a human being”.1

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It was in this context that Kumarappa looked to changing political currents in the region to find solutions for India’s social and economic ills. Specifically, Kumarappa believed that by looking at the diverging paths of China and Japan, Indians could understand their country’s comparative shortcomings and advantages, and formulate a vision of decolonization that did not simply imitate older colonial policies. Through this act of comparison, Kumarappa suggested that because of their similarities as agrarian, Asian countries, Indians could look to a neighbor like China to understand the possibilities of independence. China was a novel country worth emulating because of its insistence on striking its own path; on the other hand, Japan was a pitiable example because of the extent of its crude imitation of Western economic development. Kumarappa thus saw two different ‘Asias’: an Asia that created a novel political economy divorced from both American capitalism and Soviet socialism, and an Asia that, while functionally independent, remained embedded in the global economic forces that had once kept it in colonial captivity. Kumarappa was not alone in his search for an alternative to Soviet and American political models.2 However, his understudied attraction to the Chinese political project sets him apart; where other Gandhian activists became more insular in their quest for developmental alternatives, Kumarappa called for his countrymen to study their neighbors and situate the Gandhian project at home for the larger, global fight for peace and economic justice.3 By evaluating the evolution of Kumarappa’s political and economic thinking as he traveled and studied the conditions of other ‘Asian’ countries, this chapter makes two claims. Firstly, I argue that Kumarappa’s beliefs showcase the durability of ‘Asia’ as a political ideal. While other authors have argued that Asianism was a spent force following the defeat of the Japanese Empire, Kumarappa’s fascination with China as a fellow Asian country suggests that it took on new meanings in a bifurcated world. Kumarappa defined ‘Asia’ as consisting of nations whose social, political, and moral fabrics were defined by their agrarian political economy. He believed that both the Soviet and American model of top-down industrialization and capital accumulation would threaten this societal structure. Thus, Asia would have to collectively create its own path to development and meaningful decolonization. Even as other authors have suggested that Indian interest in China stemmed mostly from Soviet-aligned groups and communists, Kumarappa’s belief in China’s ‘Asianness’ helps to recontextualize the Chinese Revolution as significant for the region’s politics as a whole beyond simplistic communist/non-communist divisions.4 To do so would mean working together and emulating each other, while recognizing and respecting different approaches. A reliance on industrialized countries, Kumarappa believed, would not only leave former colonies at the mercy of the global economic structures that had caused their underdevelopment in the first place, but would also ultimately affect the morale of the populace. Thus, I also argue that Kumarappa’s belief in ‘Asia’ as the avatar of Gandhian politics radically

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suggested that embracing agrarian economics as the basis of non-alignment would transform India and its neighbors into the potential helmsmen of historical change, instead of riding on the coattails of either superpower. For Kumarappa, Asia would succeed against imperialism if, through mutual learning and emulation, its countries committed to a political program that would empower underdeveloped agrarian regions to stand on their own feet. This self-sufficiency in turn would enable peasants and the working class to create an economy that did not rely on the whims of the industrial world and instead create a sustainable, alternative path of development. Kumarappa thus argued that the so-called ‘backwardness’ of agrarian economies could in fact allow them to succeed where both the United States and the Soviet Union had failed: creating a moral society. In pursuit of these arguments, this chapter examines the travels that Kumarappa took in the 1950s to China and Japan, and the various writings that followed those trips. Beginning with an outline of Kumarappa’s economic and political thought, I trace his journeys and the impact that they had on his view of the economic basis for decolonization and post-colonial nationalism. In doing so, I hope to excavate how ‘Asia’ was used to conceptualize a ‘third way’.5 Kumarappa’s unconventional ‘Asian’ model centered around committing to a political and economic model capable of both harnessing the region’s particularities and inspiring a regenerative, positive nationalism that could help forge a more equitable international order. His use of Asia in this way foreshadows the way that later thinkers would likewise turn to ‘Afro-Asia’ in search of an answer to the woes of post-colonial nation-building.6 For Kumarappa, the model for liberation in India would not come from either the Soviet Union or the United States, but rather from the sort of experimentations happening in a country like China, with whom he believed India shared its fate as an Asian country. China represented an Asia that was striking an entirely independent path in a bipolar world by pursuing a vision of development that empowered its agrarian economy instead of subjugating it. Japan was in marked contrast to that status, having been, in Kumarappa’s eyes, captured by American and industrial interests that prevented the country from taking advantage of its post-war transformation. The connections that he drew between the socio-economic struggles in the rest of the region as equivalent to the struggle within India itself help to reveal how ‘Asia’ became a conduit for dreams of a better world in the early Cold War.

Development as a Moral Project Kumarappa has been hailed as the principal architect of “Gandhian economics”.7 He was a prolific writer who used Gandhian concepts to flesh out his ideal for an independent India: decentralized, self-reliant, and committed to a political

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program that could guarantee equality and progress for all.8 To that effect, much of Kumarappa’s writings engaged in questions of how to create a coherent political and economic program that abided by Gandhi’s ideals of non-violence and morality. For Kumarappa, this was not only a matter of producing a just society. Rather, a more equitable political economy would also have the benefit of reforming people’s minds and laying the foundations for India as a sovereign, democratic nation-state. The problem of raising nationalist consciousness and the struggle for liberation from the British Empire had been a driving force for much of Kumarappa’s work with Gandhi.9 Despite his anarchist leanings, Kumarappa did not inherently reject the nation-state as a model for liberation. Rather, he believed that the Western model of nationhood created certain economic and political deficiencies which had adversely influenced world politics and could potentially also hinder redistributive justice in India. Indeed, what drew Gandhi to his work in the late 1920s was Kumarappa’s emphasis on how British fiscal policy had impoverished the Indian countryside, while at the same time arguing that nationalist calls for rapid industrialization misunderstood how industrial policy had likewise caused traditional village industries to decline.10 Kumarappa believed in fighting for independence, but also held that political autonomy was useless without the correct attitude towards economic development.11 Kumarappa rooted his understanding of development in non-violence. Like his hero Kropotkin, he believed that there was a moral order to the material world, which in turn was reflected in the various types of economies and societies that had developed over the course of human history.12 Whereas other thinkers prioritized development for its own sake, Kumarappa argued that industrial economies’ drive towards increasing profits and production could only ever end in imperialism or the oppression of a population. To prevent this inevitable violence, the economy had to be developed in a way that could meet all basic needs of individuals without unravelling the bonds that tied communities together.13 Thus, the most advanced economy was the “economy of service”: a largely decentralized, agrarian society that provided for all without exploitation or the profit motive. Conversely, on the lowest stages of Kumarappa’s hierarchy of moral economies were the parasitic, predatory economies that prioritized profit and unrelenting growth in supply and demand, such as the imperial powers.14 Kumarappa believed that this moral taxonomy also influenced the nationalism that societies produced. In a speech given during the height of World War II, later compiled into an essay, Kumarappa attempted to diagnose the different types of nationalism. Relying on metaphors rooted in the natural world, Kumarappa divided nationalism into two different types: “sheep-flock nationalism” and “wolfpack nationalism”, with the former reflecting a defensive grouping and the latter a product of aggression. The purpose of this bifurcation, as Kumarappa notes in

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his speech, was to diagnose the relationship that nationalism in the West had with imperialism, and the danger that countries of the ‘East’ also faced from their own nationalist movements. In making such a division, Kumarappa did not propose a stereotypically reified division between a materialist West and a spiritual East. Rather, he framed his distinction between the two in terms of economic structures. As he understood it, European nation-states had been formed out of competition with one another, forming a “strong selfish outlook” that in turn produced a “form of Imperialism” wherein “predatory and mechanical nationalism…enables them to prey upon other nations not sufficiently organised to take care of themselves.” This sort of cannibalistic nationalism reflected the status of European economies as largely predatory, wherein the principal characteristic was an “insatiable greed for others’ goods”. This nationalism became yoked to the “self-interest of imperialists” and was “controlled by Finance.”15 In contrast, most countries in Asia had not yet been captured by those same financial interests.16 Agrarian structures and a lack of external markets had kept certain countries in the region free of the same “imperialistic greed” that defined the West. Despite falling into Orientalist tropes about countries like China and India relying on insularity and “social pressures” to maintain internal coherence, Kumarappa did not suggest that these qualities were immutable. Japan’s focus on “growth” and the “momentary glimmer of power” in its competition with the Western powers and its rapid industrialization meant that the country had shifted and “accepted the wolf-pack-nationalism as its creed”. The Guomindang in China, with its backing by corrupt industrial interests, was likewise “on the fence”. Kumarappa thus recognized that the fight against Western imperialism had just as much potential of driving anti-colonial forces in Asia towards the same patterns of violence and oppression that they ostensibly opposed. The only way to avert this would be a commitment to a moral economic structure that could provide for all without turning to centralized industrialization and the drive for profits that it brought with it. In doing so, nationalism could help nations “[work] in love towards each other and dealing with each other on the same code of morals that govern the individual.” In that sense, nationalism was “an integral part of internationalism.”17 By framing nationalism as a moral project that reflected his distinctive categorization of economic relations, Kumarappa posed a challenge to the teleological understandings of development often invoked by other Indian nationalists both before and after independence. While even figures such as Nehru had often spoken of a common purpose or ‘unity’ amongst Asian countries, much of that unity was often predicated on culturalist assumptions about the ‘East’ as a materially backward place in need of adopting the practices of the industrialized world.18 Kumarappa did not believe that India or other Asian countries were ‘backwards’ and in need of embracing ‘progress’ in any linear fashion. Indeed, supposedly

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‘advanced’ industrial nations occupied the lowest rungs of his hierarchy of economies.19 That is not to say that Kumarappa glorified poverty. Rather, he believed that truly overcoming it meant embracing a vision of development that did not fall into the same logic of capital accumulation and centralization that had defined the Western powers’ drive towards imperialism. In this sense, underdevelopment gave Asian countries a possible advantage: the potential to use their ‘backwards’ agrarian economic structures to usher in sustainable, self-sufficient development and thus create a truly moral society.20 Following independence, the Indian government did little to instill Kumarappa with much confidence that they would embrace such a program. His AIVIA believed that Congress’ economic policy was in many ways “keeping with [the] imperialism” of the “previous regime”, reflecting a larger disappointment with Nehru’s government and its failure to reform the country’s colonial structures and bureaucracy.21 At the same time, he believed that Indian villages could serve as laboratories for potential alternatives of economic development. To that end, having been appointed the chair of the Agrarian Reforms Committee in 1947, Kumarappa extensively toured the countryside to propose a series of comprehensive reforms that would address the cruelties of landlords in the zamindari system and the everyday violence that defined the lives of the landless and the destitute.22 Simply put, Kumarappa believed that without fixing the fundamental problems of economic inequality, food scarcity, and land distribution, India would not be able to create the just society promised of by its Constitution.23 By treating the village as the fundamental unit of economic and political life, Kumarappa believed that India could build a profoundly democratic and liberatory society without resorting to the violence of the Soviet model.24 At the same time, Kumarappa’s travels within the country also reinforced his belief that the Nehruvian state also needed to be warned against moving towards an American, laissez-faire economy. As he argued in a report on rural development in Punjab, just as Gandhi was “not interested in creating ‘haves and have-nots”, the state should not simply focus on “increas[ing] production” or supporting key financial interests. Instead, it needed to attend to “the needs of the people” and “provide food, clothing, and shelter to every citizen”.25 However, despite his ties to Nehru and Rajendra Prasad, Kumarappa increasingly found his warnings ignored by India’s political establishment.26 Wary of growing American influence and Congress’s commitment to haughty five-year plans, he increasingly looked closer afield for proof that his ideal economy was possible. To that end, Kumarappa was most interested in the experience of India’s neighbors. India was firmly an “underdeveloped Asian country”; thus, similarly ‘Asian’ countries made for good studying material.27

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The Novelty of New China Pandit Sundarlal, a notable Gandhian activist himself, invited Kumarappa to serve in a goodwill mission to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in September 1951.28 After some deliberation, he agreed. As reflected in his correspondence to his lieutenant and close friend at the AIVIA, G. Ramachandran, Kumarappa sought to visit China to “come back with a fund of information” about the work that was being done to address China’s “land problem”.29 Indeed, this was in line with the goal of the goodwill mission in general. Organized by a variety of ‘united front’ organizations in China and the All-India Peace Council, the mission toured China for six weeks in celebration of the second anniversary of the PRC’s founding.30 At the same time, the mission’s delegates, selected to reflect the “various shades of opinion” in India, also sought to give Indians an in-depth account of “New China” and “the conditions prevailing there”.31 The Indian government supported this initiative, with Sundarlal noting to Kumarappa that Nehru himself had requested that the economist be made a delegate.32 Kumarappa mused that Nehru likely requested his presence because he “thought I would change my opinions about economic development” after seeing the “industrial and agricultural improvements in China”.33 As the delegates declared in a signed statement to the Chinese press before their return to India, the trip’s aim had been in many ways to “report to our countrymen…the astonishing progress that we saw in all facets of life”.34 Reflecting this impetus for fact-finding and comparing China’s conditions to India, the various delegates all took pain to document their observations, with many going on to either publish their travelogues or contribute to Sundarlal’s lengthy compilation, China Today.35 Kumarappa was no exception. He frequently wrote to Ramachandran and his disciple M. Vinaik; these letters, in turn, were published in Gram Udyog Patrika, the principal publishing organ of the AIVIA.36 Coupled with his general thoughts on China’s economic and political reforms, these publications were later compiled and published as a short pamphlet, People’s China: What I Saw and Learnt There.37 Despite his desire to study agrarian policy and China’s recent land reform campaign, Kumarappa commented widely on what he saw, from clothing and public hygiene to art and infrastructure. From the moment his travels began, he was struck by what he saw as an effusive and all-encompassing display of national pride.38 As the captain of the ship that ferried the delegation from Hong Kong to Guangzhou declared “Cantonese or Pekinese, we do not care, China is all one.” Kumarappa in turn mused that “In India too there should be no Punjab no Bombay no Madras [sic]. All India should be one.”39 As opposed to divisions at home, Guangzhou and the ensuing trip through the country convinced Kumarappa that there was a certain “political wisdom” in ‘New China’ that, grounded in the drive for economic equality, had awakened a new national consciousness. Despite the

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poverty that he noticed – poverty that was comparable to what one would see on the streets of Calcutta or Delhi – Guangzhou’s municipal government had succeeded in providing the necessities for most of its citizenry.40 Kumarappa argued that these initiatives had in turn inspired citizens to adopt a certain “industriousness”. Noting that Guangzhou’s residents were themselves responsible for creating a well-kept, hygienic urban environment that consisted largely of “cycles, cycle-rickshaws and buses”, Kumarappa was astounded by the city’s local political autonomy coupled with the state’s desire to strictly regulate consumer goods.41 Kumarappa was likewise impressed with what he saw of the new state’s humility.

42

Beijing seemed relatively wrapped in a relative “simplicity” that Kumarappa

contrasted directly with the “Rastrapathi Bhavan” style of his fellow Delhi-hailing delegates.43 Luxury hotels and palaces had been made into “dormitories for volunteers”, and even though people had gathered to the city to celebrate the country’s founding, everyone was “dressed in their work-a-day clothes”, the entire nation having “rolled up its sleeve for national reconstruction.” This discipline and productivity were likewise reflected in the various celebrations organized to mark the PRC’s anniversary, as Kumarappa expressed awe at the “perfect order and discipline” and the “enthusiasm” displayed by the “workers, railway and industrial labour [sic], farmers, villagers, school and college students” who marched in the city.44 As Kumarappa put it: “…a People with this spirit will never be slaves. By comparison India suffers. It seems presumptuous on our part to think that India leads the East; China is miles ahead of us. There is a singleness of purpose and an iron determination to achieve it. Nothing can stop them now. We have neither a goal nor a purpose and we lack drive… It has an intelligent administration which has the whole-hearted backing of the people.”45 As was the case with the other delegates’ writings, Kumarappa glossed over many potential tensions or issues in ‘New China’. In part, this was the result of a highly choreographed tour; the delegates relied on a guide and translator to help them interpret the lived experiences of the people that they met. Other members of the mission noted that it was often difficult to get clear answers from their interviewees or enough empirical data to accurately assess the successes and failures of China’s revolutionary policies.46 At the same time, Kumarappa clearly did not intend to evaluate the Chinese experience on its own terms. Rather, his constant comparisons to India showed that his real audience was the Indian government, whose policies Kumarappa was growing more and more hostile towards in the wake of Gandhi’s death. Thus ‘China’ and indeed the ‘Asia’ that it represented were rhetorical devices to cast India’s economic structures in a new light.47 Kumarappa ultimately saw the political economy that was emerging in ‘New China’ and the corresponding set of disciplines, values, and patriotism amongst the masses as inherently connected to the novelty of the Chinese Revolution,

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particularly the “realistic approach” that the Chinese Communist Party took towards its policies.48 The government of ‘New China’ had managed to endear itself to the populace by providing them with most necessities and taking a harsh stance against the sort of excesses that had defined the previous Guomindang regime.49 As a result of that dedication, Kumarappa believed that the people of ‘New China’ were likewise committed to bettering themselves and participating in government projects of their own accord, thus unshackling the potential for vast and disparate regions in the country to develop at their own pace.50 As he argued, the country had taken a path that was reflective of its own past and historical trajectory. China was “miles ahead of us [India]” because of this commitment to experimentation.51 Kumarappa argued throughout his life that any sort of Soviet-style economy, concentrated on centralized, heavy industry, would ultimately not be suited to India because of its status as a primarily agrarian, Asian country.52 This quality of being ‘Asian’, as noted above, was not merely a culturalist argument but was rooted in a distinctive political economy that centered around cottage and light industries and decentralized governance. China, out of all other countries, was “nearest to our [own]”, with “political and social conditions” that were “somewhat similar to the present structures in India” and a history that was likewise “visited by famines and floods as ours.”53 Similarly, China was also not suited to the centralized policies of industrialization and urbanization that Kumarappa disliked about the Soviet Union. Rather, the Chinese people had created a method for revolutionary politics that was “very different from the Russian.” Where Russia “pivoted on the proletariat”, China was “rebuilding on the peasantry.”54 For Kumarappa, this distinction was vital. As he constantly reiterated to his readers, rumors in India of China merely imitating the Soviet Union were entirely unfounded, as owing to their “fundamental differences”, China would “not blindly follow Russia.”55 This insistence on creating their own innovative path to the society that they aimed to realize was in turn “a lesson to us”.56 Kumarappa declared that the PRC’s attitude towards land reform was the best symbol of its commitment to novel policies. ‘New Democracy’ in China had not resulted in total “communal ownership” but a mixture of private incentives for profit and the complete abolition of “parasitic” landlords. This meant that individual cultivators were “left the full benefit of his labour” and at the same time could provide the government with a direct share of this new wealth via comprehensive land taxes to pay for the disciplined administrators, teachers, and military personnel necessary for the new government’s policies. Thus, similar to Kumarappa’s ideals of moral development, China wanted to “make the nation into a family giving to all prime needs of life” with the land reform creating the “foundation of the structure” necessary to create their “own ideal of Communism”.57 Not everything that Kumarappa saw was to his liking. China had “not considered the use of a non-violent method” and was “a way off the Gandhian route”. He likewise

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feared that after China’s transitional period of New Democracy, an emphasis on producing commodities like “cotton, tobacco and hemp” at the expense of food would result in mass industrialization and a slide towards a Soviet-style state capitalism.58 Despite these misgivings, the “burning patriotism” of China was “worth emulation.” The goal for India laid not in imitating the Soviet, American, or indeed even the Chinese model. Rather, by emulating China’s drive to create its “own ideal of Communism”, India could likewise “solve our problems as best suited to our conditions under the powerful flash light of Non-violence and Truth [sic] provided by Gandhiji”.59 Kumarappa identified China and India as ‘Asian’ countries that, while suffering from underdevelopment and rural poverty, could resolve these issues while avoiding the perils of centralized industrialization or the mass commodification of the modern economy while still raising standards of living and, crucially, affecting the ‘moral character’ of the citizenry. This would necessitate comprehensive land and educational reforms that could both encourage peasants to manage their own production and dedicate themselves to a nationwide program of economic reconstruction. Kumarappa thus held that China proved that prosperity and patriotism could be ushered in without creating the conditions for a centralized industrialism that would, in the end, create the same pressures for capital accumulation that had driven the West and Japan into imperialism. Instead of being a fatal structural flaw that needed to be vanquished, an agrarian society could open a novel pathway to development and awaken the nationalist consciousness that India needed to answer its political and economic challenges. However, even as he admitted that China clearly took a leading position in the region, and despite his suspicion of the Indian government’s intentions, Kumarappa argued that India continued to have an advantage: Gandhi’s moral political program. Even as China had “struck out a new line for herself” having committed to “solving her problems in her own way”, the country was also in danger of abandoning its “moral and spiritual considerations” in favor of material progress. Thus, the path to a true ‘economy of service’ was still reserved for an India that could forge a path with “moral values as its ultimate criterion” for policy, creating a self-sufficient system that would create a more balanced social order without the need for political violence.60 In doing so, India too could live up to its own potential for real liberation.

Japan as Neocolonialism If China represented an ‘Asian’ politics wherein ‘backwardness’ was an advantage for creating a new approach to statecraft and economics, Kumarappa believed that Japan represented the failure of a model that had sought to imitate the West at

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the expense of local needs and traditions. He had previously critiqued Japanese imperialism as stemming from the same rapaciousness of Western capitalism.61 Despite this, urged on by his colleagues at the AIVIA, he requested that the Indian government provide him with funds to visit Japan after the goodwill mission to China had ended, in order to study industrial conditions in the country.62 This reflected a growing interest in India towards the Japanese model of development and economic growth. Even as the Nehruvian state clearly viewed Japan’s relationship with the rest of Asia with some suspicion in the aftermath of the Treaty of San Francisco, there were various calls throughout India to try and foster closer economic relations with the new Japanese regime. This fascination made its way up to even the highest echelons of the state, with Nehru himself noting that Japan’s advanced industrial economy was worth studying.63 At the root of that insistence was the idea that, as a previously agrarian country, Japan’s erstwhile status as a “workshop of the East” could help India overcome its own problems with underdevelopment. As the mayor of Bombay argued in 1951, access to Japanese industry and trade would help hasten the country’s economic development and would serve both countries “mutual benefit”.64 Likewise, the Japanese government’s own overtures to India in the early 1950s hinted at the possibility of Japanese industrial and economic assistance in uplifting the country, while India’s vast, untapped wealth could supply Japanese firms with much-needed raw materials.65 Arriving from Hong Kong via ship, Kumarappa wrote to his colleagues in India that as soon as he stepped into Tokyo, he felt “a little ‘home-sick’” for China.66 If China was an admirable place because of the Chinese Communist Party’s willingness to pursue novel policies based on conditions that they saw on the ground and the ensuing national fervor that this produced, Tokyo was proof to Kumarappa that Japanese politicians were neither capable of acting independent of American influence, nor had the country really reversed the underlying economic conditions that had driven it to imperialism in the first place. Writing to Vinaik, Kumarappa held that “Tokyo is very much westernized”, expressing his disinterest in the large streets and “slick big cars” and “double buses”.67 The “materialism” that had undergirded Japanese militarism had outlived the Japanese Empire itself, with Kumarappa finding that Japan was “incomprehensibly…an erstwhile independent and imperialistic country” that had accepted the “overlordship of the USA under the conditions of occupation”.68 Echoing the comments of contemporary Japanese intellectuals, Kumarappa deemed that the country’s defeat had likewise produced a malaise that had crippled the country’s capacity for a more organic approach to its own political and economic problems.69 Speaking at a press conference in Tokyo, he argued that India and China were “very much the same” due to their shared agrarian conditions and political independence, while Japan had become a “cheap copy of the West” and was being “manipulated” by the American government to

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both serve American interests in Asia and promote domestic policy that was in-line with American ideals.70 As he noted to Vinaik with some contempt, “the Harbours [sic] of Japan are full of U.S.A. ships. They have made Japan practically into another site of the U.S.A.”71 Kumarappa thus felt that the country served as a dire warning for India’s government.72As he explained in his official report to the Indian government, Japan’s extensive, deep-rooted political and economic connections with the United States meant that the country was unable to embark on its own path of development. The “adoption of alien moral and material values” meant that “even in art and clothes” Japan had been put under the foreign yoke. This meant that while Japan grew rich, it was at the cost of the common people. As he expounded as a warning to his Indian readers, Kumarappa noted that “people generally have the impression that Japanese are rich. It is true only in the sense that our Bombay and Ahmedabad mill-owners are rich. In every city in Japan our Bombay and Ahmedabad slum conditions and dire poverty exist. Children are driven out into the streets while their living space is used for industrial production… Do we want to worsen [our] present conditions by introducing merely dispersal of industries rather than decentralisation?”73 Kumarappa had regarded China’s land reforms as the perfect example of the new government’s commitment to its common people. In contrast, Japan’s land reforms were a dire warning about the corrosive influence that a reliance on foreign powers had on a country’s national program. Kumarappa used local liaisons from Tokyo University to escort him to various sites in the countryside to observe Japanese agrarian and cottage industry practices [中小工業].74 He much preferred the charm of rural areas like Nikko to the bustling metropolis of Tokyo.75 But he also found that the countryside had been seriously impacted by a program of land reform that did not reflect the interests of the common people. Instead, it “arose out of a desire of foreign interests to win over the sympathy of certain classes as a bulwark against communism.”76 Mirroring arguments by the Japanese left, Kumarappa found that medium and small holders of land had not been properly treated whereas rich landlords had taken their large compensations and invested capital in new industrial sectors, setting off a period of inflation that had “left the rich richer and the rest the worse”.77 Production had also suffered, and agricultural prices had remained stagnant, leaving farmers in a dire position.78 Though he had previously mentioned Japan’s land reform as further proof that India’s own land policy needed to be remedied, the contrast of China’s land reform and a land reform instigated by “Gen. McArthur” further highlighted the threat that American financial interests married to indigenous capital posed to the future of Asia.79 Despite the veneer of industrial progress in the cities, it was the relative ‘backwardness’ of Japanese farmers that inspired Kumarappa the most. He noted

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with some astonishment that agriculture was largely carried out by human labor, as opposed to mechanization. While India had been “fleeced to buy hundreds of tractors”, it was surprising to Kumarappa that “‘rich’ Japan cannot afford such luxuries.” The hard work of “men, women, and children working with spades and crowbars” and their attention to sustainable agricultural practices were likewise aspects of rural life that Kumarappa believed would be directly applicable to India, where he scoffed that “We waste and we are in want” whereas “there is plenty to eat in Japan when nothing is allowed to go waste.”80 Likewise, Kumarappa was impressed with what he saw of cottage industry, which despite a relative lack of support by the central government, had been propped up by local initiatives. As Kumarappa noted based on his trip to the countryside near Kobe, Japanese small industries created a swathe of “village made goods” that appealed to domestic consumption in a way that India was not able to match, with Japanese stores in those areas largely stocking domestic goods.81 Despite this, Kumarappa declared that “Japanese economic policies have landed them in political slavery, have not made the countryside any richer, and have led them to imports of food.” It was necessary for India to “solve our problems in our way, though it may be a slow process” instead of blindly hoping to replicate Japan’s industrialization. Japan’s emphasis on limitation, Kumarappa held, had limited its capacity to produce a truly liberated society. Thus, he warned his readers that “we need not import machinery or experts from Japan in large numbers. We have to create them on our soil.”82 Seeing Japan’s supposed captivity under American financial interests as a terrible potent for the region, Kumarappa returned home and began to contemplate the dangers that India and Asia at large faced from the emerging Cold War international system, and the role that his country could play in steering the region away from them.

Peace, Imitation, and Emulation In the immediate aftermath of his journeys across Asia, Kumarappa committed himself to study the nature of foreign encroachment in the region, and the relationship that trends in Indian domestic politics had with the broader grooves of regional and global politics in the early Cold War. As would be expected of such an unconventional actor, Kumarappa was not a perfect fit in any of the circles that he was active in. While his praise of China earned him an honorary leadership position in the All-India Peace Council and invitations to the Soviet-leaning World Peace Council’s annual meetings, he also remained connected to the pacifist War Resisters International and routinely denounced international communism.83 This reflected not only the gradual softening of his views of the Soviet Union – which he

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understood as a faulty model for ‘Asia’ but a necessary counterbalance to American excesses – but also his understanding for how peace could be achieved at a time of superpower competition and global upheaval. For Kumarappa, the greatest threat that the Cold War posed to a country like India and other agrarian economies in the region was an economic one – namely that an international trade regime that would subjugate domestic economic interests to the whims of producers and consumers in the industrialized world.84 Thus even as China had committed to the ‘violence’ of land reform and India supposedly remained firmly in the ‘non-violent’ camp, Kumarappa argued that true peace and non-violence also meant recognizing the coercive and exploitative global economic structures that shaped the international order. As he retorted to one criticism that he was blind to violence in China, the “practice of non-violence from Gandhiji’s ashramites will surely be different from that of Gen. McArthur.” In other words, China’s moves to banish “blackmarketing, prostitution, poverty and starvation” had created a country that was on its way to being self-sufficient, and India’s claim of Gandhian principles without that same self-sufficiency meant that it would be susceptible to the “noose” of American interests.85 Indeed, the penetration of American aid ostensibly used to promote development in India in the aftermath of the Technical Cooperation Agreement in January 1952 suggested to Kumarappa that the United States was attempting to ‘keep’ India after it had ‘lost’ China.86 For Kumarappa, American promotion of mechanized agricultural practices, a reliance on crude oil, and the desire to access the breadth of the Indian market represented a special kind of “financial imperialism” that would “deliver us body, soul and spirit into American hands” and in turn prevent the country from critiquing American foreign policy in the region.87 Even more troubling was how Congress, including Nehru and Rajendra Prasad, invoked Gandhi’s name in the unveiling of the American-backed Community Development Projects.88 Kumarappa regarded the Projects and their proposal to use American agricultural techniques to increase productivity and output as ultimately failing to solve the social ills of rural life, which in turn would turn the village into a “factory to produce goods that perish in time”. This was no real replacement for either “regional self-sufficiency in food” or “self-government”.89 By accepting American aid, Kumarappa feared that Nehru’s government would inadvertently act in “full cooperation with the users of Atom and Napalm bombs and bacterial warfare”.90 Adlai Stevenson visited the country in 1953 with the hopes of warning Indians about the danger of “Communist imperialism”, believing that India had to be made into a “stronger bulwark against communism in Asia” as part of the larger struggle between the “totalitarian and the democratic approach” to development in the region.91 Writing in response to Stevenson, Kumarappa declared that the people of the “under-developed countries of Asia” would never

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“welcome American democracy, based on atom bombs” and that any American vision of ‘peace’ would be built on the “blood of foreign nations.” Rather, the “Asian People’s Demand” was for all foreign nations to “withdraw…and confine their constructive works to their own borders.”92 Peace, as Kumarappa understood it, was destined to be the product of the “self-sufficiency scheme of Mahatma Gandhi”. If “nations go to war…to find markets for their goods”, then it would be necessary to create a regime of trade that meant that the “simple act of smoking a cigar” would no longer “mean growing Tobacco [sic] by people in place of food crops, thus causing scarcity of food for them.”93 Kumarappa thus directly connected the everyday plight of peasants not being able to feed themselves with the larger global economic structures that propped up imperialism; without peace and equality at home, peace abroad would likewise be impossible. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union could help India to achieve this. On the other hand, Kumarappa believed that due to the two countries’ similarities, China’s political program was worth emulating to awaken the same praiseworthy national consciousness that he had observed in his travels there. As one of his last significant domestic political initiatives following his return to India, Kumarappa accompanied Pandit Sundarlal to Gorakhpur in northeastern Uttar Pradesh to investigate reports of wide-scale food shortage.94 What he saw there horrified him; through bad local policy and the general incompetence of local officials, Gorakphur’s level of food scarcity neared famine conditions. Kumarappa and Sundarlal argued in their joint statement following their tour that the failure of Uttar Pradesh’s government to address the issue stemmed from its reluctance to remove the “extremely inequitable distribution of land” in rural areas, leaving villages unable to “stand on their own legs”. The only option was thus to “emulate China” and conduct a real, nationwide land-reform campaign.95 As Kumarappa espoused elsewhere: “China attained its food sufficiency through redistribution of lands. They have abolished feudalism. They have declared that the tillers are the owners of the land. They took out the ill-gotten wealth from the landlords and give it to the tillers. The tillers feel that the land belongs to them and so intensive cultivation is taking place, production has increased. There is no compensation paid to the landlord.”96 The Chinese government, having concentrated on forging its own path to development and raising the status of its own people, had created a nationalism rooted in a drive for self-reliance. In doing so, Kumarappa believed that China could steer itself away from the emerging bloc politics of the Cold War in favor of a true independence. This “swadeshi spirit” had to be emulated in India.97 Kumarappa remained adamant for the rest of his life that this meant truly embracing Gandhi’s call for a “decentralized economy” that would in turn “develop an universal brotherhood working on non-violence.”98 Without that national awakening, India’s

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potential to really remake its own social order would falter, and likewise it would relinquish the possibility of steering the course of world events away from war or competition between the two superpowers. As he pleaded with Nehru in his comments on the Second Five-Year Plan: “There is so much undernourishment, bordering on starvation [in the country]… We should not countenance import of food grains. Such a pattern of foreign trade, selling cheap goods and buying expensive goods, impoverishes the country. We must expand food production.”99 As his political influence diminished and his health failed, Kumarappa turned more and more to the possibilities of working together with China and other ‘Eastern’ countries to ensure their collective economic autonomy from the superpowers.100 To that end, when the Bandung Conference was held in 1955, Kumarappa was conflicted. Even as Bandung had “marked the advent of an epoch where no longer are the noose-strings of ‘Eastern Peoples’ in the hands of Western statesmen”, he found that Bandung was ultimately still dominated by “cocktail parties, lunches and dinners” instead of coming to grip with the “real rock bottom of the problem of international strife”.101 As he elaborated in a scathing critique: “It needs to be recognised that what threatens and disturbs the Peace of the world is not merely the H-Bomb. The poison lies in the economic system emphasising an overdeveloped life of created wants [sic]. Capitalism and Imperialism aim at exploiting the millions for the benefit of the few. State Capitalism suppresses the few for the sake of increasing the wants of the many. What is needed is a square deal for all – Sarvodaya. This found not even a mention [at the conference]… The threat of nuclear weapons is only a symptom of the raging fever of violence in our ‘supply and demand’ economics. We need to focus our attention to ways and means of substituting this system by another of sharing our lives and banish exploitation. Mere listing of common place maxims will not help matters much.”102 In his criticism of Bandung as divorced from the realities of post-colonial life or the economic stimuli undergirding the violence of the Cold War international order, Kumarappa preempted many modern evaluations of the Conference.103 At the same time, unlike many of his contemporaries, Kumarappa believed that it was necessary to treat the agrarian as both the root of inequality and the keystone of historical possibilities. As he argued at the Conference for Peace and Asian Solidarity in Bangalore mere months before Bandung, “Paper agreements and appeals have little effect in bringing about lasting peace….if we want to deal effectively with War, we must study the present day methods of production, distribution and consumption.” As the major “underdeveloped countries of the world”, the “countries of Asia” needed to recognize that agriculture was not simply “an industry” but a way of life that could utilize the region’s “enormous labour power”.104 By creating a decentralized economic system, they could thus ensure self-sufficiency, rising living standards, and economic security for all, and could work together to create

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a more peaceful global order. In rejecting the choice between following the rapacity of the imperialist powers or the violent industrialization of the Soviet Union, Kumarappa believed that India and all of Asia could collectively pave their own way to prosperity and peace.

Conclusion With his health in terminal decline by the mid-1950s, Kumarappa soon retired from political life. Even as he continued to gain both infamy and acclaim in Indian political circles for his strict commitment to Gandhian ideals, he was no longer able to travel and spent much of the later years of his life confined to bed at the Government General Hospital in Madras. He never ceased writing, however, corresponding with friend and foe alike, with notables like Nehru even visiting him at the hospital to honor one of Gandhi’s most vociferous supporters.105 Even as his star had faded amongst construction work circles, his loyal colleagues Vinaik and Ramachandran continued to support him and worked to realize his ideals through their own ashrams and experimentation.106 In the end, however, Kumarappa died on January 30th, 1960 believing that he had failed and that Gandhi’s vision for India would never come to pass.107 Kumarappa’s travels towards the end of his life and his burst of internationalism, despite their relative brevity, showcase an idiosyncratic voice amongst the many actors who contributed to the profound networks of transnational solidarity that emerged in the 1950s. Nor was Kumarappa’s voice without impact. He was in frequent correspondence with peace activists in India and far beyond its borders as well.108 His championing of the need to study China and his various writings on the country, while controversial amongst other Gandhians, also proved to be influential. Kumarappa became a frequent guest at meetings of the influential Mumbai branch of the India-China Friendship Association, to the point where his writings even inspired the founding of a local branch of the association in Hoshiarpur, a small town in Punjab.109 However, despite the proponents of Sino-Indian friendship likewise proclaiming that the path of a collective ‘Asia’ laid in forging its own way in a bifurcated world, Kumarappa’s pleas for agrarian-focused economic development and self-sufficiency went largely unanswered. Even as later anti-colonial leaders would likewise interrogate the global economic system that kept former colonies underdeveloped and bereft of real autonomy, few would ever take up Kumarappa’s Gandhian call for moral, sustainable development at a local level as necessary to regional cooperation and mutual aid. The alternatives to centralized development, either directed by the state or by the whims of the market, were subsequently

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erased. Today, at a time when talk of an ‘Asian’ model of development has yet again become a common refrain, Kumarappa’s committed stance against the oppression of the ‘backward’ for the sake of progress reminds us of the paths not taken, and the potentialities that may yet remain.

Notes 1

J.C. Kumarappa, “The Down-Trodden”, Gram Udyog Patrika, February 1949, quoted in Veenu Madhav Govindu and Deepak Molghan, The Web of Freedom (New Delhi: Oxford University Press 2016), 270.

2

For more, see: Carolien Stolte, “‘The People’s Bandung’: Local Anti-Imperialists on an Afro-Asian Stage”, Journal of World History 30:1 (June 2019): 125-156; Susan Bayly, Asian Voices in a Postcolonial Age: Vietnam, India and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Taylor C. Sherman, “A Gandhian Answer to the Threat of Communism? Sarvodaya and Postcolonial Nationalism in India,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 53:2 (2016): 249-270.

3

Other aspects of Kumarappa’s thought have been studied elsewhere. See: Ramachandra Guha, “Prehistory of Indian Environmentalism: Intellectual Traditions”, Economic and Political Weekly 27:1/2 (January 1992): 57-64 for his environmentalism; Chaitra Redkar, Gandhian Engagement with Capital: Perspectives of J.C. Kumarappa (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2019) for a breakdown of his economic works; and Venu Madav Govindu and Deepak Malghan, The Web of Freedom: J.C. Kumarappa and Gandhi’s Struggle for Economic Justice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016) for a comprehensive intellectual biography. Other authors have explored the internationalism of Indian activists at the time, albeit very different types of internationalism. See Lydia Walker, “Jayaprakash Narayan and the Politics of Reconciliation for the Postcolonial State and its Imperial Fragments,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 56:2 (May 2019): 147-169.

4

Benjamin Siegel, “The Kibbutz and the Ashram: Sarvodaya Agriculture, Israeli Aid, and the Global Imaginaries of Indian Development,” The American Historical Review 125:4 (2020): 1175-1204 is one such example.

5

My approach to Kumarappa’s Gandhian, quasi-anarchist vision of development as a forgotten alternative to dominant forms of economic thought is in many ways inspired by Sho Konishi’s Anarchist Modernity: Cooperatism and Japanese-Russian Intellectual Relations in Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

6

C.f. Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton:

7

Venu Madav Govindu and Deepak Malghan, “Building a Creative Freedom: J.C. Kumarappa and His

Princeton University Press, 2019) Economic Philosophy”, Economic and Political Weekly 40:52 (December 2005): 5477. 8

J.C. Kumarappa, Economy of Permanence: A Quest for a Social Order Based on Non-Violence (Rajghat: Akhil Bharat Sarva-Seva-Sangh, 1958).

9

C.f. “Living Touch with Villagers: Mr. Gandhi’s Aim”, The Times of India, November 20th 1934.

10

J.C. Kumarappa, Public Finance and Our Poverty: The Contribution of Public Finance to the Present Economic State of India (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Press, 1930).

11

“Co-Operation Instead of Competition: Plea to Forest Workers.” The Times of India, December 11th 1949.

asia as a third way? j.c. kumarappa and the problem of development in asia  139

12

In his foreword to an Indian printing of Prince Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread, Kumarappa makes an explicit connection between Kropotkin’s critiques of capitalism and emphasis on non-violence to the “efforts put forth by Gandhiji”. “Foreword to Conquest of Bread”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/ Writings Volume 1, J.C. Kumarappa Papers (F:128), Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.

13

J.C. Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement? (Wardha: All India Village Industries Association, 1945), 166-167.

14

J.C. Kumarappa, Gandhian Economic Thought (Bombay: Vora, 1951), 8-13.

15

“Nationalism”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 1, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

16

Like most authors who used the term in this period, Kumarappa was vague as to the geographic extent of ‘Asia’. However, it is clear from most of his writings that he was referred mostly to South, East, and Southeast Asia; for him, West Asia was part of the ‘Muslim world’, and likewise Central Asia was part of the Soviet Union.

17

“Nationalism”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 1, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

18

Cf. Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (New York: The John Day Company, 1946), esp. 37-45. This is also discussed in more detail in Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), particularly Chapter 5.

19

Kumarappa declared that Great Britain’s relationship to India was a perfect example of a ‘parasite economy’, the lowest form of economy; likewise, the United States was a ‘predatory economy’ that emphasized economic subjugation. Kumarappa, Gandhian Economic Thought, 13.

20

Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement?, 97-100.

21

AIVIA Annual Report, 1947-8, 1, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 220.

22

J.C. Kumarappa, Report of the Congress Agrarian Reforms Committee (New Delhi: All-India Congress Committee, 1949).

23

J.C. Kumarappa, The Unity Basis for a Non-Violent Democracy (Wardha: The All-India Village Industries Association, 1951).

24

J.C. Kumarappa, “Pannai Ashram”, Gram Udyog Patrika, December 1954, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 273.

25

“Report submitted by J.C. Kumarappa, President of A.I.V.I.A Wardha on rural development in Punjab and other correspondence relating to the growth of small scale and cottage industries in that province”, 1950-53, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

26

Letter from P.C. Ghosh, November 23rd 1950, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

27

“Lines for Future Agrarian Reform”, August 22nd 1950, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

28

Letter from Sundarlal, September 14th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

29

Letter from G. Ramachandran, September 22nd 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

30

For more on this, see Tansen Sen, India, China, and the World: A Connected History (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), particularly Chapter 5.

31

“Official Report of Indian Goodwill Mission”, November 6th 1951, India-China Friendship Association Files (F. 44), Pandit Sunderlal Papers, NMML.

32

Letter from Sundarlal, September 14th 1951.

33

Letter to M. Vinaik, September 19th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

34

“印度亲善访华团返国前发表声明，将向印度人民介绍新中国各方面的进步” [Indian goodwill mission issues statement before returning home, will introduce to the Indian people the progress of New China in all aspects], Renmin Ribao, October 28th 1951.

35

Sundarlal, China Today: An Account of the Indian Goodwill Mission to China September-October 1951 (Allahabad: Hindustani Culture Society, 1952).

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36

Letter from J.C. Kumarappa’s Secretary to Nehru, November 10th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Files, NMML.

37

J.C. Kumarappa, People’s China: What I Saw and Learnt There, (Wardha: All-India Village Industries Association, 1952).

38

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

39

Ibid.

40

Letter to M. Vinaik, September 25th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa files, NMML.

41

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

42

Kumarappa often scoffed at what he saw as profligate spending by India’s politicians. Cf. Kumarappa often scoffed at what he saw as profligate spending by India’s politicians. Cf. J.C. Kumarappa, “Memorials”, Gram Udyog Patrika, March 1948, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 253.

43

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

44

Sundarlal, China Today, 471-472.

45

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

46

Discussed in-depth in Margaret W. Fisher and Joan V. Bondurant, “Impact of Communist China on Visitors from India”, Far Eastern Quarterly, 15 (1956): 249-265.

47

Similar understandings of ‘Asia’ in India were often invoked before independence as well. See Sanjay Seth, “Nationalism, Modernity and the ‘Woman Question’ in India and China”, Journal of Asian Studies 72:2 (2013): 273-297.

48

Letter to G. Ramachandran, October 10th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Files, NMML.

49

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

50

Letter to G. Ramachandran, October 17th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Files, NMML.

51

Sundarlal, China Today, 472.

52

Report dated May 19th 1952, Subject File 12 (1946-52 Appreciations and criticisms about his speeches and writings), Kumarappa Files, NMML.

53

“Summary of a speech of Dr. J.C. Kumarappa addressed at a public held at Patamata on 30 th May 1952”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 5, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

54

Draft of “What I Saw and Learnt in China”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

55

Ibid.

56

Ibid.

57

Ibid.

58

Ibid.

59

Ibid.

60

Ibid.; “Russia and China”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 8, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

61

Kumarappa, Economy of Permanence, 38.

62

Letter from G. Ramachandran, September 22nd 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML; Letter to Vinaik, September 21st 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

63

For example, Nehru personally sponsored a special exhibit of Japanese toys for the All-India Women’s Conference’s ‘Children’s Week Exhibit’ held in Mumbai in 1950. Nehru had made it clear to the organization that he wanted the exhibit to highlight the advanced nature of Japan’s industries. See “Children’s Week Correspondence with Schools”, Subject File 134, All-India Women’s Conference Papers (Institutional File: 38), NMML.

64

“Re-emergence of Japan: Mr. Patil’s Hope”, The Times of India, August 30th 1951.

65

Indo-Japanese Economic Ties: Enjoy Calls for Strengthening.” The Times of India, September 29th 1952.

asia as a third way? j.c. kumarappa and the problem of development in asia  141

66

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

67

Letter to Vinaik, November 7th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Files, NMML.

68

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

69

The most famous example of this line of thinking comes from Takeuchi Yoshimi, who believed that Japan’s adoption of capitalism meant that China, with its leap towards an organic, socialist society, truly represented the potential for an ‘Asia’ that could resist Western modernity. See Viren Murthy, “Resistance to Modernity and the Logic of Self-Negation as Politics: Takeuchi Yoshimi and Wang Hui on Lu Xun”, positions: east asia culture critique 24:2 (May 2006): 513-554.

70

“Visitor From India Discusses Red China”, Nippon Times, December 4th 1951.

71

Letter to Vinaik, December 12th, 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

72

“American Aid to India: Dr. Kumarappa’s Fears”, The Times of India, February 12th 1952.

73

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

74

“紹介状”[Introduction Letter], Correspondence exchanged with his Indian associates on his tour to China, Japan and Russia relating to his activities, reporting to Pauvai Ashram and about Kumarappi Birth Anniversary Committee etc. (Subject File 23), Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

75

Letter to Vinaik, December 5th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

76

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

77

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML; Cf. 共産党、土地改革案を決定, 農地制度改革問題 [Communist Party Decides Land Reform Plan, Discusses Problems of Farmland System Reform], Asahi Shimbun, January 4th 1946.

78

Letter to Vinaik, December 5th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

79

Ibid.

80

Letter to G. Ramachandran, November 14th 1951, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

81

“Report on Agriculture and Cottage and Small Scale Industries in Japan”, Subject File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

82

Ibid.

83

Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 320-325.

84

Kumarappa, Why the Village Movement?, 101-111.

85

Letter to Miss Tejaswini Shukla, February 4th 1952, Subject File 12, Kumarappa Papers, NMML; J.C. Kumarappa, “The Noose”, Gram Udyog Patrika, February 1952, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 301.

86

Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 301.

87

J.C. Kumarappa, “The Almighty Dollar”, Gram Udyog Patrika, March 1952, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom in Web of Freedom, 301.

88

C.f. Daniel Immerwahr, Thinking Small (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press, 2015), Chapter 3.

89

J.C. Kumarappa, “Community Projects”, Gram Udyog Patrika, September 1952, quoted in Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 305.

90

“Russia and China”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 8, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

91

Adlai E. Stevenson, “Will India Turn Communist?”, Look Magazine, July 14, 1953.

92

“A World Weather Report”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 8, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

93

Punjab tour notes dated December 1950, File 21, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

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94

“More Relief Should Be Provided in Gorakhpur: Social Workers’ Findings: Land Reforms Urged”, The Times of India, September 8th 1952.

95

Pandit Sundarlal and J.C. Kumarappa, “Joint Statement on Gorakhpur Famine”, September 6th 1952, South Asia Study Center, retrieved from https://sites.google.com/site/sastudycentre/joint-state� ment-on-gorakhpur-famine

96

“Summary of a speech”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 5, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

97

Ibid.

98

“Russia and China”, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 8, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

99

Comments on Second Five Year Plan, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 11, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

100

Letter to Vinaik, April 11th 1952, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

101

“On the Bandung Conference”, J. C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 5, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

102

Ibid.

103

For example, see Antonia Finnane, “Bandung as History,” in Bandung 1955: Little Histories, ed. Antonia Finnane and Derek McDougall (Caulfield: Monash University Press, 2010).

104

Inaugural speech at the Conference for Peace and Asian Solidarity in Bangalore, January 29th 1955, J.C. Kumarappa’s Speeches/Writings Volume 5, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

105

In a rare moment of tenderness towards the Prime Minister that he believed had betrayed Gandhi’s ideals, Kumarappa thanked him for coming to “to look me up, a retired old constructive worker.” Letter to Nehru, December 11th 1957, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML. See also his letter from Rameshwari Nehru, March 15th 1958, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML.

106

Ramachandram and his wife Dr. Soundram were crucial for setting up and managing Gandhigram in Tamil Nadu, an experimental ashram dedicated to sustainable development amongst rural communities. It remains there to this day.

107

Govindu and Molghan, The Web of Freedom, 332-337.

108

See for example his correspondence with Renu Chakravarty, Pandit Sunderlal, and Russi Karanjia.

109

Letter from R.K. Karanjia, July 23th 1952, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML; Letter from Secretary of the Indo-China Friendship Association of Hoshiarpur, June 10th 1952, Correspondence, Kumarappa Papers, NMML. For more on Sino-Indian visions of ‘Asia’, see Yasser Ali Nasser, ‘Finding “Asia” After Imperialism: Transnational Visions of the “Asian Woman” in China and India, 19491955,” Twentieth Century China 46:1 (2021): 62-82.

The Dead Will Live Eternally For many years I have not wept not because my eyes are dry or my heart is stiff with cold but this time unawares my head and heart could not endure my tears moistened the morning paper A black man white of heart murdered by a white man whose heart is black But it is not the murderer who has been killed Lumumba will live forever Lumumba died to live eternally Today this earth is not for the black white man but for all white, yellow, brown, black Now the air is filled with Lumumba for Lumumba stands for freedom Dipa Nusantara Aidit Transl. Bintang Suradi Dedicated to the Second Conference of Afro-Asian Writers Indonesia Sings of Afro-Asia (Jakarta: League of People’s Culture Indonesia, 1962).

CHAPTER 7

Delhi versus Bandung: Local Anti-imperialists and the Afro-Asian Stage Carolien Stolte

Abstract The 1955 Conference of Asian-African Countries at Bandung is widely regarded as the beginning of the Afro-Asian movement. Eleven days earlier, an unofficial counterpart was organized in New Delhi. In contrast to Bandung, which was closed to the public, large crowds attended the Delhi conference. Officially known as the Conference of Asian Countries for the Relaxation of International Tension, the conference was instrumental in the formation of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization (AAPSO). It sought bottom-up, mass-based support for decolonization and nuclear disarmament through popular manifestations of international solidarity. This chapter therefore seeks to widen understanding of the “Bandung Moment” by focusing not on interstate diplomacy but on more popular, as well as more populous, expressions of the “Bandung Spirit.”

Keywords: Afro-Asianism, decolonization, Cold War, peace movement, nuclear disarmament

Just eleven days before the Bandung Conference, a conference was convened in New Delhi that should be considered its unofficial counterpart. In sharp contrast to Bandung, which was not open to the public, the nongovernmental nature of the Delhi conference enabled thousands of people to attend. Officially known as the Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension (CRIT), it was heavily influenced by the growing peace movement of the early Cold War years.1 Over the next five years, the Delhi gathering’s success in terms of attendance, media coverage, and interest from writers, poets and artists, gave rise to a set of additional conferences across Africa and Asia. It was also instrumental in the formation of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (AAPSO), which was formally established in Cairo in December 1957 with support from the Egyptian government. Several founders of AAPSO had attended the Delhi conference in 1955, and would populate AAPSO committees for years to come. There is good reason to soften the boundaries between the ‘official’ and ‘non-official’ Bandungs somewhat. The unofficial ‘Bandungs’, particularly Delhi and Cairo, handled their publicity so well that media and other observers had difficulty

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distinguishing between them, suggesting that – to a contemporary eye at least – they were not so dissimilar as events centered on promoting decolonization and combating old and new forms of imperialism. Too narrow a view of the Bandung Moment, therefore, obscures crucial Afro-Asian interactions. A conference not officially sanctioned by one delegation’s government could be an official conference in the eyes of another. The Delhi conference was not convened by the Indian Government, but convened many political actors, including from India itself.2 Conversely, Bandung co-convener Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Minister of State Anwar Sadat sponsored the Cairo conference that followed it, but convened a wide range of state, non-state and semi-state actors. Recent histories of internationalism, moreover, have pointed to the ways in which individuals could inhabit all three of these roles, depending on the moment and the venue.3 This chapter therefore gives center stage to the Delhi CRIT, precisely because it blurred the lines between official and non-official spaces, as well as between the Cold War blocs. It is in these ‘blurry edges’ of the Cold War that the Afro-Asian solidarity movement brings into view the crucial impact on these engagements on the connected processes of decolonization and the emerging Cold War. This broad-based popular Afro-Asianism both spoke to and argued with its more famous Bandung counterpart. As Hanna Jansen notes in this volume, the Delhi Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension lives on mostly in AAPSO histories that acknowledge it as a predecessor. This means that the conference has remained trapped in the official hagiography from the AAPSO Secretariat. Not least, therefore, this is an attempt to recover this conference for the historical record in a way that does not subordinate it to Cold War bloc pressure. Inspired by Naoko Shimazu’s work on the actual Bandung Conference’s engagement with the public and vice versa, this chapter’s point of departure is that the “People’s Bandung” had key characteristics that set it apart from its more famous sibling.4 First and most important of these is the local associational culture that gave it life, and the way in which these local actors privileged an internationalist platform over a national one. This leapfrogging of the national occurred across the full spectrum of participants. The conference ended up convening members of governments and of opposition parties; poets and novelists; academics and artists; some famous and others less so. But the conference would not have materialized without a deep engagement of local activists with international issues. These activists, predominantly organized through peace councils and peace committees operating on scales varying from the regional bodies to single towns, were part of the international network of the World Peace Council (WPC) but motivated by local agendas and ideas about peace with very different intellectual genealogies than their Soviet-sponsored umbrella organization. The Delhi conference gave these activists an international platform, which brought some of them to Cairo in person,

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and motivated others to become long-distance members of AAPSO.5 The intent of this chapter is not to argue that the delegates who convened in Delhi in 1955 were not also involved in nation-building. But analyzing this leap-frogging of the national level in favor of an (inter)continental platform during the crucial years of decolonization and nation-building in the mid-1950s, can point to the reasons why Afro-Asia was seen as the most attractive focal point for anti-imperial solidarity. The second feature that sets these activists apart from the ‘official’ AfroAsianism of Bandung is the centrality of the peace movement. The popularity in 1950s India of the Soviet-dominated World Peace Council and the host of fellow-traveler celebrities the Council attracted such as Diego Rivera, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Jean-Paul Sartre, is an important part of this. However, it would be shortsighted to dismiss initiatives like the Delhi Conference as ‘puppet’ events that prove no more than the long arm of Soviet foreign policy. The WPC encompassed a much broader range of interests than has been acknowledged in its sparse historiography.6 Günter Werlicke has noted wryly how several instances in which even Eastern European WPC members departed from the Moscow line have been dismissed as ‘anomalies’.7 He acknowledges that the WPC suffered from a dilemma: on the one hand, its ambition was to become the umbrella world peace movement, for which it attracted prominent public figures and forged alliances with organizations across Cold War dividing lines. On the other hand, becoming a truly representative global movement would mean relinquishing control over the Council as an instrument for popularizing Soviet foreign policy initiatives. It was precisely this dilemma that created phases of openness and diversity in the Council’s history.8 The proliferation of peace meetings across Afro-Asia in the 1950s constitutes one such phase. It provides a vivid demonstration of how the cultural and historical referents of local peace movements could deviate from ‘standard’ WPC discourse, and how the anti-imperialist agendas that often informed such peace activism could conflict with WPC agendas. The third and final feature is the core issue of anti-imperialist internationalism itself. It was precisely the versatility of polyphonic internationalism that enabled the activists in this movement to imagine visions for Afro-Asia and Afro-Asian decolonization that were different from the visions of their respective governments. It also gave them the ‘luxury’ of considering the anti-imperialist agenda of the movement over the concerns of Cold War demarcation lines and ideological divisions that constrained official narratives. The diversity of the Indian activists who participated in this Afro-Asian moment from Delhi to Cairo, and from Cairo to later conferences in Conakry and beyond, proves that the People’s Bandung was an inclusive one. Contemporary observers tried and failed to categorize moments such as the Delhi conference and the Afro-Asian conferences that followed it by their political

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color or ‘bloc’ membership. In reality, the international careers, friendships, and sponsors of this Afro-Asian moment showed an almost cheerful disregard for the political, ideological, and even geographical demarcations of their time. Bringing the Indian individuals and associations who participated in this moment into view, demonstrates how actors far removed from the national stage nevertheless considered themselves part of the Bandung moment, ‘lived’ the Bandung moment, and made it their own. As such, this ‘People’s Bandung’, as a prelude to the AfroAsian Peoples Solidarity Organization and the start of India’s involvement in that organization, offers a case study of a transnational network in which a variety of internationalisms co-exist and intersect.

The Local in the Making of the International On 25 September 1954, a long procession shut down regular traffic in downtown Calcutta. At the head of the march, four young men and women held up huge placards that spelled a single word: ‘Peace’. The organizers published a resolution in which they pledged to resist imperialist war conspiracies in Asia, with special reference to the recently concluded Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO), and to demand an end to all remaining foreign pockets on the continent.9 The spectacle was described as follows: “Behind fluttered hundreds of blue banners, posters, cartoons and paintings drawn by leading artists for the occasion. Calcutta’s tramwaymen in their uniforms, representatives of other workers and employees’ unions, marched side by side with members of the Legislature and Municipal Councils, writers and artists, leaders of the West Bengal Peace Council, members of cultural organizations, women, youth and children inspired on by the song squads of the Indian People’s Theatre Association and Loka Sanskriti Sangh, and the marching bandsmen of Bhavanipur Friends Club. It was a demonstration by the people of Calcutta of their desire for Peace and collective security in Asia.”10 This march was not an isolated outburst of “local internationalism”. Rather, it signaled the mobilizational power of anti-imperialist internationalism in this period, even in places and among people unconnected to cosmopolitan intellectual networks. In the same week, five hundred laborers of the Harbour Workers Union of Madras organized a rally, attended by a further 1,000 workers, to denounce SEATO, urge acceptance of the People’s Republic of China into the UN, and to declare that “Asians shall not fight Asians”.11 After the rally, the People’s Progressive League of North Madras circulated a petition to this effect that was signed by, among others, 650 local fishermen.12 Further Asian Solidarity initiatives were organized by the All-India Kisan Conference at Moga, the Mazdoor Sabha in Gwalior, and the Provincial Peace Conference of Orissa. In Patiala, a multi-party

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conference representing a variety of political views declared that “no power on earth can turn Asia into an arena of War.”13 It is easy to dismiss a march by “the people of Calcutta” as a communist-run event, coordinated from above, or the signing of a petition by fishermen as orchestrated by the Harbour Workers Union. And indeed, the tramway workers union in the city was linked to the Communist Party of India (CPI), and the Harbour Workers Union was part of the pro-communist All-India Trade Union Congress.14 The leadership of the West Bengal Peace Council likewise included prominent Bengali communists and straightforward links to the Soviet Union.15 However, it also included members like Vivekananda Mukherjee, editor of the large Bengali vernacular newspaper Jugantar, which was published by the more moderate Amrita Bazar Patrika Group, which favored the Congress Party.16 Likewise, it is less easy to explain away that Shri Bhaskran, a hotel worker in Madras, took it upon himself to sell close to a thousand peace badges to support the Asian Solidarity Campaign, and collected nearly 1,500 signatures for the appeal against imperialist interference in Asian affairs. This was enough to earn him a special mention in the national bulletin of the All-India Peace Council (AIPC, 1951), the local branches of which were involved in many of these solidarity initiatives.17 Taken together, these instances demonstrate a local culture of internationalism, in which individuals and groups embrace causes far beyond their direct life-worlds, as a closer look at the Indian People’s Theater Association involved in the Calcutta campaign can elucidate. The history of the Indian People’s Theater Association (IPTA) sheds light on a brand of peace activism that had less to do with allegiance to Cold War blocs than with anti-imperialist internationalism, the local roots of which were more layered than the question whether it ‘fitted’ into 1950s international peace discourse can uncover. The IPTA had its origins in the first conference of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA, 1936), an anti-imperialist and left-oriented union of authors and poets that cut through British India’s linguistic divisions.18 PWA co-founder and later Afro-Asianist Sajjad Zaheer also played an important role in founding the IPTA at the national level. Aside from the cultural activists that formed the Progressive Writers Association, the People’s Theater Association also attracted local theater and music troupes. The Calcutta Youth Cultural Institute, founded by students of Calcutta University in 1939, had played an important part in founding the organization’s Bengal chapter. The students of the Youth Cultural Institute had coined the concept of ganasangeet. Translating as ‘people’s songs’, the genre of ganasangeet combined folk music and political themes with the express intention to bring subaltern groups and middle and upper-class intellectuals together in a shared political space, which they had used to strong effect during the 1940s, including during the Bengal famine.19 These people’s songs were rooted in the tradition of early twentieth-century

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anti-imperialist swadeshi songs and were popularized in new forms by the IPTA.20 Members of the IPTA taught songs to workers and peasants through classes and organized squads, such as the one referenced above. The movement was on the decline by the 1950s, but the genre that did proliferate during this period was that of peace songs.21 Moreover, Tanika Sarkar shows that, musically, the IPTA took their song experiments further by creating political songs that drew upon a variety of musical traditions as a ‘musical-international’.22 The anti-imperialist and internationalist roots of the organizations which gathered in the streets of Calcutta in September of 1954, and the songs and dances that accompanied them, thus predated the Cold War and the international peace discourse of the WPC. So did their idiom: the use of ‘people’s’ to signal political positioning was used widely throughout India. But these antecedents did put them in an ideal place to engage this anti-imperialism in the cause of Asian and AfroAsian solidarity, and to use the WPC and its networks to further their own ends. It is no coincidence that prominent members from both the PWA and the Indian People’s Theater Association were also members of the All-India Peace Council and the WPC in the 1950s. Famous novelist Mulk Raj Anand is a strong example. He was a prominent member of the WPC from its very start, having attended its precursor, the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wroclaw in 1948. His circle of international friends likewise included many WPC members, such as Pablo Picasso (fig. 7.1). His peace activism, however, well predated the WPC and the Second World War. The founding manifesto of the WPC, which Anand co-wrote in London, opened with the words that ‘it is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress … to discourage the general reactionary and revivalist tendencies on questions like family, religion, sex, war, and society…’23 PWA co-founder Sajjad Zaheer’s career likewise took an international turn. After a conviction for engaging in communist conspiracy in Pakistan and being extradited to India in 1954, Zaheer revived his links to the progressive cultural movement and went on to become a vocal advocate for Afro-Asian solidarity and a leader in the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association.24 In this way, cultural actors both famous and obscure brought tried and tested anti-imperialist strategies to the new context of the early Cold War. In organizations like the WPC, they found institutional spaces in which they could connect with peace movements from across the decolonizing world, which were similarly rooted in the anti-imperialist struggle. They may have strengthened the WPC’s image as a global organization, but they also used the WPC to strengthen their networks of Afro-Asian solidarity. What did this interaction with the WPC look like at the institutional level? A full critical history of the World Peace Council is yet to be written, especially a study that is sensitive to its global dimensions. The existing historiography is

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Figure 7.1. Pablo Picasso, Ceylonese architect Minette DaSilva, American sculptor Jo Davidson and Mulk Raj Anand at the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace, Wroclaw 1948. Polska Agencja Prasowa (Polish Press Agency), 27/8/1948.

largely focused on tensions between the peace movements within the Cold War blocs or the WPC as an extension of Moscow’s foreign policy. The history of the All-India Peace Council, which was allied with the WPC from its first foundation in 1951, has not been written either. The role of the AIPC and its Indian leaders in the foundation of the Afro-Asian movement is not an angle that can bring a full picture of the AIPC into view. What it does bring out, however, is that the internationalist activism of the Indian AIPC members ran on a parallel track, the direction of which was determined both by the anti-imperialist internationalism of the interwar years and by local anti-British struggle.25 Over the years, the WPC did try to incorporate peace discourses with AfroAsian intellectual genealogies into their own work as part of an effort to become the global peace organization. AIPC leaders came to occupy high offices in the organization, with Saifuddin Kitchlew, another internationalist with strong roots in interwar anti-imperialism, eventually becoming vice-president. Kitchlew also led the Indian delegation to the WPC Congress in Vienna, at which meeting it was decided to broaden the peace movement by actively seeking out alliances with non-communist organizations.26 This likely facilitated the WPC’s enthusiasm for the Delhi Conference of Asian Countries for the Relaxation of International Tension in 1955. Kitchlew himself became part of the CRIT Preparatory Committee.27 The WPC’s enthusiasm for Afro-Asian themes is also evident from the pages of its bulletin. When India held an Asian Solidarity Month, to which the local initiatives described above were connected, the WPC published the accompanying resolutions and petitions, acknowledging at least implicitly that this Asian Solidarity month reflected Indian peace activists’ desire to popularize the Five Principles recently enunciated by the Nehru-Zhou Enlai agreement, and had little to do with WPC

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affairs.28 If the call to include the PRC in the United Nations and to oppose the remilitarization of Japan converged with WPC talking points, the motivation was different: “Such attempts by interested powers are aimed at maintaining colonial rule, thwarting the freedom desire of the peoples of this region and endangering the sovereignty of Asian countries.”29 This temporary convergence of anti-imperialist agendas with WPC principles was true in a larger sense for the Delhi Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tension as well. Their calls for disarmament and denuclearization were primarily informed by anti-imperialism, fears of new forms of imperialism in the guise of organizations like SEATO, and an Asian solidarity which was explicitly changed to Afro-Asian solidarity in the months after the conference.30 Among the “Political Questions” on the agenda – sessions were grouped under the headings of political; cultural; and economic and social questions respectively – the prohibition and control of weapons of mass destruction was listed, but well below the issue of colonialism and foreign interference in the internal affairs of Asian countries. Other political questions on the agenda included “discrimination against Asians in the matter of immigration” and equal rights for immigrant citizens.31 In the end, the aim of “lessening world tension”, as it was known in WPC circles, was interpreted mostly indirectly. The conference aimed to “study the common cultural heritage of Asian countries with a view to reviving and strengthening old cultural ties” and “to afford an opportunity for an exchange of views on the common problems affecting Asia”. “Securing greater common understanding and close contact”, then, would “help lessening present world tension” as a by-effect.32 The organizers thus used the international networks of the WPC to recruit international participants for the Delhi Conference, but the conference was not organized under the WPC flag, or even under that of the All-India Peace Council.33 It was the local Asian Solidarity Campaigns of September 1954, inspired by the Nehru – Zhou Enlai meeting as well as the Colombo Conference that laid the foundations for Bandung, which had culminated in the decision to not only internationalize the local, but also to localize the international by hosting an international peace and solidarity conference on Indian soil.

From Delhi to Bandung Interestingly, the chosen format for the Delhi CRIT closely resembled an earlier conference held in New Delhi: the 1947 Asian Relations Conference, in which some 200 delegates representing 28 Asian nations convened in New Delhi to discuss the shape of the postwar world and the position of the decolonizing world in a new international order.34 Important agenda points included remaining imperial

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strongholds in Asia and how Asia might collectively work towards removing them, as well as emerging new forms of imperialism and how to best safeguard hardfought freedoms. The prevailing attitude was that no one Asian country could face these challenges alone, and that Asian solidarity was key to gaining and maintaining the independence, development and prosperity of individual nations. The CRIT went back to the blueprint of this Asian Relations Conference. Like the CRIT, the Asian Relations Conference had been styled as a non-political gathering even though it convened many soon-to-be members of government. Delegations consisted of academic, cultural, and social organizations. Secondly, because it was non-political, it could adopt an inclusive attitude to what constituted a ‘national delegation’ – in the case of the Asian Relations Conference, these ranged from the individual Soviet Central Asian Republics, to Tibet, Outer Mongolia, and US-occupied Japan. In the case of the CRIT, these included North Vietnam and North Korea, with the interesting distinction of being the “first major Global South conference North Korea ever attended.35 Though eight years apart, both conferences exhibited an almost cheerful disregard for the emerging ideological lines of the Cold War, something which became difficult to replicate as the internationalist optimism of the 1950s drew to a close. Thirdly, the Asian Relations Conference had been a public gathering, with tickets sold to thousands of interested participants who braved the threat of ongoing Hindu-Muslim rioting and police-enforced curfews to catch a glimpse of famous freedom fighters. The Conference on the Relaxation of International Tension was arguably even more of a public event than its 1947 predecessor. Though the Asian Relations Conference could count on important donors both in kind and cash, the Provisional Government had hosted it. The CRIT, by contrast, was organized by volunteers and funded largely by public subscription. The conference was the brainchild of Rameshwari Nehru, a prominent social worker and veteran of both the Indian anti-imperialist and women’s movement.36 In the 1950s, along with advisory work for the Nehruvian Government, she had become involved in a variety of international and internationalist organizations, including the Indo-Soviet Cultural Society, the World Peace Council, the All-India Peace Council and the India-China Friendship Association.37 But despite her wide array of institutional connections, she lamented shortly before the conference: “We are very hard up for money, as a big undertaking like this requires a lot of money and we are depending solely on public support for financing the conference”.38 What the conference did not lack, however, was volunteer labor. The Preparatory Committee included academics from different disciplines at Delhi University, Jamia Milia Islamia University, Delhi Polytechnic and the Jullundur (Jalandhar) Law College. Many of their international students found their way to the conference preparations – so much so that they ended up turning people down.39 As a way to kill two birds with one stone, the

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Preparatory Committee used student volunteers to further popularize the conference. Students could sign up for a “Reception Committee”, as part of which they were to recruit fellow students and friends to become “members” of the conference. For every ten members they enlisted, they received one observer ticket.40 All incoming volunteer labor was directed to Romesh Chandra, the General Secretary of the AIPC and later co-founder (with Rameshwari Nehru) of the Indian Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee. Chandra coordinated the Reception Committee from the Imperial Hotel, where the conference’s secretariat was lodged in one of the hotel rooms. As one of Delhi’s first high rises and home to a permanent suite kept by the Nehru family, the Imperial had played host to key political meetings in the run-up to Independence, and had hosted discussions on Partition with Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, and Mountbatten. As a location for the conference’s secretariat, it should be read as a caveat for the conference’s outward portrayal as an underfunded event far from the realms of power. The same held true for the location of the conference’s inaugural session at the Constitution Club of India, which was literally set up as a forum for interaction between present and past parliamentarians. The sessions open to the public, however, were more in line with the aims of the conference: held at the Gandhi Grounds near the Delhi Railway Station, they were easily accessible to all. The Bombay Chronicle described the public closing session as follows: “The delegates were addressing a crowded public meeting in Gandhi Grounds. The large gathering gave them a warm ovation as they arrived. Flags of the various countries participating in the Asian Conference fluttered majestically on both sides of the dais. Streamers, on which were written the five principles of co-existence, were also prominently displayed at the meeting. All the delegates were introduced to the audience amidst loud applause. Shouts of ‘Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai rent the air as the Chinese delegates appeared on the dais. Three Chinese girls were lustily cheered when they sang a Hindi song entitled ‘The sky is ringing with the shouts of India-China brotherhood.’”41 A similarly evocative event was a public reception for all the attending writers and artists, for which cultural organizations across India had joined forces: it was organized by no fewer than the Shaw Society, Romain Rolland Club, Tagore Society, Sanivar Samaj, Rajdhani Sanskriti Parishad and the All-India Bengali Literary Conference. Here, too, music played an important part: visiting artists such as Vietnamese poet Tran Khanh Van sang songs in their own language, and Indian hosts followed suit with, among others, songs by Tagore.42 The similarities between the Asian Relation Conference and the CRIT were not coincidental. Although the All-India Peace Council did not yet exist in 1947, many of its members had attended the Asian Relations Conference in different capacities. Rameshwari Nehru, for instance, had played a prominent role in the Asian Relations Conference, and so had Hannah Sen. As co-founder of the Lady Irwin College in New Delhi, she had hosted a gathering for all the female delegates and

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observers to the conference at the college, and was likewise involved in the preparations for the CRIT.43 Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, a long-standing ally of Rameshwari Nehru and Hannah Sen in the Indian women’s movement and a session leader at the Asian Relations Conference must have conferred some of her enthusiasm on her cousin Romesh Chandra, who co-organized the 1955 gathering. All three women had been leaders of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC), which had, aside from involvement in the Asian Relations Conference, had a history of Asian anti-imperialist solidarity themselves as conveners of the 1931 All-Asia Women’s Conference in Lahore.44 And as Elisabeth Armstrong reminds us, such anti-imperialist women’s networks matured in the late 1940s and 1950s into a politically diverse landscape that included the 1949 Conference on the Women of Asia (Beijing), the 1958 Asian-African Conference of Women (Colombo) and the 1961 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference (Cairo).45 It is likely that the participation of Pak Chong-ae (Pak Den-Ai) as leader of the North Korean delegation was a result of such connections.46 The Beijing conference had been convened by Women’s International Democratic Federation, of which Pak Chong-ae had been an Executive Committee member since 1948.47 It is worth highlighting that the links between the two Delhi conferences in 1947 and 1955 revolved around the women’s movement. Despite the vibrancy of the feminist internationalism in the first half of the twentieth century, prewar radical anti-imperialism was a largely homo-social space.48 In 1947, by contrast, Jawaharlal Nehru specifically requested that delegations include women.49 From the 1950s, the peace movement further increased female participation, although peace as a ‘women’s issue’ should not be overstated. In Europe and the United States, there were strong links to earlier pacifist discourses.50 But peace discourse in India had different roots, not least in the Gandhian movement of which Rameshwari Nehru had been part. It is more likely that the focus on the inclusion of mass organizations energized women’s networks at this conference. Despite its elite leadership, the AIWC adept at reaching local organizations and non-elite spaces.51 This use of pre-existing contacts from the women’s movement did not always have the desired effect in the new context of the CRIT. Though a notable presence at the conference, Pak Chong-ae primarily used the conference to call for another conference to be convened on the Korea issue, but did not engage with the conference agenda, which closely and purposefully mirrored that of Bandung. The agenda for the Bandung conference had already been published and this close correspondence created a potentially embarrassing situation for Indian Prime Minister Nehru who, as co-convener of the Bandung Conference, was committed to the latter initiative. A rival conference in his capital city was not good for diplomatic relations with his Bandung colleagues. This was exacerbated by the fact that Rameshwari Nehru, as the main host for the Delhi conference, was a relation

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of his: she was married to his cousin Brij Lal Nehru. As Nehru wrote to his cousinin-law: ‘outsiders who come here do not draw a clear line between Governments and non-official organizations. Apart from this, even from the political angle there is a possibility of embarrassment. As it is, the Indonesian Government has been rather put out by this conference and has asked us repeatedly for explanations as to what it is. The idea of this Asian Conference taking place just a few days before the Afro-Asian Conference in Indonesia naturally leads people to ask how these two are related or what they have to do with each other.’52 Behind the scenes, however, the separation was not as strict. Nasser stopped by the conference on his way to Delhi and combined the visit with bilateral talks with Nehru.53 Pham Van Dong, North Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister, privately had dinner with Nehru to discuss the situation in Indo-China – though it accidentally became public knowledge.54 And two weeks before the conference, Rameshwari Nehru shared the complete delegate list with the Prime Minister, with the promise to keep him abreast of any changes.55 And though Nehru could not attend the conference publicly, he was willing to meet a few delegates personally at his house. Urging caution, he wrote to Rameshwari: “it will be difficult for me to meet a large crowd, but you can select those whom you wish me to meet. I suggest 8th April at 6:30 PM at my house. Please let me or Indira know who is coming.”56 Publicly, Nehru’s efforts to realize the Bandung conference and his relationship with Sukarno and the other Colombo Powers were at stake.57 Privately, there is little reason to assume Nehru had fundamental problems with a conference tied to the All-India Peace Council and, by extension, the WPC. Many prominent Indian politicians were members of the WPC in the 1950s, including his fellow architect of non-alignment V.K. Krishnamenon, who had been involved in political work with Mulk Raj Anand and Romesh Chandra from the late 1930s onwards.58 The MPs who sympathized with the Delhi Conference’s aims organized themselves into an organization called Parliamentarians for Peace – not as part of the AIPC but in close relationship to it.59 When the Bureau of the WPC organized a session in New Delhi in March 1958, the meeting took place in the Indian Government’s Vigyan Bhavan (fig. 7.2). Nehru warmly greeted the delegates and participated in some of the proceedings alongside Rameshwari Nehru, who attended as head of the newly established Indian Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee.60 But as the proceedings of the Delhi conference make clear, Nehru was not the only person who blurred the lines between the ‘Official Bandung’ and the ‘People’s Bandung’. Though the Conference of Asian Countries on the Relaxation of International Tensions may not have been quite as underground and subversive as its organizers and subsequent historiography have suggested, officially the government of India kept it at a distance. The conference’s flirtation with Bandung was one-sided and the uncomfortable sense of competition between the two did not go unnoticed by

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Figure 7.2. Jawaharlal Nehru (r.) receives a WPC delegation at the Government’s Secretariat Building in New Delhi. On the left noted Syrian peace activist Mustapha Amine. Bulletin of the World Peace Council 8, 15 April 1958.

both journalists and secret services. As one CIA official noted: “although the New Delhi meeting is not a preliminary to the Afro-Asian Conference, the Communists are expected to exploit this opportunity to set the tune of their propaganda at Bandung.”61 It is ironic that disparaging remarks about the CRIT as a Moscow-run affair largely missed the connection to the peace movement. This caused such reports to interpret Beijing’s large delegation of peace activists to Delhi as a sign it considered the conference unimportant: ‘The leader of the group is a high non-party government official and the remainder of the group consists of “cultural” and labour leaders who are perennial delegates to peace conferences.’62 ‘Perennial’, here, was meant dismissively, suggesting that the movement was limited to a few regular participants but held no mass appeal. In terms of India-China connections, this misses the point. The CRIT was a reunion of Indian and Chinese activists who had met at the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, where Delhi organizers like the aforementioned Romesh Chandra, Saifuddin Kitchlew, C.N. Malviya and others had met their Chinese counterparts. The presence of Guo Moruo (Kuo Mo-Jo), moreover, was eagerly anticipated by the Indian public. He was considered one of the most important attendees along with Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg. His work was well known, and so was his affinity with Indian literature and the arts. He had been present at the founding of the India-China Friendship Association in May 1952, where Nehru’s sister Vijayalakshmi Pandit led the Indian delegation, and was a longtime admirer of Tagore.63 By Indian journalists, he was alternatively considered a sympathetic representative of Chinese government circles, or a luminary of Chinese literature and the arts, and his speeches were quoted in full. The press

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calmly took note of his statements on the history of Sino-Indian relations and its shared 2,000 year history, but his rousing call at the public session in the Gandhi Grounds was conveyed in print as it had been shouted through the microphone: “WE WANT PEACE IN ASIA AND THE WORLD AND REFUSE TO BE COWED DOWN BY THREATS FROM ANY POWER. ASIA HAS LONG BEEN EXPLOITED AND CAN NO LONGER BROOK INTERFERENCE IN HER AFFAIRS!”.64

Like the Chinese delegation, the other delegations all included prominent novelists, poets, and artists. Aside from Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet delegation consisted mainly of intellectuals from the Central Asian Republics, such as Tajik poet Mirzo Tursunzoda and Turkmen composer Veli Mukhatov.65 Notable is also the strong presence of female writers, such as Japanese poet Kyoko Nagase, Ceylonese writer Theja Gunawardana, and Vietnamese poet Tran Khanh Van.66 Together, they ensured that the emotive Asianist rhetoric of post-colonial revival of intra-Asian ancient bonds and cultural affinities which the Indian public expected from Guo Moruo, became the language of the conference. The final resolutions ended with an emotional collective statement entitled “Appeal to Asians”: “we met in New Delhi here on the threshold of a new period of history. We have had long historic relations in the past. We have witnessed periods of glory, which remain our precious heritage, and the memories of those days are enshrined in our hearts. Together we have also witnessed periods of stagnation, exploitation and national humiliation, dark dismal periods. We are out of the valley now and there are new urges and stirrings in the hearts of our millions. We are on the march, dedicated to the preservation of freedom, that had earned freedom which we shall never lose again. We are dedicated to peace, for peace represents the inner spirit of Asia.”67 In this way, the conference infused peace discourse with new meaning, calibrated to the decolonizing world. If the organizers hoped to steer this rhetoric towards the Bandung frame, the delegates happily complied. Maulana Bhashani, a Pakistani delegate to the Delhi conference, is a strong example. Bhashani’s activism had deep roots in peasant organizing. An alumnus of the Deoband School, he was a popular Islamic scholar who used his status as a religious leader to oppose communal strife by arguing that divisive colonial policies shared blame, and to call for solidarity with oppressed populations.68 As the founder of the Awami League (East Pakistan), he used his status as a political leader to oppose new forms of Great Power control, particularly Pakistan’s relationship to the US. Combined, this earned him both the honorific Mazlum Jananeta (Leader of the Oppressed) and the much less generous “Red Maulana”.69 By the 1950s, his commitment to ‘international cooperation, friendship, and solidarity’70 had brought him to international peace conferences,

delhi versus bandung: local anti-imperialists and the afro-asian stage 159

including Delhi. Moving deftly from a speech on the universality of Asian culture and religion, Bhashani declared in his speech: “We hope that all states present at the coming Bandung Conference will accept the Panch Shila … From the New Delhi Conference we can only express this clearly defined hope to the Bandung Conference. This united declaration of the countries of Asia and Africa can become a very valuable contribution to the advance of civilization in the whole world … I pray to the creator, the most gracious Allah for the success of the Conference and for the establishment of world peace through the sacred unity of oppressed Asians.71 Outside observers likewise analyzed the conference in the Bandung frame. Indian press reports of the conference indicate that opinions expressed at the Delhi conference were widely assumed to foreshadow the outcomes of Bandung. However naïve in hindsight, this impression was probably created by the fact that the long road to Bandung, as noted above, included stopovers in Delhi for some. As one slightly confused editor reported in the Bombay Chronicle: ‘a sort of eveof-Bandung meeting in Delhi on Wednesday was addressed by leaders of India, Egypt, and Afghanistan. There is something common between these three, but it might easily be exaggerated. It is that they are not attached to any bloc. The Delhi meeting, however, emphasized not their non-alignment but the phenomenon of Asian resurgence, of the change from dependence to independence.’72 While the national dailies largely hailed the conference as a great success and as an indication that the Bandung Conference would be equally productive, the gathering was not without its critics. It was precisely the cross-bloc list of invitations and the conference’s inclusive internationalist agenda, which privileged general anti-imperialism over specific ideological content, that was perceived as both problematic and dangerous. These voices held that the conference could only spell trouble, especially for India: ‘The idea of Soviet Russia being an integral part of Asia, which is one of the basic factors influencing the constitution of this Asian Conference, is highly questionable. It sounds unnatural and ridiculous, speaking whether geographically or historically … The talk of capitalist-communist coexistence is without substance. It is just an empty slogan to lull people into a sense of complacency.’73

From Delhi to Cairo In the years after 1955, ownership of (and participation in) the ‘Bandung Moment’ was increasingly contested not just at the international, but also at the local level. On their part, the peace activists of the 1954 local Asian Solidarity campaigns who had organized the Delhi gathering, now lent their support to the organization of

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a bigger event: the 1957 Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Conference, held in Cairo. According to G.H. Jansen, “if the first Asian Solidarity Conference in 1955 had been a competitor to Bandung, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference of 1957 viewed itself as dedicated to completing Bandung’s work.”74 From an Indian perspective, this was indeed the case: in 1956, the Asian Solidarity Committee changed its name to the Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee at the Asian Writers Conference in New Delhi. CRIT organizer Anup Singh became the Indian delegate on a four-country mission of writers, along with Chinese novelist Yang Shou, Russian writer Anatoly Sofranov, and Japansese internationalist Masaharu Hatanaka. After plans for the Cairo conference emerged in consultation with Nasser, Singh declared: “Once again we meet on an unofficial level to take stock of the world situation and to appraise and analyse our common problems. Let the Cairo Conference be the People’s Bandung.”75 Like its predecessors, the Cairo Conference was driven by Afro-Asian solidarity in the form of support for the decolonization of remaining colonial territories as well as by fears of new forms of imperialism. All independent countries of Asia and Africa had been invited, as well as delegations from eighteen nationalist movements ranging from Algeria to Zanzibar. The organization of the conference followed the same logic as the Delhi conference: two years of grassroots work culminating in the establishment of local Afro-Asian Solidarity Committees, which formed the basis for delegations to Cairo. Where no Solidarity Committees existed, other local organizations were contacted. This resulted in the same precarious balance of an unofficial conference with hybrid delegations that included both local activists and national dignitaries. Other echoes of the CRIT reverberated through the halls of the Cairo conference, not least in the physical presence of the many people who attended both conferences. For India, these included Rameshwari Nehru, Anup Singh, and Perin and Romesh Chandra, as the main hosts of the Delhi conference. Of the other Indian official delegates to Cairo, several had played supporting roles in the organization of the Delhi conference as well as attended the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference, such as V.K. Dhage, A.K. Gopalan, and C.N. Malviya. All three were MPs, further blurring the lines between the state and non-state realms. Aside from the official record of the conference, a number of personal accounts of the conference remain, not least from Rameshwari Nehru. Her notes emphasize how strongly she was wedded to the idea of a people’s conference: “Men and women travelled long distances to come to Cairo to greet the delegates. Thousands of young students, both boys and girls, paraded the streets in batches carrying banners bearing good-will messages; shouting slogans for Afro-Asian solidarity. The whole route from our Hotel to the Conference Hall was decorated with multi-colored buntings and improvised gates wishing hearty welcome to the “messengers of peace”, as

delhi versus bandung: local anti-imperialists and the afro-asian stage 161

they termed the delegates. … Embraces and kisses were showered on the delegates who were literally drowned under the overwhelming affection of the public.”76 This description conjures up images of the delegate parades on the streets of Bandung a few years previously.77 But the idea of cultural identification that characterized the broader Afro-Asian movement stands out in the Cairo description. Rameshwari Nehru emphasizes the link between local and international spaces, and the emotive appeal of long-distance solidarities: “we were taken out on excursions outside the city of Cairo. The enthusiasm of the people, even in these far-off places in small towns and smaller villages, was great. Thousands of school boys and girls, men and women came out of their houses and gave us heartening cheers. The welcome given was in the traditional fashion, musicians playing the indigenous musical instruments riding on gaily adorned camels covered with multi-coloured embroidered trappings. Wherever we went, the town and the village en route all took a gala appearance and the atmosphere became charged with friendship and love. We felt like being amongst our own people with whom fate had united us for good and for evil and forever. The idea of the Afro-Asian Solidarity seemed to have taken life and form in the broad smiles and love-laden eyes and expressions of exuberant joy.”78 Rachel Leow has commented on the emotional registers of Afro-Asian diplomacy.79 It is worth noting that the idea of Afro-Asian solidarity, which according to some accounts was a weakness of the official Bandung conference, is especially emotive here. Despite her long career as an internationalist, Rameshwari noted that “I have attended many national and international conferences but none inspired me in the way this Conference did. … The Conference stirred the hearts and the minds of men, it awakened the conscience of humanity, it reminded the free countries that it was not enough for them to be free themselves. They owed a duty outside the geographical boundaries of their own countries and their apathy also was to some extent responsible for the sufferings of the colonial people. The Conference also reminded them that their own freedom was in danger as long as their neighbors were slaves.”80

Conclusion The Delhi conference belongs in the larger narrative of the Bandung Moment as an event that coincided with Bandung, but brings into view a different Afro-Asianist trajectory: one that harbored a variety of visions of Afro-Asian futures, united by a strong emphasis on the lived practice of Afro-Asian solidarity. In the midst of the interlinked processes of decolonization and the early Cold War, it was in this popular Afro-Asian context that a plurality of internationalisms could continue to thrive.

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For diplomat and journalist-turned-historian Godfrey H. Jansen, this was enough to dismiss moments like the Delhi conference for lacking consistency, and for being hopelessly naïve. To him, the Afro-Asian solidarity movement was a ‘parody of, and parasite on, the Bandung Spirit’, rather than an expression of it.81 But this view fails to take into account one of the solidarity movement’s most important features: the importance it placed on culture. This helped to connect local activists to their peers across Afro-Asia, and galvanized mobilization on AfroAsian issues beyond cosmopolitan cities and literary works. As shown above, local campaigns and song squads were more than ‘petitions propaganda’. It was in this sphere of Afro-Asian activity that local academic, cultural, and social organizations continued to leapfrog the national to fight old and new forms of imperialism across the decolonizing world, under the banner of Afro-Asian solidarity. And it is in this agenda of Afro-Asian solidarity that different articulations and idioms of internationalism could once again converge. In the case of the Indian peace movement, whose leaders organized the Delhi Conference, the anti-imperialist strategies and ideas that drove their international engagements had deep local roots that predated the Cold War. However, this did not mean that they could not be brought to the international stage and translated into an Afro-Asian solidarity movement for the Cold War. It did mean that those efforts were largely rendered invisible in the analytical frames that have shaped Cold War scholarship. The activism of people like Maulana Bhashani demonstrates that the question of whether he was a ‘Marxist or a Maulana’ was not one he would ask of himself. As Uddin argues, ‘Bhashani showed that both traditions belonged in the soil of Bengal’.82 Finally, the fate of international bodies like the World Peace Council has further exacerbated the historical evaluation of polyphonic internationalisms such as that of Afro-Asian peace and solidarity: as the WPC failed to succeed in becoming a representative global movement, peace discourse became increasingly considered double-speak for Soviet policy. As Jansen notes with his usual acerbic wit: ‘that particular Trojan horse was showing signs of wear and tear: it had nearly succeeded in making “peace” a derogatory word.’83 But as the Delhi conference shows, discourses of peace and nuclear disarmament brought in WPC influence, people, and contacts, but the WPC did not control the layered meanings, histories, and referents of “peace.” As Anup Singh declared in Cairo: “We stand by the ten principles of the Bandung Conference. We abhor the path of war and violence and we are dedicated to world peace, for peace represents the inner spirit of our peoples.”84

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Notes An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume. 1

The conference’s official name was too convoluted for the press and even for the conference conveners of the conference, most of whom simply spoke of the “Conference of Asian Countries” or the “Asian Solidarity Conference”. In order to avoid confusion with the 1947 Asian Relations Conference, also held in New Delhi, this article uses the official name (acronym CRIT) throughout.

2

The Indian preparatory committee for the conference included no fewer than 43 Members of Parliament. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (hereafter NMML), Rameshwari Nehru Personal Papers (hereafter RNPP), Conference of Asian Countries, Bulletin no. 2, 25/3/1955, 9.

3

Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14:4 (2005), 421-439: 425. See also the collection of essays in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms: a Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2017).

4

Naoko Shimazu, ‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955’, Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2014). On the importance of public diplomacy in this period, see also Frank Gerits, “When the Bull Elephants Fight”: Kwame Nkrumah, Non-Alignment, and Pan-Africanism as an Interventionist Ideology in the Global Cold War (1957-66)’, The International History Review 37:5 (2015), 951-969.

5

I am thankful to Chilamkuri Raja Mohan for alerting me to the fact that AAPSO membership was common across left-leaning India as a token of solidarity, even without direct conference participation.

6

On the range of actors and interests involved in the WPC, see Günter Werlicke, ‘The Communistled World Peace Council and the Western Peace Movements: the fetters of bipolarity and some attempts to break them in the fifties and early sixties’, Peace and Change 23:3 (1998), 265-311; Patrick Iber, Neither Peace nor Freedom: the Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

7

Werlicke, ‘The Communist-led World Peace Council’, 266-7.

8

Ibid., 275; 298.

9

The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, also known as the Manila Pact, had been concluded two weeks previously. It was intended to be a Southeast Asian version of NATO, though did not include standing forces. Critics saw it as an unwarranted extension of American influence, and by extension of the Cold War, and as a threat to recently decolonised nations’ autonomy and sovereignty.

10

NMML, RNPP 26/WPC 1953-1960. AIPC Weekly Newsletter, 5/10/1954: West Bengal.

11

NMML, RNPP 26/WPC 1953-1960. AIPC Weekly Newsletter, 5/10/1954: Tamilnad.

12

Ibid.

13

NMML, RNPP 26/WPC 1953-1960. AIPC Weekly Newsletter, 11/10/1954: Pepsu.

14

On the Calcutta tram workers and the Communist Party of India, see Siddharta Guha Ray, ‘Politics and Protest: Story of Calcutta Tramworks 1940-1947’, in Tanika Sarkar and Sakhar Bandopadhyay (eds.), Calcutta: the Stormy Decades (Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2018), 151-176; Kanchi Venugopal Reddy, Class, Colonialism and Nationalism: Madras Presidency, 1928-1939 (New Delhi: Mittal, 2002), 181.

15

On Soviet links to the formation of the CPI, see the documentary collections brought together by Gangadhar Adhikari, Documents of the history of the Communist Party of India (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1971-7).

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16

Arani Basu, ‘History of Media in Bengal: a Chronological Overview’, Transcience 4:1 (2013), pp. 13-19: 15.

17

NMML, RNPP 26/WPC 1953-1960. AIPC Weekly Newsletter, 5/10/1954: Tamilnad.

18

On the history of the Progressive Writers Movement and its links to internationalist movements in the early Cold War, see Sajjad Zaheer [transl. by Amina Azfar], The Light: a History of the Movement for Progressive Literature in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Hafeez Malik, ‘The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan’, The Journal of Asian Studies 26:4 (1967), 649-664; Rakhshanda Jalil, Liking Progress, Loving Change: a literary history of the Progressive Writers’ Movement in Urdu (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014).

19

Tanika Sarkar, ‘Time in Place: Urban Culture in Decades of Crisis’, in: Tanika Sarkar and Sakhar Bandopadhyay (eds.), Calcutta: the Stormy Decades (Abingdon, New York: Routledge, 2018), 461-474: 468.

20

Anuradha Roy, ‘The Music of Politics and the Politics of Music’, India International Center Quarterly 32:4 (2006), 71-84: 72.

21

Ibid., 76.

22

Sarkar, ‘Time in Place’, 468.

23

Malik, ‘The Marxist Literary Movement in India and Pakistan’, 651.

24

On Zaheer’s arrest, see Kamran Asdar Ali, ‘Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years, Modern Asian Studies 45:3 (2011), 501-534.

25

For a thorough characterisation of interwar internationalism in South Asia, see Michele Louro, Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). See also Kama Maclean, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015); A. Raza, F. Roy and B. Zachariah (eds.), The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds and Worldviews, 1917-1939 (London: Sage, 2014).

26

Farooq Z. Kitchlew, Freedom Fighter: the story of dr. Saifuddin Kitchlew (Sussex: New Horizon, 1979), 89.

27

NMML, RNPP: Conference of Asian Countries, Bulletin no. 2, March 25, 1955. Asian Solidarity and Peace.

28

Also known as the Panchsheel agreement, these are: mutual respect for each other’s territorial integrity; mutual non-aggression; mutual non-interference in each other’s internal affairs; equality and mutual benefit; and peaceful co-existence.

29

‘On Asian Solidarity’, World Peace Council Bulletin, no. 17 (September 1954), 5.

30

In late 1955, Asian Solidarity Committees across India were renamed Afro-Asian Solidarity Committees. NMML, RNPP, Rameshwari Nehru to Yusuf Sebai, 18/2/1958.

31

‘The Conference of Asian Countries’, World Peace Council Bulletin no. 1 (January 1955), 7.

32

Ibid.

33

To all intents and purposes, the CRIT was an AIPC project, but not in name. Contemporary sources largely left the AIPC out of their reporting, but the fact that Romesh Chandra called the CRIT an AIPC conference in retrospect in a 2001 interview, is evidence of the close connection. NMML, Oral Transcripts. Romesh Chandra interviewed by Usha Prashad, 10/9/2001.

34

Carolien Stolte ‘“The Asiatic Hour”: New perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, Delhi, 1947’, Natasa Miskovic, Harald Fischer-Tine and Nada Boskovska (eds.) The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade (London: Routledge), 57-75. For important notes on this conference as inspiration (or lack thereof) to future movements, see Vineet Thakur, ‘An Asian Drama: the Asian Relations Conference, 1947’, The International History Review (Feb. 2018), 1-23.

delhi versus bandung: local anti-imperialists and the afro-asian stage 165

35

Charles K. Armstrong, Tyranny of the Weak: North Korea and the World, 1950-1992 (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press). A delegation of primarily pro-communist Korean groups was present at the Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, but during this conference the Korean War was ongoing.

36

On Rameshwari Nehru, see Om Prakash Paliwal, Rameshwari Nehru, Patriot and Internationalist (New Delhi: National Book Trust India, 1986).

37

NMML, RNPP, subject correspondence.

38

NMML, RNPP, Rameshwari Nehru to dr. G. Bhatra, 24/2/1955. The AIPC certainly contributed, and the author cannot exclude the possibility that this included funds provided by the WPC.

39

NMML, RNPP, Rameshwari Nehru to dr. G. Bhatra, 24/2/1955.

40

NMML, RNPP, Rameshwari Nehru to Kazuyoshi Konno, student at Delhi University, 24/2/1955.

41

Editorial, ‘Asians Resolve to End Colonial Rule’, Bombay Chronicle 11/4/1955, 1.

42

‘Reception to Delegates’, Hindustan Times, 6/4/1955, 3.

43

Asian Relations, being Report of the Proceedings and Documentation of the First Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, March-April 1947 (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948), 314; NMML, RNPP, Bulletin no. 2: Preparatory Committee.

44

See, in particular, Sumita Mukherjee, ‘The All-Asian Women’s Conference 1931: Indian women and their leadership of a Pan-Asian feminist organization’, Women’s History Review 26:3 (2017), 363-381.

45

Elisabeth Armstrong, ‘Before Bandung: the Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41:2 (2015), 305-331.

46

Pak Chong-ae’s speech at the Delhi conference opened with personal thanks to Rameshwari Nehru, suggesting connections predating the conference.

47

Francisca de Haan, ‘Eugénie Cotton, Pak Chong-ae, and Claudia Jones: Rethinking Transnational Feminism and International Politics’, Journal of Women’s History 25:4 (2013), 174-189: 180.

48

This is increasingly highlighted in the historiography of anti-imperialist movements. See, for example, the third chapter of Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third-World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 89-98.

49

Thakur, ‘An Asian Drama’.

50

Harriet Hyman Alonso, Peace as a Women’s Issue: A History of the U.S. Movement for World Peace and Women’s Rights (Syracuse University Press, 1993).

51

Elisabeth Armstrong, ‘Indian Peasant Women’s Activism in a Hot Cold War’, Communist Histories (New Delhi: Leftword Books, 2016), 176-217.

52

NMML, RNPP, Jawaharlal Nehru to Rameshwari Nehru, 11/3/1955.

53

Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement, 63.

54

‘Viet-Minh minister meets Nehru – support assured to Panch Shila’, Bombay Chronicle, 9/4/1955, 1.

55

NMML, RNPP, Rameshwari Nehru to Jawaharlal Nehru, 24/3/1955.

56

NMML, RNPP, Jawaharlal Nehru to Rameshwari Nehru, 24/3/1955.

57

On the nature of this relationship, see Cindy Ewing, ‘The Colombo Powers: crafting diplomacy in the Third World and launching Afro-Asia at Bandung’, Cold War History (2018), 1-19.

58

They had met in London in 1937. According to Romesh Chandra, this is where he learned that “to be in the Indian independence movement, one must also be an internationalist.” NMML, Oral Transcripts. Romesh Chandra interviewed by Usha Prashad, 10/9/2001.

59

Ibid.

60

Special issue on the New Delhi session of the Bureau of the World Council of Peace, 22-25 March 1958. World Peace Council Bulletin, 8 (April 1958), 5-6.

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61

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Office of Current Intelligence. Memorandum on the Asian Conference for Relaxing International Tensions, 14/3/1955.

62

CIA, Memorandum on the Asian Conference for Relaxing International Tensions, 14/3/1955.

63

On the India-China Friendship Association, see Arunabh Ghosh, ‘Before 1962: the case for 1950s China-India History’, The Journal of Asian Studies 76:3 (2017): 695-727. On Guo Moruo and Tagore, see Sisir Kumar Das, ‘The controversial guest: Tagore in China’, China Report 29:3 (1993), 237-274: 240-1.

64

‘Asians Resolve to End Colonial Rule’, Bombay Chronicle, 11/4/1955.

65

NMML, RNPP, Conference of Asian Countries, Bulletin no. 1, New Delhi, March 5, 1955, 7. For Mirzo Tursunzoda, see also Hanna Jansen’s chapter in this volume.

66

Ibid., 5.

67

NMML, RNPP, Resolutions.

68

Peter Custers, ‘Maulana Bhashani and the transition to secular politics in East Bengal’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 47:2 (2010): 231-59: 235.

69

Layli Uddin, ‘Maulana Bhashani: the Lessons of Freedom’, The Daily Star, 21/11/2015. See also her PhD dissertation, ‘In the Land of Eternal Eid: Maulana Bhashani and the Political Mobilisation of Peasants and Lower-Class Urban Workers in East Pakistan, c. 1930s-1971’. Royal Holloway, University of London, 2016.

70

Uddin, ‘Maulana Bhashani’.

71

NMML, RNPP, Speech M. Bhasani 7/4/1955.

72

Editorial, ‘The Asian Way’, Bombay Chronicle 15/4/1955.

73

C. Parameswaran, A Look into the Conference of Asian Countries (New Delhi: Republican Series, 1955), 16.

74

Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment, 258.

75

Ibid., 255.

76

NMML, RNPP, Indian Delegation Report Cairo – personal note by Rameshwari Nehru.

77

Shimazu, ‘Bandung as Theater’.

78

NMML, RNPP, Indian Delegation Report Cairo – personal note by Rameshwari Nehru.

79

Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019): 21-54.

80

Ibid.

81

Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment, 252.

82

Uddin, ‘Maulana Bhashani’.

83

Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment, 250.

84

Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (Cairo: Foreign Languages Publishing House: Moscow 1958).

CHAPTER 8

Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub: Infrastructures of Solidarity in 1950s Cairo Reem Abou-El-Fadl

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 AsianAfrican 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.1 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

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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. How can we understand popular agency and its limits in a state-sponsored peoples’ conference? This chapter responds by analysing the building of an ‘infrastructure of solidarity’ on multiple spatial scales in the Egyptian capital in the 1950s, highlighting the ways in which state and popular actors interacted at such sites. It situates the Cairo Conference in this process, starting with the founding of the African Association in 1955, followed by the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) in 1958. The former was established as a home from home for African students and political activists, while the latter was to continue the work of the Cairo Conference. Both owed some of their resources to the state but were officially independent of it. The question of Afro-Asian identity has hardly had a hearing in Middle East Studies, where there has been a lack of engagement with Egypt’s Afro-Asian policy under Gamal Abdel Nasser.2 Instead scholars have focused on the Arab scale – given Nasser’s captivation of Arab audiences, and the devastating Arab defeat of 19673 – variously engaging the conventional wisdom that Arab nationalism ‘failed’. This notion assumes that pan-Arab and national loyalties were mutually exclusive,4 and that there was an imperialist purpose behind Egypt’s pan-Arabism.5 By contrast, Egypt features prominently in global history scholarship on decolonisation, and particularly on the Bandung Conference,6 in which overlapping national and transnational engagements are uncontroversial. Yet even here, the Bandung and Cairo Conferences are at times deemed part of a fleeting moment of ‘high-minded symbolism’,7 which masked participants’ rivalries and nationally differentiated priorities.8 There is room for a different perspective, which acknowledges the transnational circulations of ideas and solidarity practices in the spaces created by both conferences. The role of non-state actors has not been a significant focus in studies of Nasser’s Egypt, and even the state’s agency has often been downplayed. Many accounts have employed a ‘Cold War lens’,9 privileging the feuding superpowers’ perspective. Scholars have been preoccupied with evidencing that the Nasserist project overreached, and that its counterbalancing of great powers was a fruitless strategy.10 Here they have presented Cairo as beholden to Moscow, and AAPSO as a Soviet front through the activities of the World Peace Council, with competition from the Chinese.11 This overlooks the active hostility that confronted such Third World projects,12 as well as the multifaceted agency of a state like Egypt, given the

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role of the popular networks analysed here. By contrast, scholarship on Algeria has celebrated it as a haven for Third World liberation movements.13 This only makes the silence on Egypt’s role more problematic, given that Egypt hosted the Algerian National Liberation Front’s provisional government nine years before Algerian independence, amongst other internationalist commitments. This chapter builds on the small but growing literature that addresses actors beneath the high politics level of Afro-Asianism, who were involved in national and transnational communities simultaneously.14 It focuses on the subaltern agency of Egyptian activists, writers, and artists, who made of Cairo a hub for Arab, African, and Afro-Asian connections of different kinds in the 1950s. To do so, I engage with scholarship from historical geography on the relational production of place, and the generative nature of solidarity. In her work on London as a world city, Doreen Massey proposes ‘an alternative geographical imagination in which the character of a region… is a product not only of internal interactions but also of relations with elsewhere’.15 Cairo as a place for Afro-Asian solidarity can be similarly understood as a product of interactions at home and elsewhere. Egyptian solidarity activists confronted an unequal, colonially constituted external geography, and sought to remake it into one of global justice and peace. A spatial analysis helps clarify the driver of their solidarity practice, namely the recognition of their entanglement with other colonised peoples, and the way imperial power operates ‘along long chains of command’,16 which they aim to disrupt.17 As Massey argues, ‘[l]ocality and interconnectedness are often part of the very politics, even the focus, of the struggle… their rethinking may be a crucial part of political organising’.18 To examine this process, I draw on the concept of translocality, which connotes ‘situatedness during mobility’: ‘agents’ “simultaneous situatedness across different locales.”’19 Its twin valences appear in the forging of physical places for connections to be made, and the flow of people and ideas between them. Such solidarity practice is generative of new political imaginaries and communities in turn, as David Featherstone elaborates: ‘translocal political organizing’20 can lead to ‘the active creation of new ways of relating’.21 Accordingly, I argue that Egyptians negotiating the challenges of decolonisation in the 1950s built an infrastructure for translocal solidarity on Arab, African, and Afro-Asian scales simultaneously, and engaged in the relational construction of identity in the process. Moving between localities at each scale, they tried to renegotiate and break down some of the borders between them, most notably by seeking to move Algeria and Palestine from Arab onto Afro-Asian agendas. I also argue that Cairo as an Afro-Asian hub was produced through tensions and collaborations between state and non-state actors, in the context of a state that monopolised the political sphere, but promoted a political project of anti-imperialism that enjoyed widespread legitimacy.

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Infrastructures of Solidarity: Building an African Home in Cairo In June 1954, Egypt’s daily Al-Ahram reported that the annual Liberation Festival would see Cairo host a ‘general congress of peoples from colonised African territories’, in solidarity with them against imperialism.22 In late 1955, this trend was enhanced with the formation of the African Association: a crucial precursor to AAPSO, that has been overlooked in studies of Egypt’s foreign policy. Its address at 5 Ahmad Heshmat Street in Zamalek became the site of tens of African liberation movement offices, and a cultural centre for Egyptian writers, activists, and students who supported them. As official policy was being developed, Association members were hosting, introducing, broadcasting, and mobilising African activists in Cairo. These were translocal interactions, producing interconnectedness between different local places, across different spatial scales, simultaneously. They created a permanent politicised space for the African community to organise in Cairo: a rootedness which was a resource for activists suffering political persecution and often forced underground. At the same time this fixity promoted mobility: it allowed individuals to meet one another and share their experiences and skills, and encouraged ideas to flow between Cairo and other locales, even if their authors were immobile. This was in turn a politically productive solidarity practice, extending relations and resources across borders, overcoming colonial ‘enclosure’ and isolation. Indeed, the Association was also a place for African liberation movements’ political expression, through channels furnished by their Egyptian hosts. The Association was established just three years after the Free Officers came to power, as part of their strategy to form bases in both Arab and African spheres, and to gain leverage in their withdrawal negotiations with Britain.23 In 1955 Nasser travelled to Bandung, where he affirmed Egypt’s solidarity with all colonised nations, based on shared past experiences and future challenges of development.24 This logic of connection and mutuality prompted a strategy to disrupt the colonial chain, and informed the Egyptian leadership’s invitation to liberation movement leaders to convene in Cairo.25 Historian Muhammad Anis described Bandung as ‘the moment of Arab nationalism’s exit from isolation’, and its fusion with Afro-Asianism and ‘progressive humanism’.26 Many scholars have understood such discourse as masking a contradiction, but for Egypt’s leaders, the national and international were mutually reinforcing routes to liberation, and assuring a decolonised neighbourhood was a matter of survival. If Burma, India and China had begun such outreach in previous years,27 Egypt was in this sense a pioneer among African states. The Association’s role as a base for African liberation movements evolved gradually. It initially took responsibility for the thousands of students coming to Egypt on university scholarships, particularly from the Nile Basin countries and Muslim

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communities in West Africa.28 Behind this was a motivation to locate students who were involved in national liberation movements in their home countries, with whom Cairo could foster productive relations. Some of these would become representatives with permanent offices at the Association. This process was supervised by senior Free Officer Muhammad Fayiq, who headed the presidency’s new African Affairs Bureau from 1955 to 1966.29 The Association itself was not a state organisation, however, and its director Abd Al-Aziz Ishak was a scholar, formerly at Khartoum University and later consultant to the Foreign Ministry.30 The Association’s community hovered close to, but outside, the bureaucratic apparatus. One such figure was Helmi Sharawy, who went on to become the coordinator of the African liberation movements in the Egyptian presidency, but had begun by pursuing research at the Association. Visiting it by chance in its first year, he was captivated by the anti-colonial fervour and ideological commitment of its community. He soon disregarded opportunities for secure employment in academia, and began freelancing as a translator and researcher at the Association.31 Sharawy’s description of the six African youths he met there illustrates the diversity of profiles it hosted in 1956. They were mostly university students, one from South Sudan, two from Nigeria, a fourth from West Africa, and two from western and northern Eritrea. They all gravitated around ‘the Professor’ Ishak, who led them in long discussions about empire and resistance in Africa.32 Sharawy describes Ishak as a liberal scholar with a satirical wit that often rattled the technocrats who liaised with him from the African Affairs Bureau.33 For Sharawy, and his African colleagues, the Association was a haven of education and mentorship, amongst intellectuals with genuine affection for their African students. The Association’s community grew suddenly after Nasser’s successful nationalisation of the Suez Canal Company. Britain, France, and Israel’s joint attack on Egypt in October had generated an unprecedented cascade of Afro-Asian solidarity with the Egyptian people: ‘the sheer volume, universality, and scale of adverse reaction to the British and French attack on Egypt shocked, sobered or scandalised the supporters of the policy’.34 After Suez, the transnational networks flowing through Cairo multiplied. Indeed, Fayiq remembers 1956 as a turning point for Egypt’s African relations: it both emboldened Nasser and mitigated the difficulties Fayiq had faced in locating African liberation movements.35 Several African movements were attracted by Cairo’s victory, and began taking the initiative to make contact. A case in point is Felix Moumié, leader of the Union of the Peoples of Cameroon (UPC), whose widow and fellow activist Marthe wrote: ‘When we saw that Nasser could nationalize the Suez Canal, resist the French and the British, and win, we said to ourselves, this is someone who can really help [the UPC]’.36 As Kenyan independence activist and later vice president Oginga Odinga put it, ‘It was the abortive Suez adventure of 1956 … that united all Africa, and Africa with Asia and

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the Arab world, to give a great spurt forward to national independence … Africa was never the same after Suez.’37 The second function that the Association now came to fulfil was to enable communications amongst its African guests, and between them and their bases at home. Meeting one another in Cairo, they could escape colonial administrations’ restrictions on their movement, exchange skills and moral support, and broaden their networks. One of the first delegations arrived in July 1957 from the Cameroons, headed by Felix Moumié, and received a residence and office in Zamalek, as well as financial assistance. Moumié’s widow Marthe recalls: ‘All the parties represented in Cairo, with the support of the Egyptian government, had a spirit of manifest solidarity. The Algerians, Ugandans, South Africans, and Cameroonians consulted one another about strategies to adopt in their struggle against colonialism. The UPC office in … Zamalek, Cairo, occupied an important place’.38 Whilst African activists’ meetings with state officials secured their position in Egypt, it was members of the African Association who were their main contacts in Cairo. In 1958, still in his twenties and new at the Association, Helmi Sharawy was to meet and become increasingly responsible for guests such as Felix Moumié (UPC), Joshua Nkomo (ZAPU), and Ignatius Musaazi of the Uganda National Congress Party (UNC). The continual movement and shifting fortunes of such figures were intimately tied to the support they received in Cairo, and to the exchanges they had with enthusiasts for their cause in Egyptian political, intellectual, and cultural circles. Beyond its physical centre, the Association provided a valuable space in the media for African activists to communicate with audiences in Egypt and back home. In 1957, its members began publishing the magazine Nahdat Afriqya [‘Africa Rising’], under the editorship of Ishak and Egyptian poet Abdu Badawi. The Association sought to forge an African consciousness among Egyptians, and Nahdat Afriqya announced itself the first Arabic language magazine with this objective.39 It was a rich publication featuring first-hand accounts from African politicians, a news roundup called ‘Africa in a Month’, scholarly research on African history, book reviews, and letters from its Arab-African readership.40 Published in Arabic, English, and French, its editor called on writers from across the continent to contribute, under the slogan ‘Africa for the Africans’.41 Meanwhile, the Association was able to generate new spaces for its guests’ political expression and organising, by connecting them with Cairo Radio’s nascent African broadcasts, providing both personnel and content. In July 1954, programming had begun in Amharic, Sudanese dialects, and Swahili.42 Cairo’s Swahili coverage was part of Egyptian support for the Mau Mau uprising: on the one hand, with news bulletins and press reviews highlighting Egyptian affairs, it fostered familiarity between the two peoples, and promoted Egypt as a regional ally.43 On

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the other hand, it exerted pressure on Britain, by reporting on British violence against the Kenyans, on dissenting voices in British parliament and society, and on other African liberation movements, from Zanzibar, Somaliland, Tanganyika, Uganda, Northern Rhodesia, and South Africa.44 Through their use of language and translation, mass media such as Nahdat Afriqya and Cairo Radio became important places for the politics of African solidarity, articulated together by and with the Association. However, this effort had important limits. The Nahdat Afriqya team took care to translate summaries of its content into English and French, aiming to foster an ‘imagined community’ contemplating the same content across linguistic barriers simultaneously. This effect was subject to the constraints of the Association’s resources, however, both technically and financially, and circulation remained highest in Egypt, as the Letters pages attested. Conversely, Cairo Radio employed presenters directly from each movement, broadcasting in their own language. It sought to constitute its listeners as members of national fighting fronts, but also of a wider African public, with Egyptians by their side. In both media, however, hailing Arab-African publics into being in this way was limited by class, gender, and cultural differences across audiences, as well as differential attitudes to Arab historical legacies in the continent, including slavery.

Changing Political Imaginaries: From Suez to the Cairo Conference “It was the first time that the colonised peoples could send their representatives … despite colonisers’ borders and obstacles (…) [The Cairo Conference] created a new field for meeting and coordinating efforts, not only in Africa but extending to the peoples of Asia and others.”45

The production of Cairo as a hub for liberation movements had begun through the fostering of a networked physical presence for their members and supporters, with an emphasis on the Arab world and Africa. With the Cairo Conference in December 1957, a new phase saw the Afro-Asian scale gain prominence in Egyptians’ political imaginaries. As Laura Bier observes, at this juncture after independence, ‘the primacy of the nation-state as the locus of identity was largely taken for granted.’46 Contrary to the conventional wisdom on Egyptians’ mutually exclusive nationalist and pan-Arab commitments, those engaged in translocal organising with Arab, African, and Asian counterparts in the 1950s were undertaking a far more complex reimagining of their identities and role on the world stage. As Ruth Gilmore notes, solidarity practice remakes identifications through a creative process of engagement.47

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In Egypt, this unfolded first in the confrontation over Suez, and then through the gathering of Afro-Asian representatives in Cairo. Both experiences moved Egyptian activists from a solidarity which foregrounded their common enemy, and proposed a shared project in the future, towards a solidarity which substantiated a shared project in the present. Having been observers of the broad trajectory launched at Bandung, Egyptian delegates became authors of resolutions that they announced themselves for immediate implementation. This was by no means a seamless transition, however, as differences of class, language, and historical experience underpinned power differentials that could interrupt the flow of solidarity. There was a lively public debate about national identity already underway in 1950s Egypt, in which different voices affirmed the salience of Egypt’s regional neighbourhoods, even if they differed on the relative weight to be given to each.48 The struggle over Suez then became the crucial event connecting Bandung with the Cairo Conference, and shaping the Egyptian delegates’ identity narratives, for several reasons. First, the extraordinary engagement of Arab, African, and Asian publics with Egypt’s cause led many Egyptians to see themselves within wider and overlapping spatial networks of anti-colonial resistance. The central trope here was that of the common enemy. This was a contingent process that predated Suez, but one which came to a dramatic crescendo in the second half of 1956. After securing British withdrawal in 1954, Egypt had faced renewed isolation through Britain’s promotion of a Middle East security pact, Israel’s attacks on Egyptian troops, and the United States’ insistence that any military assistance be conditional on a settlement with Israel. It was at Bandung, after his embrace of neutralism, that Nasser was able to secure arms from the Soviet bloc instead.49 Thus for Egyptians pursuing meaningful sovereignty, the need to resist Western regional alliances had thrown the Arab scale into relief, while the isolation imposed by the Suez attack revealed Afro-Asian spaces as generous sites of translocal solidarity. In a fluid process of introductions, sharing, and organising at venues such as the Cairo Conference, they began to identify with one another. As Brown and Yaffe emphasise, ‘relations of solidarity can travel in more than one direction simultaneously, building complex webs of reciprocity’.50 Second, it was the gift of popular solidarity with Egypt across Africa and Asia that raised Egypt’s profile internationally, and elicited the invitation to host the first Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference. In December 1956, after the Asian Writers Conference in New Delhi, the Asian Solidarity Committee had decided to send a delegation to Cairo. Four ASC secretaries, Indian Anup Singh, Russian Anatoly Sefernov, Chinese Yang Shou, and Japanese Masaharu Hatanaka, arrived in February 1957 and met with Nasser, who agreed to host the conference.51 Egypt’s leadership knew how to capitalise on this: Nasser had relied on a popular base to buoy Egypt through the Suez trial, and now used it to strengthen Egypt’s Third World profile. Thus Suez brought together a trajectory of grassroots solidarity with

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state policy, which saw the articulation of Cairo with other Afro-Asian locales, and enabled the convening of the 1957 Conference. Finally, the Suez experience deepened the so-called ‘Bandung moment’ in Egypt – specifically the rapprochement between Nasser and the Egyptian left – which shaped the composition of Egypt’s delegation to the Cairo Conference. On the one hand, after Bandung and Suez, Nasser had realised the political leverage afforded by adopting more radical positions, which prompted an engagement with the communist bloc and Egypt’s own leftists.52 Until 1954, crackdowns on opposition had seen many such figures jailed, and even leftist Free Officers such as Khalid Muhyi Al-Din exiled.53 Now, the government instead aimed to enhance its own technocratic ranks with leftist intellectuals’ superior capacities in theorisation, planning, and public discourse. On the other hand, Nasser’s feats in securing arms and the Suez nationalisation had delighted audiences in the Arab world, not least amongst the Egyptian left, whose members had a strong tradition of theorising Arab nationalism within their socialism.54 Its different factions now adopted a dual strategy of unification amongst themselves and cooperation with the state.55 The conference delegation therefore included both Free Officers such as Muhyi Al-Din, and recently released Marxist intellectuals, who sought to pull the government left. There were also liberal and nationalist public intellectuals, who were content to support and generate publicity for the government project. These included Egypt’s foremost man of letters Taha Hussein, celebrated novelists Nagib Mahfouz and Ihsan Abd Al-Qudus, and influential journalists Muhammad Hassanein Heikal, Ahmad Bahaa’ Al-Din, and Zakariyya Lutfi Gum‘a. The calibre of this team reflects the importance that the Egyptian government attributed to the conference, and made for rigorous and critical deliberations. That said, the Free Officers’ rule was characterised by its close surveillance of the political field, and its wariness of independent organising. The Afro-Asian conference had two military men placed in charge of its preparatory committee: senior Free Officer Anwar Sadat as preparatory committee and conference chair, and Yusuf Al-Siba‘i as secretary. Sadat was a right-leaning figure, formerly secretary of the short-lived Islamic Congress, and described in Nkomo’s memoir as ‘not remotely interested in Africa’.56 Al-Siba‘i moved from his military background into a career as novelist and editor with an uncritical pro-government line. Ultimately this meant that the implementation of decisions remained to a large degree in state hands. However, this choice did not mean that the critical voices in Egypt’s delegations were silenced. As subsequent sections show, the Egyptian scene was already vibrant with personalities and institutions engaged critically but sympathetically with the state policy of Afro-Asian solidarity. The Cairo Conference had come to its Egyptian hosts from an Asian solidarity movement in which they had not been much involved, but they now adopted

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several liberation causes from Asia and Africa. Meanwhile they endeavoured to set the Afro-Asian agenda to include causes hitherto considered exclusively ‘Arab’, and to channel participating delegations’ energies towards an Egyptian rendering of the meaning of Afro-Asian solidarity. Conferences were important venues for diplomatic sociability, and for securing consensus on agendas and priority issues which could then be transposed to other fora, both international and popular.57 From 1958 onwards, Egyptian efforts were critical to the assimilation of Algeria and Palestine, but also Tunisia, Morocco, and Yemen, into the core causes and critiques of anti-imperialists in Afro-Asian and later Euro-American movements. Through such connections in turn, Egyptians sought to constitute themselves as subjects at home in Arab, African, and later Afro-Asian worlds, in a specifically Egyptian internationalism. Significantly, they were constructing this Afro-Asianism in tandem with Egypt’s pan-Arabism, at a particularly tumultuous time for the Arab world. Egypt’s merger with Syria into the United Arab Republic was announced within days of the Cairo Conference, sharpening the polarisation between the anti-imperialist republics and the pro-Western monarchies in the so-called Arab Cold War of the 1950s. This process had begun in earnest with the preparations for Bandung. In the preceding Arab League meetings, Egypt had tabled the issues of Palestine and North Africa alongside African liberation, racial discrimination in Africa, and disarmament, and secured an agreement from fellow Arab states to send delegates who would vote with Egypt on Palestine.58 At Bandung, Nasser’s emphases on the North African and Palestinian problems were echoed and endorsed by several Arab delegates, including Tunisian, Algerian, and Moroccan delegates who were being hosted as political exiles in Cairo.59 The Final Communiqué recorded Egyptian support for a host of Arab liberation causes.60 Bandung also generated a ten-point Declaration endorsing Egypt’s struggle against the Baghdad Pact.61 ‘Arab’ issues were then more prominent in the AAPSO agenda than they had been at Bandung.62 Indeed at the October 1957 Preparatory Meeting, the second agenda item was the Algerian situation, after Algerian delegate Ahmad Tawfiq Madani successfully requested separate consideration.63 Delegates agreed to send a letter of support to the Syrian people and government for their steadfastness during their recent standoff with Turkey, a message to the United Nations Secretary-General regarding the Syrian events, a memorandum to the General Assembly President on Algerian liberation, and a message to the Egyptian people on the first anniversary of Suez.64 At the Cairo Conference itself, delegates from India, Cameroon, Indonesia, Japan, and Sudan all gave reports, on their own national liberation struggles, on the challenges of racial discrimination and the threat of nuclear weapons, and on the promotion of economic development and cultural exchange.65 Meanwhile, Egyptian

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Figure 8.1. Crowds outside the Conference opening ceremony at Cairo University (Al-Ahram, 27 Dec ember 1957).

contributions such as Free Officer Khalid Muhyi Al-Din’s address on neoimperialism made comparisons between Western security pacts in the Middle East, the Far East, and South-East Asia, and enumerated the anti-colonial causes of West Irian in Indonesia and Goa in India in particular.66 The Egyptian delegation then secured a resolution on Algeria which described the French as engaged in a war of extermination, and called on the peoples of Africa and Asia to mobilise public opinion and insist that France respect the Geneva Conventions on the Laws of War.67 On Palestine, the conference had begun with the Palestinian delegation’s submission of a report and a proposal for a resolution supporting the Palestinians’ right of return.68 The final conference declaration then endorsed the Palestinian delegation’s report. Whereas Bandung’s final communiqué contained just a few lines on Palestine, here was a detailed historical account.69 Indeed persuading

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African interlocutors of comparisons with apartheid South Africa was fast becoming an important element of Egyptian policy.70 Meanwhile the Cultural Resolutions of the conference recommended the provision of scholarships and facilities to enable Algerians and Palestinians to study at schools and universities across Africa and Asia, in the context of the repression of teachers and students under colonial rule.71 A critical limitation to this gain was that the problem of Zionism was not one that could easily be appreciated across Afro-Asian spaces. Connections had been forged between Israeli and Afro-Asian socialists in the precursors to Bandung such as the Asian Socialist Conference, and Israel was offering diplomatic and economic assistance to its African interlocutors, presenting itself as a fellow newly independent state. This was compounded by another limitation in turn: the rivalries and competing interpretations of Afro-Asian solidarity amongst other influential powers, such as Ghana under staunch pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah. Israel’s activism had proven notably effective with Nkrumah, who convened the All-African Independent Peoples’ Conference in April 1958, on the heels of the Cairo Conference, followed by the All-African Peoples’ Congress in December, while resisting Egypt’s counsel on the question of Palestine throughout. Similarly, Sharawy recalls trying to explain to his friend ZAPU leader Joshua Nkomo in 1958 the similarities between Rhodesia and Palestine, Algeria, Kenya and South Africa, as all subject to settler colonial regimes, but finding the Zionist movement’s strong presence in South Africa in particular an obstacle to Nkomo’s grasp of the comparison.72 If these were the kinds of interactions Egyptians had at the conference, what was the effect on their political imaginaries? In late 1957, the Egyptian preparatory committee began to articulate their Arab and Afro-Asian identities in the Egyptian cultural press. This is illustrated well by a comparison of Nahdat Afriqya’s coverage of the conference, and that of Al-Risala Al-Gadida, a cultural magazine edited by conference secretary Al-Siba‘i, which featured commentary from members of the Egyptian delegation’s Cultural Committee. Even though the African Association did not have a formal presence at the conference, it was represented by the correspondents who sent reports,73 and the African conference delegates whom it hosted. Both magazines asked similar questions regarding Egyptian delegates’ impressions of their guests, and their ‘duties … in implementing the conference’s recommendations’.74 Suez was a common point of departure for Egyptian delegates, and the two publications used the motif of Egypt’s national victory at Suez as an Afro-Asian one. This offered Egyptian audiences new coordinates for the resonance of this event, not only in the Arab but the Afro-Asian space too. At the conference, Anwar Sadat had addressed the delegations: ‘[Egypt] recognizes that the only way of repaying her debt to you is by taking an active part in the task of liberating the rest of those peoples whose fates are still being dominated by imperialistic regimes’.75 In Nahdat Afriqya, Ishak echoed this by asserting that ‘Colonialism was broken,

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and its prestige evaporated in Port Said’.76 In Al-Risala Al-Gadida, Marxist Lutfi Al-Khuli similarly affirmed that the choice of Cairo for AAPSO headquarters was ‘a clear sign of these peoples’ appreciation for the struggle of the Egyptian people in particular and the Arabs in general against colonialism’.77 While Suez was juxtaposed with the common enemy in the West, the conference debates on cultural exchange provided a space for the elaboration of a shared project in the production of an Egyptian, Afro-Asian identity. The theme of Egypt’s own distinct trajectory was strongly present, but there was also a pledge to fuse this with new cultural sources. Significantly, this had come from a preeminent liberal nationalist, and longtime advocate of Egypt’s Mediterranean identity and European ties, Taha Hussein. As Egypt’s Cultural Committee chair, Hussein had spoken at length about ‘Egypt’s gift to world culture’, but also announced ‘that the Egyptian mind … the mind of the intellectuals, and of those seeking to learn, welcome most deeply the fruits of what the Asian and African countries’ minds produce.’78 Indeed Hussein’s speech revolved around translation in Egyptian and Arab history, which was a theme that animated conference proceedings on cultural exchange. It appeared in conference secretary Al-Siba‘i’s call for a nationally coordinated literary translation programme, and leading actress Fatin Hamama and director Salah Abu Sayf’s call ‘to realise the exchange of films on the widest possible scale’.79 Novelist Nagib Mahfuz and editor Ahmad Bahaa’ Al-Din insisted that the Egyptian state facilitate travel and collaboration between Egyptian and Afro-Asian writers, to enable ‘the establishment of Afro-Asian literature… out of spiritual and moral cooperation…’80 Nahdat Afriqya further combined the Arab with Afro-Asian frames through stories such as ‘Madagascar: The Asian-African Island’ or by celebrating the Egyptian-Syrian merger as forming the first truly Afro-Asian state.81 In providing a hall of fame of modernist leaders from the East, for example, Ishak grouped together Islamic modernist Jamal Al-Afghani with China’s founder Sun Yat Sen, alongside Egyptian anti-colonial nationalist Ahmad Urabi, Libyan fighter Al-Sunusi, and Riffian revolutionary Abd Al-Krim Khatabi.82 Meanwhile in the post-conference issue of Al-Risala Al-Gadida, the tale of Arab folk hero Abu Zayd Al-Hilali was retold, emphasising his Arab, Asian and African connections each time.83 In the same issue, an analysis of Cairo Radio’s ‘special programmes’ stressed their role in ‘reshaping our culture into local, Arab, and internationalist’. The author described Egyptians’ Arab and Afro-Asian identities as a series of widening perspectives: ‘We were until recently closed in on ourselves, colonised… Now many events… have drawn new horizons in front of us. We now have to see ourselves as part of humanity.’84 While writers and artists engaged in this co-construction of Arab and Afro-Asian identities, it is important to note the challenges that confronted their dissemination, as was the case with the pan-Arabist nation-making project.85 Afro-Asian solidarity

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activists had to contend with the difference between their own experiences and visions, and those of Egyptians whose political culture was shaped by local references and an attachment to Egypt’s distinct national identity. Particularly when combined with lingering tropes of civilisational superiority, this could undermine the solidarity framework. There was a concerted effort from state institutions to increase the popularly available literature on Africa and Asia, and to make relevant changes to the school and university curricula.86 However such measures could not bring about shifts in societal attitudes swiftly enough for Association members like Sharawy, who bemoaned insufficient investment in cultural education around Arab-African relations in particular.87

A Growing Hub: AAPSO Joins the African Association For its Egyptian hosts, a significant outcome of the 1957 Conference was that Cairo was now a firmly fixed presence on the Afro-Asian political map. They had demonstrated their ability to host and coordinate a vast array of delegates and ideas, and this had been politically productive – facilitating and strengthening connections between delegates across borders, and promoting an Egyptian Afro-Asian political imaginary. The conference resolutions then added an important new node to the infrastructure of translocal solidarity being built by its hosts: they announced the formation of AAPSO, with a permanent secretariat to be based in Cairo. Clearly AAPSO was not the beginning of Third World internationalism in Egypt, but it would significantly enhance both the rootedness and mobility of the dynamic activist networks in Cairo. AAPSO was an international organisation, however, unlike the African Association – its relationship to high politics differed as a result. As AAPSO was being set up, the African Association was going from strength to strength. An immediate consequence of the Cairo Conference was the Association’s swelling into the liberation movement base whose reputation came to be known across decolonising Africa. The opportunities it afforded these movements for situated mobility now multiplied. After the conference, Al-Ahram featured interviews with several African delegates who had managed to evade colonial border controls to make it to Cairo, and who were now effectively claiming asylum.88 They included a resistance fighter with the Kenyan Mau Mau, a delegate from French Sudan who had claimed he was travelling to France, and Chad delegation president, Zakariya Nimr Yusuf, whose delegation had obtained pilgrimage visas for Hijaz, the only destination the authorities allowed. Also covered was the story of John Kale, the young Foreign Relations Secretary of the Ugandan National Congress, who would become its first representative in Cairo at the African Association, and an influential voice on Cairo Radio.89

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Meanwhile an elegant Nile-side villa was found to host the new Afro-Asian organisation in Cairo’s Manyal district. Its main tasks were to be the implementation of the conference resolutions, the promotion of Afro-Asian solidarity movements, and the provision of a link between them. A modus vivendi developed gradually with the African Association, whereby any liberation movement based in Cairo would propose a principal resident in the African Association, and a representative in the AAPSO Secretariat (either the same person or an assistant). As Sharawy recalls, this new arrangement placed him and the AAPSO in competition for these liberation movements’ attention.90 A division of labour also evolved to distinguish AAPSO’s activities from those of others in Cairo. The African Association and later the presidency’s African and Arab Affairs Bureaux provided politicised spaces from which liberation movements could communicate with their constituencies at home, associate with one another, and promote their political thought in written and broadcast forms. Meanwhile AAPSO also provided a fixed venue and resources, but promoted a different kind of mobility: delegates were able to represent themselves directly at foreign embassies and international organisations in Cairo, by accompanying their Egyptian hosts. This also allowed them to convey their message to non-African audiences at international conferences, again by accompanying Egyptian delegates.91 For example, Marthe Moumié recalls that her husband began to receive messages of support from China during their stay in Cairo, followed in 1958 by an invitation from the Chinese Afro-Asian Solidarity committee to visit the country.92 For the Egyptian leadership, and those writers and activists affiliated with it, AAPSO was also an important theatre in which to present their priorities and to engage dynamically with much stronger powers. At the 1957 Conference and 1959 Youth Conference, Cairo played host to both the Soviets and Chinese, navigating their complex relations, as well as their reactions to Egypt’s treatment of its communist movement. Contemporary accounts make much of the Soviet presence,93 and left-leaning intellectuals such as Anis were greatly enthused by this ‘new gathering of liberation powers in the world, both socialist and nationalist’.94 By contrast, the scholarship on AAPSO has often indulged in the language of fronts, presenting its members as puppets of the Soviet World Peace Council or mouthpieces of Chinese propaganda.95 It is more precise to consider the organisation as having provided, through Cairo, a place for both powers to communicate with, and mobilise among, the world’s liberation wave. There were three parties in this dynamic, and their relative power balances were not static. In this respect, a further political role for AAPSO from Egypt’s perspective was as a pressure balancer between the Soviet and Chinese poles of the communist bloc. Certainly AAPSO reflected the state of SinoSoviet relations at different points, and the political weight of each power could

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be asserted through their expenditure on representatives’ travel, and sponsorship of AAPSO activities. However from AAPSO’s 1958–1959 beginnings onwards, the two powers were balanced by the efforts of Egypt as the host to assert its own neutralist interpretations, not least as Nasser’s rapprochement with the left grew cold, and was followed by renewed repression – for reasons relating to intra-Arab relations rather than Cold War dynamics – in 1959.96 Even in 1957, before the Cairo Conference, Egyptian preparatory committee member Zakariyya Lutfi Guma had completed an Africa tour aimed to assure fellow participants of Egypt’s neutral stance. In later years, both the African Association and AAPSO would try to host liberation movements regardless of their pro-Soviet or Maoist sympathies, and to avoid becoming embroiled in that rivalry. According to Sharawy, there were occasional tensions ‘between Zamalek and Manyal’ over which liberation movements were worthy of support.97 After all, Egyptian engagements with both Russia and China extended to other critical areas such as trade and the Arab-Israeli conflict, and it was these that would often dictate Egypt’s fluctuating positions in this dynamic.98 These are the complexities revealed by breaking down Cold War frameworks, and asking how priorities of post-colonial independence and development overlay bipolar or intra-communist politics. Indeed AAPSO had a complex relationship with the Egyptian state, which at times enhanced, and at others limited the possibilities of translocal solidarity in Cairo. First, it had significant funding, starting with a government pledge of 10,000 Egyptian pounds annually to launch it, and enjoyed the support of major powers in its permanent secretariat. This comprised representatives from Egypt, India, Algeria, Russia, and China. However, even as the government openly promoted AAPSO, and had sought collaboration with the left at the Cairo Conference, this was still carefully regulated. AAPSO was to operate within the parameters of the existing system of Arab socialism, which stressed a national, non-communist trajectory towards social justice and redistribution.99 AAPSO’s permanent staff were Yusuf Al-Siba‘i and two aides, the linguist Mursi Saad Eddin and author Edward Al-Kharat. Historian Anouar Abdel Malek stresses that this was a conservative choice of team, aimed at ‘neutralising’ any communist influence after the energy displayed by Marxist delegates at the Cairo Conference.100 Around the African Association and AAPSO were several other institutions, affiliated to differing degrees with the state, and tasked with implementing policies in Africa and Asia. The Supreme Council, formed in January 1956, comprised high-ranking figures such as the Interior and Finance Ministers, and some diplomats, but did not compare with the influential African Affairs Bureau under Muhammad Fayiq.101 In 1958, after the Cairo Conference, there was a recognition at the executive level that a more complex infrastructure was needed to support

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Egypt’s new role.102 This began with Fayiq expanding the African Affairs Bureau in the presidency and National Defence Council, and working with parties such as AAPSO, the African Association, and Egypt’s Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU). Meanwhile, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs expanded its diplomatic representation in the newly independent African states, but according to Sharawy, was focused on Arab affairs. To the African Affairs Bureau, it remained primarily a source of information through its Research Directorate.103 Another venue for information was the Institute of African Studies, formed at Cairo University in 1958, from origins in Sudanese Studies. Overall, this year saw the emergence of a more extensive and permanent institutional set-up for Egypt’s Afro-Asian solidarity policy, its elements operating at varying distances from the state.

Conclusion “The cordial reception given to us was not to any individual, but to our movement of solidarity, not only in Cairo but outside also, in towns as well as in villages … People from long distances, from the north and the south, have come to wish us success. In Egypt, at least, it has become a people’s movement. Who can resist the force of its momentum now?”104

If Bandung was the moment of emergence for Egypt’s Afro-Asian solidarity framework, then the Cairo Conference provided the opportunity for its enunciation. The Egyptian activists and intellectuals engaged in this project aimed at nothing less than a remaking of the world order, in an endeavour that sought to connect between local places across the colonised space, and overturn imperial hierarchies. They were driven by the example of Suez, and by the presence amongst the Arab delegations of strong leftist voices, together with liberation leaders who enjoyed bases in Cairo and coordinated policy with the Egyptian delegation.105 AAPSO then took its place alongside the already vibrant African Association, and there followed several AAPSO subcommittee conferences in Cairo: the Economics, Youth, and Women’s committees convened in December 1958, February 1959, and January 1961 respectively.106 By the late 1950s then, Cairo had been refashioned as an Afro-Asian hub, by facilitating interactions amongst diverse national liberation activists at home, and enhancing their mobility on multiple scales beyond. In his review of recent historical geography scholarship on solidarity, Diarmaid Kelliher argues for greater attention to structural contexts: ‘a generative conception of solidarity should not preclude attempting to understand the basis on which such relationships have been developed, and the wider contexts and structures that can both encourage and restrict the possibilities of solidarity’.107 He presents decolonisation as a broad historical framework which might be fruitfully investigated along

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these lines. This chapter offers a contribution in this direction, having presented a case study of solidarity practised in the historical context of decolonisation, and negotiated with a centralised state engaged in an anti-colonial nation-making project. First, this chapter has explored the different kinds of Afro-Asian identity being negotiated in Cairo in the 1950s, and the changing contours of the Egyptian activists and intellectuals’ specific imaginaries. In pursuing a situated meaning of AfroAsianism, the conditions of possibility of solidarity pertinent to this case become clear, which in turn sheds light on the processes that enable a particular Egyptian Afro-Asianism to emerge. In this case, the mere notion of a common enemy and a common experience of colonisation are departure points, but cannot indicate the contours that solidarity will follow: ‘Shared experiences matter in the construction of solidarity, then, yet such relationships must be actively produced, and can be developed in a multiplicity of ways’.108 Analysing the role of space in the building of Cairo’s infrastructure of solidarity is key here, since Egypt’s geography was partly a source of vulnerability, but also one of great potential. Egypt was an influential and independent Arab state, strategically located in Africa and with powerful cultural influence in Asia through its ties to the Levant and Gulf. The spatial analysis provided here highlights the ways in which Egyptians fostered translocal connections through the African Association, the Cairo Conference, and later AAPSO, giving form and substance to the notion of a shared Afro-Asian experience and hence a shared project. An important element that is often overlooked today is the promotion by Egyptian activists and leaders alike of the causes of Algeria and Palestine, making a lasting impact on anti-imperialist agendas through an Arab Afro-Asian imaginary. This chapter has further analysed the interactions between the state and popular networks of solidarity during decolonisation. In theorising race and the origins of solidarity, Juliet Hooker underscores the importance of structural conditions to mutual obligation: ‘solidarity can be derived from the spaces individuals inhabit together and the kinds of structural relations in which such shared membership enmeshes them’.109 Broadly speaking, the spaces that Afro-Asian activists inhabited together were translocal, and the structures in which they were enmeshed were colonially constituted, which significantly complicated the task of communication and forging common meeting spaces. Yet the provision of substantial state resources, together with the labour of translocal organising undertaken by activists and intellectuals, helped build up an infrastructure of solidarity in Cairo that tempered this challenge significantly. The line separating the state apparatus from the intellectuals under study here was blurred: there was a broad consensus around the state’s ideological framework of anti-imperialism, national development, and Afro-Asian solidarity. Accordingly, the great writers and artists of the day often supported state projects, even as they kept their distance institutionally.

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At the same time, the Egyptian case illustrates the limits placed upon popular solidarity by a centralised state in the context of decolonisation. In 1950s Egypt, channels for political expression and influence in the public sphere were closely monitored by the state. The input of intellectuals to state projects was subject to the intersecting tensions of domestic power struggles, and to embroilment in the inter-state rivalries of high politics. The Egyptian left was vulnerable to domestic repression, for example, which was itself contingent on regional balances of power and ideological competition with Arab communism. During AAPSO’s early years, solidarity activists confronted the influence of Sino-Soviet tensions, and instances of Egypt’s Arab and African loyalties competing, as the presence of Israel drove a wedge between many of its new connections. There was also a contradiction between the aim to disseminate a new mass political culture, and the obligation to do this by central means. State sponsorship could spell over-management, and the imposition of a conservative political line, which reined in such expansive, indeed revolutionary, visions as those of the Cairo Conference’s leftist delegates. A case in point is the state’s tradition of converting the liberation movement offices in Zamalek into embassies as soon as independence was achieved, underlining its principles of national sovereignty and mutual non-interference.110 If the state attempted to direct popular activists, and assign them particular positions, those activists also utilised those positions to make their own demands, placing pressure on the state to deliver on its pledges, and introducing new areas to state agendas on Afro-Asian cultural exchange. Close analysis of the organisational landscape under Nasser shows that intellectuals and activists of the left – in their withdrawal of support just as in their collaborations – were critical to the production of the Egyptian political order. These dynamics are further illuminated by a consideration of subsequent eras, and by paying attention to ‘both the opening up and the closing down of such spaces of solidarity’.111 In the 1970s, the reversal by Anwar Sadat of much of Nasser’s foreign policy led to the defunding of Cairo’s infrastructures of solidarity, and the shrivelling of opportunities for Afro-Asian connections. The African Association was neglected, for example, and no longer used politically. There was also personal upheaval for those involved in the solidarity project: Fayiq, for example, was jailed in 1971, and Sharawy was forced to retire in 1973.112 While the state’s about-turn may seem to be the key here, it was not simply the state’s resources that had powered the Afro-Asian hub. Sadat’s repression could not entirely overwhelm the popular networks that had been built in Cairo: from 1973 to 1980, Sharawy was able to transform the Association into a cultural and intellectual centre renamed the African Society, engaged particularly with the African Association of Political Science in Dar Es Salaam. Sharawy and his colleagues took up oppositional activism, and maintained personal and political links across Africa

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that fostered the mobility of ideas and initiatives beyond and in contestation of the newly hostile state.113 These insights underline the need to couch any study of Cold War dynamics within a larger decolonial frame, and to situate Cold War studies within the field of imperial history, given the salience of colonial legacies and neo-colonial power relations in determining the positions of members of the Afro-Asian bloc. The Egyptian case further highlights the importance of collaborative work across regional and linguistic specialisms, through ‘multiple archives, languages, and perspectives’.114 Such work brings area studies conventions into question, and allows a more precise – if painstaking – construction of a larger-scale view. Thus the Egyptian story offers global history and non-Middle East area studies scholarship a local context to the Cairo Conference and AAPSO, and some colour to an otherwise monochromatic image of its leadership. Conversely the non-Middle East scholarship offers the study of Egypt an awareness of comparable and connected cases in the Afro-Asian space, and of local contexts that shaped the decisions of Egypt’s interlocutors. This reveals the multiple ways in which Egypt contributed to trajectories of decolonisation beyond its borders, and to what is now recognised as the multipolarity of the Cold War.115 Finally, directing attention to the process of construction and projection of Egyptian Afro-Asianism, and to its contingency and fragility, counterbalances much of the conventional framing of Egypt within a dichotomy of success and failure. This binary has too often engulfed the Afro-Asian project also, deeming it to have been more ‘spirit’ than substance. Instead, examining the opportunities that solidarity gave to smaller powers, and smaller movements, helps compel a historical engagement with a world of very different imagined possibilities, and as sound a grasp of those that were realised as those that faded. Ultimately, collective efforts to forge a new Afro-Asian centre of gravity in an unequal world system took place at every level, and deserve to form a greater part of the scholarly stories of decolonisation.

Notes An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume. 1

Address by Yusuf Al-Siba‘i’, The First Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (Cairo: AAPSO, 1958), 21.

2

One important work is Tareq Ismael, The UAR in Africa: Egypt’s Policy Under Nasser (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971).

3

See James Jankowski, Nasser’s Eypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2002); Joseph Lorenz, Egypt and the Arabs: Foreign Policy and the Search

building egypt’s afro-asian hub: infrastructures of solidarity in 1950s cairo 187

for National Identity (Oxford: Westview, 1990); John Waterbury, The Egypt of Nasser and Sadat: The Political Economy of Two Regimes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). 4

Elie Podeh, The Quest for Hegemony in the Arab World: The Struggle over the Baghdad Pact (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 13; Avraham Sela, ‘Nasser’s Regional Politics: A Reassessment’, in Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Egypt, ed. Podeh and Onn Winckler (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 183.

5

Podeh, 13.

6

Christopher Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2010); Jamie Mackie, Bandung 1955: Nonalignment and AfroAsian Solidarity (Singapore: Editions Didier Millet, 2005); Derek McDougall and Antonia Finnane (eds.), Bandung 1955: Little Histories (Caulfield: Monash Asia Institute, 2010). This discrepancy is likely a legacy of the early twentieth-century foundations of different fields, and the separation of Middle East from African Studies.

7

Frank Gerits, ‘Bandung as the Call for a Better Development Project: US, British, French and Gold Coast Perceptions of the Afro-Asian Conference’, Cold War History 16:3 (2016).

8

See James Brennan, ‘Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 1953-1964’, in Lee, 173; Robert Vitalis, ‘The Midnight Ride of Kwame Nkrumah and Other Fables of Bandung (Ban-doong), Humanity 4:2 (2013): 261-288.

9

Matthew Connelly, ‘Taking off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict during the Algerian War for Independence’, The American Historical Review 105:3 (2000), 739-769.

10

See Adeed Dawisha, ‘Egypt’, in The Cold War and the Middle East, ed. Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim

11

Charles Neuhauser, China and the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization, 1957-1967 (Cambridge:

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 47. Harvard East Asian Research Center, 1968). 12

Katherin McGregor and Vanessa Hearman, ‘Challenging the Lifeline of Imperialism’, in Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures, ed. Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 164.

13

Connelly, A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and Third World Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

14

Duncan Yoon, ‘“Our Forces Have Redoubled”: World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the AfroAsian Writers’ Bureau’, Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2:2 (2015)’Laura Bier, ‘Feminism, Solidarity, and Identity in the Age of Bandung’, in Lee; Vijay Prashad, ‘Cairo’, in The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (London: New Press, 2007); McGregor and Hearman.

15

Doreen Massey, World City (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 17.

16

Ibid., 323.

17

Massey, ‘Geographies of Solidarity’, in Material Geographies: A World in the Making, ed. Nigel Clarke, Massey and Philip Sarre (London: Open University, 2008), 323.

18

Ibid., 3313.

19

See discussion in Clemens Greiner and Patrick Sakdalpolrak, ‘Translocality: Concepts, Applications, and Emerging Research Perspectives’, Geography Compass 7 (2013): 375-6.

20

David Featherstone, Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism (London: Zed Books, 2012), 18.

21

Ibid., 5.

22

‘Forthcoming Cairo Conference of African People’, 22 June 1954.

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23

Nasser’s engagements in the Arab arena are well documented, although their very early nature is less widely recognised. See Abou-El-Fadl, Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 147-77.

24

Nasser, Speech at Opening Ceremony of Bandung Conference, Nasser.org website, 19 April 1955.

25

Al-Ahram, 13 January 1954, 6. Egypt had already begun hosting the Algerian National Liberation Front in 1953: Fathi Al-Deeb, ‘Abd Al-Nasir wa Thawrat Al-Jaza’ir [Abdel Nasser and the Algerian Revolution] (Cairo: Dar Al-Mustaqbal Al- ‘Arabi, 1984).

26

Muhammad Anis, Al-Mu’tamar Al-Asyawi Al-Ifriqi [The Asian-African Conference], Ikhtarna Lak 44 (Cairo, 1958), 160.

27

See Lewis and Stolte in this volume.

28

See Fayiq, 44-5; ‘Nigerian Students for Egypt’, Summaries of World Broadcasts, BBC Written Archives (hereafter SWB) IV 420, 39 27 November 1953.

29

Fayiq, Ismael, 157-225; Joshua Nkomo, The Story of My Life (London: Methuen, 1984), 101-2.

30

Interview, Helmi Sharawy, Cairo, 30 August 2017.

31

Sharawy, Sira Misriyya Ifriqiyya [An Egyptian African Story] (Cairo: Al-Ain, 2019), 99-100.

32

Ibid., 14.

33

Ibid., 154.

34

Keith Kyle, Suez: Britain’s End of Empire in the Middle East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992), 392.

35

Fayiq, 24.

36

Marthe Moumié, Victime du Colonialisme: Mon Mari Félix Moumié (Paris: Duboiris, 2006), 100.

37

Odinga, Not Yet Uhuru (London: Heinemann, 1967), 175.

38

Moumié, 102-3.

39

Nahdat Afriqya II, December 1957, 2.

40

See Nahdat Afriqya II, December 1957, 42-46, 47-49, 54-57.

41

Ishak, ‘Introduction’, Nahdat Afriqya I, October 1957.

42

Fayiq, 35-6.

43

‘Broadcasts in Swahili’, SWB IV 481, 33, 3 July 1954.

44

See ‘Appendix: Cairo in Swahili’, i-iv, SWB IV 558.

45

‘Intishar Harakat Al-Tahrir fi-Afriqya’ [The Spread of Liberation Movements in Africa], Nahdat Afriqya, December 1957, 59-63.

46 47

Bier, 155-7. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalising California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 238.

48

For example Nasser, Falsafat Al-Thawra [The Philosophy of the Revolution] (Cairo: Madbuli, 2003, 1953), 57-61; Hussein Mu’nis’ Egypt and its Message, cited in Ismael, 106, cf. 237; and Anis, 160.

49

Abou-El-Fadl, ‘Neutralism’.

50

Gavin Brown and Helen Yaffe, ‘Practices of Solidarity: Opposing Apartheid in the Centre of London’, Antipode 46:1 (2014): 35.

51

Anis, 198.

52

Anouar Abdel Malek, Egypt, Military Society: The Army Regime, the Left, and Social Change under Nasser (New York: Random House, 1968), 116.

53

Khalid Muhyi Al-Din, Wa Al’aan Atakallam [And Now I Speak] (Cairo: Al-Ahram, 1992), 323-51.

54

Abdel Malek, 264-273.

55

Ismael and Rifat El-Said, The Communist Movement in Egypt, 1920–1988 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 82.

56

Nkomo, 78.

building egypt’s afro-asian hub: infrastructures of solidarity in 1950s cairo 189

57

Ruth Craggs, ‘Postcolonial Geographies, Decolonization, and the Performance of Geopolitics at Commonwealth Conferences’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35:1 (2014): 39-55; Naoko Shimazu, ‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955’, Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2014): 225-252.

58

See ‘The Presentation of Arab Issues at Bandung’, SWB IV 560, 23, 9 April 1955 and Ismael, 31.

59

‘An Interview with Salah Ben Yousif ’, SWB IV 561, 21-22; ‘Mohammed Khaidar’s [Khider] Broadcasts’, 22-23; ‘A Statement by ‘Allal Al-Fasi’, 23-24, 17 May 1955.

60

See Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference, Interventions 11:1 (2009): 97, 100; see also Anis, 16.

61

Final Communiqué, 102.

62

The Cairo Conference preparatory committee included twenty-one states: Afghanistan, Algeria, Burma, Cambodia, Cameroon, Ceylon, China, Jordan, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Japan, Lebanon, Libya, Mongolia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, USSR and Republic of Vietnam. It sent invitations to 55 countries. Anis, 202, 220.

63

See Anis, 200, 217.

64

‘Ma‘rad Al-Shahr’ [The Month’s Exhibition], Nahdat Afriqya II, December 1957, 37-39.

65

See Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1958), 4. The final agenda saw the addition of ‘The conditions of woman and child’.

66

Khalid Muhyi Al-Din, “‘Imperialism and Upholding the Peoples’ Rights for Independence and Sovereignty”: Report by Khaled Mohieddin, Egypt’, Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference, 81-86.

67

Resolutions, First Conference, 39,

68

Al-Ahram, 26 December 1957, 5.

69

Resolutions, 42.

70

Sharawy, ‘The Presence of African Liberation Movements in Egypt after the Bandung Conference in 1955’, in The Future We Chose: Emerging Perspectives on the Centenary of the ANC, ed. Busani Ngcaweni (Pretoria: African Institute of South Africa, 2013).

71

Resolutions, 62.

72

Sharawy, Sira, 44.

73

Areen Abd Al-Hamid, ‘Ala Hamish Al-Mu’tamar: Ahrar Asya [On the Margins of the Conference: The Free of Asia], Nahdat Afriqya III, January 1958, 9.

74

Enayat Al-Khurazati, ‘Udaba’ wa-Fananu Misr fi-Mu’tamar Al-Shu‘ub Al-Ifriqiyya Al-Asyawiyya’ [The Writers and Artists of Egypt in the Afro-Asian People’s Conference], Al-Risala Al-Gadida, February 1958.

75

‘Address by Anwar Sadat’, First Conference, 8.

76

Ishak, ‘Thamrat’, 6.

77

Al-Khurazati.

78

Taha Hussein, ‘Tanmiyat Al-Tabadul Al-Thaqafi’ [The Development of Cultural Exchange], Speech for the Egyptian Delegation, Al-Risala Al-Gadida, February 1958.

79

Al-Khuli in i

80

Liu, ‘The Eventfulness of Translation: Temporality, Difference and Competing Universals’, Translation, Spring (2014).

81

See Nahdat Afriqya III, January 1958, 34-36.

82

Ishak, ‘Thamrat’, 4.

83

Zakariyya Al-Higawi, ‘Abu Zayd Al-Hilali: ‘Arabi, Asyawi, Ifriqi’ [Abu Zayd AlHilali: Arab, Asian, African], Al-Risala Al-Gadida, January 1958, 42-45.

84

Bahig Nassar, ‘Al-Idha‘a wa-Thaqafatuna Al-Gadida’ [The Radio and Our New Culture], Al-Risala Al-Gadida, September 1958.

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85

See Abdel Malek. 256-262.

86

See Ismael, 104-107, Jacques Baulin, The Arab Role in Africa (London: Penguin, 1962), 51.

87

Sharawy, Sira, 152.

88

‘The Story of Those Who Came to Participate in the Conference and Will Not Return!’, Al-Ahram, 2 January 1958, 3.

89

See Ismay Milford, “‘Shining Vistas” and False Passports: Recipes for an Anticolonial Hub’, AfroAsian Visions 2017; Sharawy, Sira, 172.

90

Sharawy, Sira, 102.

91

Sharawy, Interview; Moumié, 103.

92

Moumié, 102-3.

93

‘Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference Delegates Start to Arrive’, Al-Ahram, 23 December 1957.

94

Anis, 225-6.

95

See Neuhauser.

96

See Abdel Malek, 232-3.

97

Sharawy, Interview.

98

Murad Ghalib, Ma‘ Abd Al-Nasir wa-l-Sadat: Mudhakirat Murad Ghalib [With Abdel Nasser and Sadat: Murad Ghalib’s Memoirs] (Cairo: Al-Ahram, 2001).

99

See Ahmad Al-Mulla, Al-Yasar Al-Misri bayn ‘Abd Al-Nasir wa-l-Sadat: Majallat AlTali’a, 1965–1977 [The Egyptian Left between Abdel Nasser and Sadat: Al-Tali’a, 1965–1977] (Cairo: Dar Al-Kutub, 2014).

100

Abdel Malek, 232.

101

Sharawy, Sira, 121-122. Cf. Ismael, 35 and Baulin, 47, who attribute more weight to the Foreign Ministry.

102

See Sharawy, Sira, 136.

103

Ibid., 146-8.

104

Rameshwari Nehru, First Conference, 74.

105

Abdel Malek, 231.

106

Prashad, 57.

107

Diarmaid Kelliher, ‘Historicising Geographies of Solidarity’, Geography Compass 12:9 (2018), 8.

108

Kelliher, 5.

109

Juliet Hooker, Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 38

110

Sharawy, Interview.

111

Kelliher, 4.

112

See Sharawy, Sira, 247-9.

113

Ibid., 249-406.

114

Afro-Asian Networks Collective, ‘Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, Radical History Review 131 (2018): 179.

115

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

CHAPTER 9

Soviet “Afro-Asians” in UNESCO: Reorienting World History and Humanism Hanna Jansen

Abstract This chapter highlights the activities of Soviet Central Asian intellectuals within the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Countries (SKSSAA) at UNESCO. It argues that the SKSSAA activated the UNESCO East-West Project (1956-1966) with the specific aim to advance a historical agenda that posited the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity at its center. When looking at the UNESCO Peoples’ History of Asia project, this approach to history resonated with lived experiences of complex solidarities that often transcended the boundaries of states. While there were political reasons for the disintegration of the UNESCO History of Asia Project, such as the Sino-Indian border war, the UNESCO regimes of professionalization seriously undermined the imaginary landscapes that the Peoples’ History of Asia project sought to sustain.

Keywords: Afro-Asianism, UNESCO, historiography, Soviet intellectuals, Central Asia

Narratives of African and Asian unity figured prominently in the agendas of national liberation pursued by decolonizing countries in the first half of the twentieth century. As historians have pointed out, across Afro-Asia, anti-colonial elites formulated agendas of modern statehood that shared a remarkable dualism. Analyzing the agenda of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Movement (AAPSM) in the early 1960s, historians observed a shift from a “universalistic” ideal of African and Asian cultural liberation and modernization towards a more “particularistic” agenda of anti-colonial struggle.1 This they generally regarded as the logical consequence of inter-state conflict, notably the Indo-Chinese border war of 1962.2 Shifting focus, this chapter traces the demise of a universalistic agenda of AfroAsian Solidarity to the non-state realm of cultural and intellectual activism, and to contesting visions of world history and humanism in particular. Specifically, this chapter traces the activities of Central Asian intellectuals on the Soviet Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Countries (Sovietskii Komitet Solidarnost’ Strany Azii i Afriki – SKSSAA), showing how these committed “Afro-Asians” came to activate the UNESCO institutional infrastructure in support

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of a humanist agenda that stressed the cultural-historical agency and unity of African and Asian peoples. In 1956, the UNESCO General Conference adopted a Major Program for the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Values, at the initiative of India and Japan. Historians have investigated UNESCO’s role as a space for internationalist and anti-colonial activism.3 But its function as a space where the agenda of the budding AAPSM could be negotiated has yet to be seriously addressed. Similarly, there has been little attention for the role played by Soviet (or socialist) activists in this constellation, and virtually none for Soviet “Asians.”4 This chapter fills this gap. Focusing on Soviet Central Asian intermediaries, it suggests that in the mid-1950s key actors within the SKSSAA advocated a “universalistic” program of Afro-Asian cultural emancipation and reform at UNESCO, the intellectual roots of which could be traced back to the radical visions circulating within radical anti-colonial and modernist movements of the interwar period. From the moment of the SKSSAA’s inception at the Asian Conference for the Relaxation of International Tensions (CRIT) in Delhi, 6–10 April 1955, various Soviet activists framed their anti-imperial commitments in terms of a radical program of cultural emancipation and reform that can be traced back to the Asian Relations Conference of 1947.5 While these Central Asian intellectuals acted as representatives of the Soviet state (whether on the All-Union level or on the level of the particular Republics) this chapter suggests they should be regarded as representatives of a transnational cultural heritage too. The personal biographies of various Central Asian intellectuals on the SKSSAA indicate that the Afro-Asian Solidarity agenda went beyond the confines of inter-state diplomacy.6 These people were state functionaries as well as writers and they sought not just to emancipate their particular heritages, but also to harmonize them, thus to reform world history and culture at large. At international meetings and conferences such as the Conference for African and Asian Writers in Tashkent (1958), these “Afro-Asian” intellectuals and scholars (writers, poets, academics trained in the humanities) acted not just as spokespersons for particular states, but also for a one-world cultural heritage or humanism that acknowledged the cultural contributions of the peoples of Afro-Asia as a whole. In the USSR, this shift manifested itself in a post-Stalinist agenda of historical revisionism that was controversial both in Moscow and in the wider socialist camp.7 With Cold War tensions intensifying, UNESCO’s bureaucratic regime grew increasingly hostile to the universalistic message of Afro-Asian cultural reform. Responses to the 1958 Tashkent Conference and the UNESCO project for the “History of Asia” (1957–1962) indicate that observers failed to recognize the complex internationalism of the “Afro-Asian” activists. Trends in the human sciences incentivized an approach to world culture and history as compartmentalized into particular national heritages.8 While an extensive analysis of these marginalizing trends goes beyond the scope of this chapter, they do suggest that, at

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the level of international organizations, new norms of professionalism restricted the space for an ambiguous, self-reflexive politics of Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity in UNESCO.

Soviet Academic Afro-Asianism: Establishing a Shared Heritage Agreement to set up the SKSAA was reached at the Conference of Asian Countries for the Relaxation of International Tensions (CRIT), 6–10 April 1955, New Delhi.9 It aimed to participate in the budding AAPSM, which would be institutionalized as the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization in Cairo, December 1957.10 That the Soviet Union was allowed to take part in AAPSM events was not self-evident. Under Stalinist Russo-centric state politics, foreign observers had come to see Soviet Central Asians as representatives of the “European” Soviet state. As a consequence, Soviet Central Asians had not been invited to the first inter-governmental Conference for African and Asian Countries held in Bandung, 18–25 April 1955.11 However, the Soviet Union’s adoption of Nehru’s Five Principles in February 1955 offered new opportunities for cultural and scholarly engagement. After Stalin’s death, Soviet cultural figures and intellectuals petitioned international organizations for “soft” diplomacy beyond ideological blocs.12 The new Soviet Party leader Nikita Khrushchev aimed to establish friendly relations with the decolonizing world. Central Asian intermediaries showcased their heritages as proof of Soviet anti-colonial commitments, as well as the USSR’s successes in modern state-building.13 As a consequence, the visibility of the Central Asian Republics in Soviet foreign affairs increased. Crucially, in the non-state realm of culture and scholarship, Central Asians brought their own, distinct Asian heritages, which granted them access to Afro-Asian arenas. Within the Presidium of the SKSSAA, members of the cultural and scholarly elites of the Soviet “Asian” Republics (the Caucasus and Central Asia) were well represented. Mirzo Tursunzoda, Tajik poet and member of the Soviet Partisans for Peace delegation had helped organize the CRIT in Delhi, and he was installed as the SKSSAA’s president.14 Still, at the first Presidium meeting in November 1956 there was some concern among members that the profile of the Soviet Solidarity Committee’s wasn’t recognizably “Asian.”15 Turning this into an argument advancing the greater international visibility of the Soviet “Eastern” Republics, they argued that in the future international conferences and meetings should be organized in the Central Asian Republics too. The official task of the Solidarity Committee was to encourage economic, scientific and cultural cooperation between the peoples of Asia and Africa.16 One upcoming event that attracted great attention during the meeting was the

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Conference for Asian Writers, to be held in New Delhi in December 1956. The idea for the conference had been proposed at the CRIT, and in July of the previous summer, delegations from Burma, China, Korea, Nepal and Vietnam had already congregated in New Delhi for a preparatory meeting, outlining the evaluation of “our respective literary and cultural heritages” as one of its primary aims. The conference was to generate an “atmosphere of tolerance and friendship” so that “new creative works [could] be provided and shared among the various nations … struggling towards a new future of peace and freedom.”17 Despite the Committee’s declared focus on international cultural exchanges, various SKSSAA-members suggested that the Committee’s activities should also include an academic agenda that aimed to universalize world culture through the emancipation and reform of the heritages of non-Western countries. As Mirzo Tursunzoda suggested, the agenda of Afro-Asian Solidarity was strongly entangled with an agenda of culture building and reform: “countries want to establish their cultural traditions, elevate their economy and culture.”18 Alexander Guber agreed. To his mind, the agenda of Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity meant not just to support “the resurrection of a downtrodden culture,” but to take active steps towards the creation of a “new culture.”19 That agendas of cultural heritage emancipation and reform were closely related was also suggested by Jawaharlal Nehru in The Discovery of India (1946). In the book, Nehru advanced the idea that a science of cultural heritage or “nationalism” could serve as an antidote to religious communalism, Muslim-Hindu oppositions in particular, helping to build a shared Indian culture. Claiming that India “needs to get rid of the exclusiveness in thought and social habit,” he tabled the thought that a cultural history emphasizing the shared elements in the past of different communities and groups would help to bridge cultural differences and correct the “idea of ceremonial purity [that] has erected barriers against social intercourse and narrowed the sphere of social action.”20 A few years before, Soviet thinkers would have discarded Nehru’s views as bourgeois nationalism. But the cultural and intellectual thaw of the mid-1950s had opened new opportunities for Soviet intellectuals to widen the notion of historical materialism.21 In June 1955, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru made his first post-independence diplomatic visit to the Soviet Union. That same month leading Soviet Indologists at the Institute for Oriental Studies (Institut Vostokovedenie Akademii Nauk–IVAN) in Moscow, published a review of Nehru’s Discovery of India in Kommunist, the organ of the All-Union Communist Party.22 Historically, strong links existed between the Soviet Academy of Sciences and Indian scholarly institutions. Soviet scientists regularly attended the yearly Indian Science Congress. One attendee was Alexander Guber, who was officially installed as director of the IVAN in August 1955. Under his directorship, the IVAN’s research agenda was geared towards

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the academic SKSSAA agenda. Contemporaries framed this reorganization, in particular the rehabilitation of literature studies, as a step towards destalinization.23 Rather than criticizing Nehru’s nationalism, the Soviet Indologists embraced it, presenting it as the seed of international solidarity: “[t]hese sections… characterize the author as a leading international activist and humanist, as a passionate supporter for the idea of solidarity between peoples.” Framing Nehru’s nationalism as a step towards global citizenship, they quoted the Prime Minister’s declaration that pride in the Indian cultural heritage would “open their [Indian citizens – HJ] minds and hearts to other peoples and other nations, and become citizens of this wide and fascinating world.”24 In fact, Soviet academics viewed Nehru’s emancipatory heritage agenda in terms of a universalistic humanism, seeing no contradiction between cultural nationalism and world unity or solidarity. The review declared that Communist Parties were not at all “alienated from their national traditions.”25 Indeed, during the thaw, Soviet academics activated the study of cultural heritage for the construction of new solidarities between non-state communities and groups.26

Activating UNESCO: Situating “Afro-Asia” in World History At the November 1956 meeting of the Soviet Solidarity Committee, Alexander Guber pointed at the potential value of UNESCO as an arena where an agenda of Afro-Asian Solidarity could be advanced. In his view it was the only international organization thus far to have developed concrete measures towards cultural-historical reform or, in his words, “national education and Enlightenment.”27 Soviet support for the Afro-Asian Solidarity agenda within UNESCO would allow the USSR to showcase its anti-Eurocentric commitments. As Guber had it, UNESCO suffered from both an “undemocratic” and Eurocentric worldview, and this had become painfully apparent that previous spring when European member-states greatly outnumbered the Asian member-states at the UNESCO Regional Conference in Tokyo.28 Guber was the right person to point the SKSSAA in the direction of UNESCO. He headed the eastern section of the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (Vsesoiuznoe Obshchestvo Kul’turnoi Sviazi s zagranitsei – VOKS) and participated in UNESCO conferences abroad.29 When the USSR acquired UNESCO membership in 1954, Guber was installed as a member of the Soviet editorial committee of The Intellectual and Scientific History of Mankind.30 The History of Mankind project was the brainchild of Joseph Needham, a Cambridgeeducated scientist with strong connections among Chinese Revolutionary circles.31 In 1948 Julian Huxley, UNESCO Director General at the time, managed to get his plans through the UNESCO General Conference just before being forced to step down as Director General.32 Huxley and Needham were old friends and committed

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universalists, both saw cultural history as a field where “a lost sense of common humanity after 1945” could be restored.33 An explicit aim of the History of Mankind project thus was to conceptualize an integrated history of mankind that highlighted the patterns interlinking the world’s different peoples.34 Also the project’s supervisor Ralph Turner suggested, “…a conception of mankind as a unity, or as working together in community-integration through time, is a necessary intellectual achievement for the mid-twentieth century.”35 From the beginning the project was criticized as Eurocentric. And with good reason – by 1951 Syria and India were still the only Eastern countries represented on the History of Mankind’s International Commission.36 At a roundtable discussion on The Concept of Man and the Philosophy of Education in East and West organized in New Delhi that same year, Asian representatives argued that the Western humanities failed to sufficiently acknowledge the contribution of the East to world history and civilization.37 As Jean Filliozat, Secretary General of the International Union of Orientalists remembered, the roundtable resolved to prioritize research of the East: it was concluded that a “new universal humanism” could only be created with sufficient knowledge on the whole “ensemble of human cultures,” also incorporating “elements borrowed from the various cultures of Occident and Orient”.38 In light of such critiques the roundtable resolved to temporarily postpone UNESCO initiatives to construct a new universal humanism. In Filliozat’s view, the roundtable constituted a pivotal moment in UNESCO’s history as it helped kickstart a new UNESCO program focused on the “Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Values” (East-West Project for short).39 India had played a central role in this reorientation. According to the Indian UNESCO Commission the East-West Project project had been inspired by “ideas expressed, from time to time, by the Minister of Education, the Prime Minister and the VicePresident of India” – Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan.40 For Maulana Azad, who also acted as president of the UNESCO Commission, the East-West Project represented “an Asian and African point of view on the programs and plans of UNESCO,” promising to overcome UNESCO’s Eurocentric bias.41 To his mind, it was inspired by an agenda of Afro-Asian Solidarity – the “spirit generated by the Bandung Conference” – which he regarded as both particularistic and universalistic. Particularistic in the sense that it involved opening up African and Asian heritages: a specific task was to make heard the “voice of African and Asian countries” in the fields of “education, science and culture”.42 Universalistic in the sense that it sought to highlight the role of the East in world processes: UNESCO should help the “under-developed or undeveloped areas of the world to catch up with the more advanced countries” and give greater attention to “the growing solidarity of these [Asian and African – HJ] countries in world affairs.”43 Rather than seeking to establish a united world culture, however, Azad proposed

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that international integration should evolve gradually: “A good deal of conflict and misunderstanding between the East and the West can be removed if all that is best in these areas is made known to one another on a sufficiently large scale.”44

A Peoples’ Heritage for Asia: Echoes of the Asian Relations Conference The UNESCO East-West Project drew connections between various places and historical arenas where conceptions of (Afro-)Asian unity had been negotiated. Azad’s plea to adjust world history with an eye to the “growing solidarity” between African and Asian countries can be situated in a longer tradition of inter-Asian debates regarding the past and future of the continent. In particular, personal linkages suggest that Azad’s agenda can be situated in the legacy of the Asian Relations Conference (ARC) of 1947, and the regional visions that shaped its agenda.45 In 1957, UNESCO received a proposal from the Indian Council for World Affairs (ICWA), to set up an international research project entitled The History of Asia within the confines of the East-West Project. Also this project could be traced directly to the ARC as the ICWA had functioned as organizing body for the ARC in Delhi. The ARC had brought together various Indian and Soviet representatives in UNESCO and the AAPSM. Both Maulana Azad and Evgeny Zhukov, heads of the Indian and Soviet Commissions for Cooperation with UNESCO respectively, had participated in the Asian Relations Conference. Mirzo Tursunzoda, head of the Soviet Solidarity Committee had been installed as one of the members of the Provisional General Council of the Asian Relations Organization (ARO) the Conference had resolved to set up. The ARO had provided a connection between the Soviet Tajik poet and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, who had been installed as head of the ARO Provisional Council. The aim of the History of Asia project was to bring together an international group of scholars to revise and compose a new “standard history of Asia.”46 On the one hand, the project proposal reproduced traditional Asianist tropes, speaking of the “resurgence of Asia” as one of the “outstanding development[s]” of the twentieth century.47 On the other hand, it approached culture as universalistic and integrated, seeking to highlight the “cultural contributions of Asia to human [Italics mine – HJ] civilization.” For the ICWA the research project sought to overcome both nationalist and East-West cleavages: “It is believed that such an approach would adequately guard against any nationalist bias of anti-west sentiments.”48 Despite its Asian orientation, the History of Asia project showed strong affinity with the universalistic spirit animating Huxley’s History of Mankind project. The ICWA proposed that UNESCO’s experience in preparing the History of Mankind project “might be drawn upon and adopted with suitable modifications.”49

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The projects were similar in the way they were set up. Overlap also existed on the level of personalities. For instance, the British historian Arnold Toynbee had also acted as a consultant for the History of Mankind project and was one of the members of the History of Asia editorial board. Another member was Indian historian and diplomat Kavalam Madhava Panikkar, who also acted as the Indian representative of the UNESCO East-West Project Advisory Board and as a member of the editorial board of the sixth volume of the History of Mankind project.50 Key to the “universalistic” spirit of the History of Asia project was its non-state “peoples’” focus. In contrast to various interwar Asianisms, not the Asian continent or its constituent nations were taken as the force moving history forward, but the cultural and intellectual activities of non-state communities and groups.51 As the ICWA emphasized, the aim of the project was to draw attention to the “historical evolution and cultural contribution of the peoples of Asia to world civilization” and to foresee in “the growing demand both from the peoples of Asia and from the peoples of Europe and America” for a “standard study”, or a unified historical narrative.52 In this constellation the Asian continent as a political and geographical unit provided a window on the interconnections and links between different societies and groups, illuminating a shared heritage of interlocking cultural and intellectual patterns that stretched beyond national or regional boundaries. This “peoples’” orientation diversified Western civilization, promising to universalize Western citizenship models. As Nehru stated in The Discovery of India, Western intellectuals imagined themselves as the “vanguard of an advancing civilization,” while living an “artificial life which has no living contacts with the culture of the East or of the West.”53 This inspired both Indian and Soviet representatives participating in the AAPSM and UNESCO to activate cultural traditions as a source of cultural transformation and unity. In Kavalam Panikkar’s historical writing, ordinary people and groups were presented as cultural-historical agents. His Asia and Western Dominance (1953) argued that the heritages of “common people” served to unite, not to divide, world culture, as these groups shared a “substratum of values” that to a large extent “accounted for … Asian unity.”54 Like Nehru in The Discovery of India, Panikkar presented religions as an obstruction of Asian unity, in particular religions such as Hinduism and Confucianism, which he believed were “peculiar to their countries of origin and mutually incompatible.”55 At the ARC, Nehru’s opening speech had talked of a “crisis” in “world history” arguing that formerly colonized Asia must take up its place in world affairs.56 The ARC Roundtable on Cultural Problems concluded that“[h]istory needed to be rewritten” so that not the “individual national culture” but the “unity of all cultures” was emphasized: “The essence of culture lay in the fact of our realizing the oneness of mankind.”57 As the History of Asia project demonstrates, the UNESCO East-West Project provided the space to follow up on this. In the USSR, meanwhile, measures

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were taken to activate the Soviet Academy of Sciences in support of this revisionist agenda. In February 1956 Bobodzhan Gafurovich Gafurov, First Secretary of the Tajik Republic and Tajik historian, proposed to reorganize the IVAN as a complex research institution with an international focus: aimed to support research institutions in decolonizing countries with knowledge and expertise. Soon after, Gafurov was established as the IVAN’s director, replacing Alexander Guber. His instalment signaled that in the USSR people from formerly colonized countries could take on leadership positions among “Europeans” too.58 The IVAN explicitly presented itself as heir to interwar Russian Oriental Studies, which was known for a cultural-historical, anti-Eurocentric orientation. Changes in the IVAN’s staff embodied such continuities: in 1957 for instance Yurii Roerikh was installed as head of the new Sector for Ancient Cultural and Spiritual traditions at the India Department. He was the son of famous painter and émigré orientalist Nikolai Roerikh, who in the interwar years been a close friend of Indian writer and Nobel-prize winner Rabindranath Tagore with whom he felt intellectual kinship.59 In his role as director, Gafurov became the president of the Soviet EastWest Committee that was set up under the wings of the Soviet Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO. Gafurov’s personal network connected him with key figures on the SKSSAA and the History of Asia editorial board. He was an old friend of Tursunzoda, the president of the Soviet Solidarity Committee. Upon his arrival in Moscow, Gafurov was installed as vice-president of the SKSSAA. Also Igor Mikhailovich Reisner, the Soviet representative on the History of Asia editorial board was an old acquaintance; he had acted as Gafurov’s academic supervisor in the early 1940s and was a member of the IVAN staff.60 Also the historical narratives published under Gafurov’s name showed continuities with both UNESCO’s History of Mankind and the History of Asia projects. In 1945 already, Gafurov opened up the Tajik cultural and intellectual heritage, presenting this as a means to universalize Western historical narrative: “Ours is a responsible task: to open up the rich past of the Tajik people; a ‘people without history’ in the approach of bourgeois historians.”61 In Gafurov’s History of the Tajik People (1949), the first officially endorsed history of the Tajik Republic, Central Asian history was marked by the existence of cultural and intellectual affinities across ethnic, political and religious divisions.62 Also other work focused on the non-state cultural heritage of the Tajik people, emphasizing moments of cultural and intellectual synthesis brought on by encounters of non-state actors: wandering Sufis, Muslim court poets, and tradesmen.63 As such, inter-Asian unity was captured by a language of shared literary traditions and humanism rather than historical materialism alone.

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The Tashkent Writers Conference: situating “Afro-Asia” in World Humanism In the History of the Tajik People, the History of Mankind, and The History of Asia, cultural heritage – literature in particular – served as a source of unity bridging the differences between individuals and groups. Historians have productively examined how, after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev’s diplomatic “Break to the East” affected Moscow-periphery dynamics, showing how Central Asian’s intermediaries adopted their new political leverage, negotiating greater recognition and better resources for their respective Republics.64 Soviet Asian intermediaries were expected to showcase successes of the Soviet “model” abroad, and to craft a favorable image of the USSR in decolonizing countries. Indeed, at the November 1956 meeting of the Soviet Solidarity Committee Presidium, Anatoly Sofronov urged Central Asian representatives “… to tell and most of all showcase the countries of Asia the economic growth of our national Republics, of Uzbekistan and others.”65 SKSSAA discussions illustrate how Asian participants turned the agenda of Afro-Asian Solidarity to the advantage of projects closer to home.66 Placing not Moscow but the “Asian” periphery central stage, Mukhtar Auezov, the enigmatic Kazakh playwright suggested that in the future Afro-Asian Solidarity Conferences could be held in Central Asia. Mirzo Tursunzoda, the SKSSAA’s Tajik president capitalized on Afro-Asian Solidarity to seek greater visibility for the Soviet Republics, emphasizing that Central Asian cultural and intellectual figures should “participate on the pages of our printed press and the radio.”67 He emphasized the value of Central Asian cultural knowledge, suggesting that the SKSSAA needed a vice-president that possessed a good working knowledge of oriental languages. His comment that the present situation (with the “European» Anatoly Sofronov as vice-president) was “satisfactory for now” turned traditional state-periphery relations on its head, underscoring that within the SKSSAA the leading role was played by Soviet Asians.68 Many Soviet Solidarity Committee members were intellectuals, artists and writers. Mirzo Tursunzoda, for instance, was both a prize-winning poet and president of the Tajik Writers Union. While in the statements above the SKSSAA members acted as spokespersons for the Soviet Republics, their literary profiles also suggest that they acted as spokespersons for the Soviet periphery on a different scale: the non-state realm of cultural and especially literary entanglement; a global Peoples’ Republic of Letters.69 Literature played a central role in the self-understanding and self-representation of many of the SKSSAA-members who invested it with integrative, internationalizing potential. For Mukhtar Auezov, for instance, literature served as a reminder of internationalism, and he insisted that the Central Asian public should be educated in its spirit: “the work of writers from Indonesia and India should be popularized among us too.”70 During the SKSSAA meeting in

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November 1956, he emphasized the added value of literature: writers get “beyond other established connections” and “tell you much about every country.”71 Perhaps it was this interconnecting ability that Tursunzoda hoped to ignite when he urged the SKSSAA members to write their publications in an “artistic literary style.”72 For people like Tursunzoda and Gafurov, the cultural agenda of Afro-Asian Solidarity resonated with very ‘close-to-home’ experiences; with literature providing an important source of unity in a diverse society. There were clear commonalities between the biographies of the two SKSSAA members. Both were born in the decade preceding the Bolshevik Revolution and spent most of their childhood years in rural villages that were situated in multi-lingual and ethnically mixed regions (Gafurov’s mother was Uzbek, his father Tajik). Both were groomed for a career in “enlightenment” and militant atheism in the 1920s. Both moved to the Tajik capital Stalinabad in 1930–1931, shortly after the Tajik SSR had been established. Upon arrival in the new Republic, both took up jobs as journalists writing for Red Tajikistan, the organ of the Tajik Communist Party. When they began their careers in the Tajik state and Communist Party organs, both had spent most of their formative years freely traversing the landmass that would from that time on be imagined as separated by the Uzbek and Tajiks Union Republics. Both seem to have come from poor but “cultured” families and were versed in Islam.73 Though they wrote in different genres, Tursunzoda and Gafurov wrote about similar themes. In both of their oeuvres literature constituted a source of popular unity.74 Tursunzoda’s career in poetry started around the time of the Asian Relations Conference, when he published his first collection of poems on India. His poems of the 1940s–1960s had titles such as “My Sister, Africa,” and contemporaries remember him as a prominent internationalist. In Soviet Central Asia, historical literatures were closely associated with Islam and in Gafurov’s historical writings of the 1930s and 1940s, Islamic literature, Sufi poetry in particular brought people together.75 Rearticulating the ideas of pre-Revolutionary orientalists, Gafurov emphasized that the writings of Sufi poets of the 11th and 12th centuries reproduced “free-thinking and humanitarian ideas” and served to unify elements of different spiritual and philosophical traditions: neo-Platonism, Manichaeism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Nestorianism, Sufism, and Ismailism.76 In Gafurov’s approach of history then, Islamic culture and literature was essential to the understanding of Tajik history as intertwined with that of other peoples and communities in the region. For people such as Tursunzoda and Gafurov, thus, “international solidarity” in the sense of cultural or spiritual entanglements across material divisions was a lived, everyday local reality. The literary element in their biographies allowed them to present themselves not just as citizens of particular Soviet Republics, but as representatives of a larger Soviet and Central Asian heritage within the global Republic of Letters.

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The AAPSM framework allowed Soviet Central Asian intellectuals to propagate the emancipation of local cultural and spiritual traditions as part of new literary trends and practices.77 This reformative aim was central to the agenda of the Conference for African and Asian Writers that the Soviet Union hosted in October 1958 in Tashkent, the capital of Soviet Uzbekistan.78 The conference welcomed over 200 people and UNESCO was one of its major sponsors. Its setup in the capital of the Uzbek Republic served to peripheralize Moscow, and flagged the active role of Afro-Asia as a space of cultural internationalism and reform. At the same time, the conference’s location was meant to signal Moscow’s anti-colonial credentials given Tashkent’s reputation as a modern Soviet city and as the first Bolshevik stronghold in the former Emirate of Bukhara.79 In his opening speech Nuriddin Mukhitdinnov, former First Secretary of Soviet Uzbekistan and member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of All-Union Communist Party, Mukhitdinnov described the writers from Africa and Asia as contributors to world civilization: “The peoples of the East played and continue to play a very important part in world history. Like the peoples of Europe and the other continents, they have for ages been creating invaluable material and spiritual wealth, which has become part of the treasure-store [sic] of world culture and civilization.”80 While highlighting the centrality of Afro-Asia in world culture, he encouraged the conference’s participants to come together and actively engage with one another to “still better determine your place in the common struggle of all progressive mankind for peace.”81 In the minds of the African and Asian leaders supporting the conference, the UNESCO agenda of cultural-historical emancipation was closely connected to the unifying aims of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference. Burma, as well as India, enthusiastically supported the agenda of cultural historical reform as an asset to contemporary agendas of Afro-Asian cultural exchange.82 U Nu, the Burmese Prime Minister, was unable to attend the conference but he still sent an enthusiastic message of greetings describing the current generation of African and Asian writers as carriers of a long, shared cultural heritage and harbingers of cultural reform. “Generally speaking, the peoples of Asia and Africa have comparatively recently shaken off their lethargic inertia in the intellectual, esthetic and spiritual sphere – an inertia forced on them in many cases by alien influences – and have either embarked on new and wonderful adventures of the mind and the spirit, or re-awakened to and recovered their ancient heritage, which in turn is inspiring them to produce a coherent and significant fusion of the old and the new.”83 While U Nu’s message of greetings was infused with Asianist rhetoric, his representation of Asia as stifled by the yoke of colonization was not intended as a plea to return towards a romanticized past. U Nu approached the conference as a chance for African and Asian writers to collectively negotiate a shared cultural heritage and position in world civilization.84 Similarly, in his speech Mukhitdinnov framed

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the conference as a humanist moment; addressing the audience as a community of people who had “chosen to devote [their] lives to the lofty ideas of humanism.”85 In the sphere of culture, Central Asian activists could present themselves as modern actors in their own right, and Tashkent as a center of international engagement and renewal, a progressive Afro-Asian “humanism,” rather than only a Soviet “model” for decolonizing countries.

Regionalism in UNESCO: Sidelining “Afro-Asia” Inter-Asian conflict may have had an effect on the AAPSM agenda. But intellectual trends and currents also obstructed the inter-Asian initiatives to revise world history in the name of Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity. Activists within the larger AAPSM contested the thought that culture had a role to play in the unification of peoples and groups. The People’s Republic of China was critical, with Chairman Mao rejecting the narrative of the “spiritual unity” of peoples as contradictory to socialism, and a continuation of imperialist practices.86 Chinese critiques of Soviet revisionism rose throughout the late 1950s and in 1958 the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent received strong-worded criticism in the Chinese literary press.87 At the Afro Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) in Cairo, December 1957, African delegates criticized Indian rallying calls for cultural reform, suggesting that more immediate measures were needed if independence from colonial rule were to be achieved.88 Also Western observers criticized the integrative, non-state dimension of the Afro-Asian Solidarity project. In a report on the Afro-Asian Writers Conference that clearly reflected Cold War polarizations, political scientist G.A. von Stackelberg discredited the event as a stage for Soviet propaganda; an opportunity for the USSR to influence the “next conference of Afro-Asian states.”89 Von Stackelburg emphasized that certain delegates disagreed with the “concept of the unity and solidarity of writers,” turning this into a defence of liberal individualism: “a writer is essentially an individual and that this individuality is what makes his work valuable.”90 Moreover, Von Stackelburg’s assessment favored a particularistic interpretation of anti-Western activism over the conference’s transnational unifying aims. Quoting the Indian writer K.L. Shridharani who labeled the conference as “a challenge for Indian writers,” he seemed to suggest that the conference’s efforts were obstructive of other (more “realistic”) agendas of anti-colonial nation-building.91 Within UNESCO anti-colonial activism was generally perceived through the prism of the particularistic nation-state. As Poul Duedahl has also demonstrated, the intellectual fashion in UNESCO worked against the one-world humanism that had inspired the History of Mankind.92 UNESCO functionaries had criticized Julian

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Huxley’s universalistic aspirations from the very beginning. In contrast to Asian representatives such as Maulana Azad who had lobbied for a diversified humanism, various Western representatives expressed skepticism about Huxley’s hopes that a one-world humanism or cultural and scientific history could be attained at all.93 In this intellectual climate, Gafurov’s attempts to orient UNESCO programs towards the creation of a shared “new” cultural humanism that included the heritages of African and Asian peoples did not prove easy.94 In 1958, around the time of the Afro-Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent, Gafurov wrote to several UNESCO departments, trying to open up space to disseminate the achievements of the conference. To support the mutual understanding between peoples, Gafurov’s proposed, UNESCO should pay greater attention to the works of modern Asian and African writers and the way these contributed to the creation of modern Eastern literature: it “would hardly be right or expedient to concern ourselves solely with the past, leaving all the cultural values that are created in the present and in different countries out of consideration.”95 In his proposal Gafurov grouped Soviet Central Asian writers such as Mukhtar Auezov together with the “many-numbered peoples of the Orient” – thus situating Soviet Central Asians in a wider, imagined transnational East that could not be reduced to a single state or country.96 The poetics of Gafurov’s phraseology was lost on the UNESCO staff who failed to recognize the transnational aims of the Tashkent conference. One UNESCO functionary rejected the proposal, explaining that the organization could not afford to take on tasks for “the dissemination of national cultures.”97 Another responded to Gafurov’s query by redirecting him to national organizations such as the British Council or l’Alliance français.98 Such responses suggest that the UNESCO bureaucratic regime failed to recognize the unifying spirit animating the Afro-Asian Solidarity project. Regional imaginaries added to Gafurov’s difficulties in navigating the UNESCO institutional landscape.99 Crucially, in the East West Project, the Asian continent functioned as a window on broader, potentially all-world, processes of human development and integration. This allowed historians to approach peoples as cultural and historical agents. In the ICWA plans for the History of Asia, Asian peoples were presented as “contributing” to a wider, integrated world history and culture. In the late 1950s, however, this understanding competed with an approach to the world as a series of fixed, bounded entities. This latter approach was manifest in the way Luther Evans, UNESCO Director General from 1953 onwards, described the UNESCO East-West Project in the Delhibased journal March of India in 1957. To Evans’ mind, the East-West Project had “two civilizations” as its focus: Asia, which he claimed could also be defined as the “East” or “Orient” on the one hand, and “the West” on the other hand, which he believed encompassed “all the cultures of Europe and the Americas.”100 While

soviet “afro-asians” in unesco: reorienting world history and humanism 205

Evans claimed that “UNESCO is, and has been for years, well aware that ‘cultural regions’ are a relative concept,” he also underscored Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s statement that “[t]he world is unified physically but is mentally divided.”101 In Evans’s description thus, Asia functioned as a culturally bounded unit; integrated with the wider world on the material level but spiritually distinct. In the next years, changes in India’s political climate came to affect the agenda of the East-West Project. Azad passed away in 1958 and by the late 1950s Nehru’s influence in the Indian Congress Party began to wane. Rightwing elements capitalized on India’s political difficulties, including the mounting tensions between China and India that culminated in the Chinese Indian border war of 1962.102 Against this political backdrop, the Indian UNESCO Commission came to support a new Asian history project, one that no longer reflected the ICWA’s intentions to explicitly uncover the patterns that transcended the boundaries between peoples, states and regions. In August 1960, India’s UNESCO Commission informed the East-West Secretariat that the plans for the History of Asia were being reconsidered. In December 1961, an Asian History Congress convened in New Delhi. When comparing the work plan of the History of Asia book project and that of the Asian History Congress a few differences stand out. First, the Asian History Congress was organized not by the ICWA but by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR). The ICCR was officially set up in 1950, on the initiative of Azad, and with the aim to establish closer cultural relations between India and neighbouring countries in the East and West.103 In his inaugural address of 9 April 1950, Azad had hinted that initially, the ICCR’s aim had been to establish closer relations between India and its neighbouring countries in Asia and the Middle East only. While Azad had welcomed the “removal of all the territorial and geographical limitations on the activities of the council” the shift from the ICWA to the ICCR mirrored the trend in UNESCO to move away from Huxley’s “one-worldism” and to reaffirm the boundaries between regions and countries. Moreover, in their aims for the Asian History Congress, the ICCR was less radically integrationist than the ICWA had been. Rather than taking the one-world context of history as a given, the ICCR hoped that the Congress “might stimulate an interest in comparative studies.” This suggests that in this new research project the History of Asia was imagined as the history of separate communities and groups with few fuzzy edges connecting them.104

Conclusion As this chapter has shown, within UNESCO, Afro-Asian activists helped initiate the East-West Program that aimed to universalize world culture by highlighting the role of African and Asian peoples. In the period of “destalinization” Soviet Central

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Asians activated UNESCO and other international cultural organizations for a complex agenda of cultural emancipation and reform. While Soviet “Afro-Asians” have generally been regarded as representatives of the Soviet state, their profiles as intellectuals, writers and cultural historians allowed them to present themselves as Asian representatives of the global Republic of Letters – as working towards a new, anti-Eurocentric understanding of history and humanism. The “East-West” Program produced an imaginary landscape that united the life-worlds of peoples and groups across and beyond the borders of federal states and nations. In this sense, the project preserved and encouraged a lived sense of transnational unity and solidarity against the current religious communalism and separatist nationalism. Within UNESCO, however, narratives emphasizing the shared, transnational nature of Afro-Asian culture and humanism were controversial. Increasingly, throughout the 1960s, they were contrasted with particularistic visions of anti-colonial cultural emancipation and development. While it took more than political conflict to erode the spirit of Afro-Asian Solidarity, in the 1960s intellectual regimes of professionalization in UNESCO helped undermine the spread of a humanist outlook on world affairs.

Notes An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume. 1

This distinction is made for instance by David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973).

2

G. H. Jansen, Afro-Asia and Non-Alignment (London: Faber and Faber, 1966); Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement; Dietmar Rothermund, “The Era of Non-alignment,” in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi -Bandung Belgrade, ed. N. Miškovic, H. Fischer Tiné, and N. Boškova (London: Routledge, 2014), 19-34.

3

See Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2013); Quinn Slobodian, Comrades of Color: East Germany in the Cold War World (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015); Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York, London: The New Press, 2007); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

4

The exception to this rule (although not focusing on Central Asian activists in particular) is Louis H. Porter, “Cold War Internationalisms: The USSR in UNESCO, 1945–1967” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2018).

5

For the way the AAPSM-agenda could be traced back to CRIT and the ARC, see Stolte in this volume.

6

For works looking beyond the inter-state and metropolis-periphery axis, see “Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa,” Radical History Review 131 (2018): 176-82; Tim Harper and Sunil S. Amrith, “Sites of Asian Interaction: An introduction,” Modern Asian Studies 46:2 (2012): 249-57.

soviet “afro-asians” in unesco: reorienting world history and humanism 207

7

See Hanna Jansen, “Internationalizing the thaw: Soviet Orientalists and the Contested Politics of Spiritual Peoples’ Solidarity in Asia 1954–1959,” in Alternative Globalizations, Alternative Globalizations: Encounters Between the Eastern Bloc and the Postcolonial South, ed. James Mark, Steffi Marung, and Artemy Kalinovsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2020).

8

Poul Duedahl has witnessed a similar shift with regard to UNESCO’s History of Mankind project, see Duedahl, “Selling Mankind.”

9

The introduction to the archive of the Soviet Solidarity Committee states that the protocols of this meeting have gone missing, see Predislovie Arkhiv Sovetskogo Komiteta Solidarnosti, f. 9540, Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), Moscow, Russia. For more on CRIT and its afterlives, see Stolte’s chapter in this volume.

10

At this meeting it was agreed that the Solidarity Movement would include the countries of Africa, and the Committee adjusted its name accordingly (Soviet Committee for Solidarity with the Countries of Asia and Africa – the acronym SKSSAA will be used throughout).

11

This has been described as a disappointment for the USSR, but recent scholarship has shown that the USSR actively coordinated with the PRC. See Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (The University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 2014); Odd Arne Westad, Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750 (London: The Bodley Head, 2012).

12

For recent contributions on Soviet cultural politics in the Cold War, see Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Russia and the Soviet Union (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015); Michael David-Fox, Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy & Western Visitors to the Soviet Union 1921–1941 (Oxford University Press, 2012). For a focus on Soviet East exchanges with the Arabic world see Masha Kirasirova,“The Eastern International: The ‘Domestic East’ and the ‘Foreign East’ in Soviet Arab Relations, 1917–68” (PhD diss., New York University, 2014).

13

On Central Asian intermediaries in Soviet foreign diplomacy towards the decolonizing world, see Artemy Kalinovsky, “Not some British Colony in Africa: The Politics of Decolonization and Modernization in Soviet Central Asia, 1955–1964,” Ab Imperio 2 (2013): 191-222; Masha Kirasirova, “‘Sons of Muslims’ in Moscow: Soviet Central Asian Mediators to the foreign East, 1955–1962,” Ab Imperio 4 (2011).

14

See E.P. Chelyshev, Izbrannye trudy: tom tretii vremia i liudi (Moscow: Nauka, 2002).

15

Stenogramma Zasedaniia Sovetskogo Komiteta Solidarnosti Stran’ Azii, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

16 17

Predislovie, f.9540, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow. As summarized in M.V. Desai, “The Asian Writers’ Conference December 1956 – New Delhi,” Books Abroad 31, no. 3 (1957): 243.

18

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, fond 9540, opis 1, delo 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

19

Ibid.

20

As quoted in Prasenjit Duara, ed., Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London: Routledge, 2003), 37.

21

For the effects of the thaw on Soviet historiography, see Roger D. Markwick. “Thaws and Freezes in Soviet Historiography 1953–1964,” in The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, ed. Polly Jones (London, Routledge, 2006), 173-193. For how this affected inter-Asian dynamics, in particular Soviet relations with the PRC, see Jansen, “Internationalizing the thaw.”

22

V. Balabushevich, A. Diakov, “Kniga o velikom indiiskom narode,” Kommunist 32, no. 9 (1955): 97-106. On Oriental Studies in the Soviet Union, see Michael Kemper and Artemy M. Kalinovsky, eds., Reassessing Orientalism: Interlocking Orientologies during the Cold War (London: Routledge,

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2015); Michael Kemper and Stephan Conermann, eds., The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies (London: Routledge, 2011); V. Tolz, Russia’s Own Orient: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stéphane A. Dudoignon, “Some Side Effects of A Progressive Orientology: Academic Visions of Islam in the Soviet South After Stalin,” in After Orientalism: Critical Perspectives on Western Agency and Eastern Re-appropriations, ed. Pouillon, François and Jean-Clause Vatin (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 121-132. 23

Hanna Jansen, “Khrushchev’s ‘Break to the East,’ Sino-Soviet Conflicts, and the Regionalization of Soviet Oriental Studies,” in In Search of Other Worlds: Essays Towards a Global Historical Reading of Area Studies, ed. Torsten Loschke et al. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2019).

24

Ibid. The reference to humanism as a way out of colonialism resemble the visions articulated by the Asian Socialist Conference, see Lewis in this volume.

25

Balabushevich, Diakov, “Kniga,” 102.

26

Hanna Jansen, “Peoples’ Internationalism: Central Asian modernisers, Soviet Oriental studies and cultural revolution in the East (1936-1977)” (PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2020).

27

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

28

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

29

V.Iu. Afiani and V.D. Esakov, eds., Akademiia Nauk v Resheniiakh TsK KPSS (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010), 141.

30

Afiani and Esakov, eds., Akademiia Nauk, 141.

31

For recent scholarship on the History of Mankind project, see Paul Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage: UNESCO and the Rewriting of World history,” Past and Present, 228 (2015): 249-85; Poul Duedahl, “Selling Mankind: UNESCO and the Invention of Global History, 1945–1976,” Journal of World History 22:1 (2011): 101-133.

32

For controversies surrounding Huxley and Needham, see Duedahl, “Selling Mankind.”

33

As cited in Paul Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage,” 253. For the Julian Huxley’s worldview and his aims for UNESCO see Glenda Sluga, “UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley,” Journal of World History 21:3 (2010): 393-418.

34

Betts, “Humanity’s New Heritage”; Duedahl, “Selling Mankind.”

35

UNESCO Radio, “A History of Mankind,” date missing, 1951, https://unesdoc. unesco.org (accessed on 08 February 2018).

36

Duedahl, “Selling Mankind.”

37

Discussion on the Cultural and Philosophical Relations Between East and West, 5 December 1951, UNESDOCS, https://unesdoc.unesco.org (accessed 12 March 2017).

38

Report on an enquiry on the possibilities of broadening the teaching of the humanities, 2 March 1956, UNESDOCS, https://unesdoc.unesco.org (accessed on 22 October 2015).

39

For the East-West Project see Laura Elizabeth Wong (2008), “Relocating East and West: UNESCO’s Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Cultural Values,” Journal of World History 3, no. 8 (2008): 349-74; Laura Wong, “Cultural Agency: UNESCO’s Major Project on the Mutual Appreciation of Eastern and Western Values, 1957–1966” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2006).

40

Report on the Second Conference of the Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO, 13 March 1956, 008 (540) MP 03, East-West Major Project, Participation India part 1 (hereafter EWMPPI-1), UNESCO Archives (hereafter UNESCO), Paris, France.

41

As quoted in: Report on the Second Conference of the Indian National Commission for Cooperation with UNESCO, 13March 1956, 008 (540)MP 03, EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris

42

Ibid.

43

Ibid.

soviet “afro-asians” in unesco: reorienting world history and humanism 209

44

Ibid., 202.

45

On the ARC as a crucial link between post-war debates on inter-Asian cooperation and decolonization and their interwar predecessors, see C. Stolte, “‘The Asiatic Hour’: New Perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947,”in The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War, ed. N. Miškovic, H. Fischer Tiné, and N. Boškova, 57-75. For interwar internationalisms see Ali Raza, Franziska Roy, and B. Zachariah, The Internationalist Moment: South Asia, Worlds, and World Views 1917–39 (New Delhi: Sage Publications India, 2015); C. Stolte and H. Fischer Tiné, “Imagining Asia in India: Nationalism and Internationalism (ca. 1905–1940),” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54:1 (2012).

46

Letter to Luther Evans, 19 October 1957, 008 (540) MP 03, EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris.

47

Memorandum of the “History of Asia Project,” 19 October 1957, 008 (540) MP 03, EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris.

48

Ibid.

49

50 Ibid.

50

“Letter to Luther Evans from S.L. Poplai,” 22 November 1957, 008 (540) MP 03 EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris.

51

For variations of Pan-Asiasm and Pan-Islanism in the early 20th century see Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); S. Saaler and J.V. Koschmann, eds., Pan-Asianism in Modern Japanese History: Colonialism, Regionalism and Borders (London: Routledge, 2007); Carolien Stolte, “Orienting India: Interwar Internationalism in an Asian Inflection, 1917–1937” (PhD diss., Leiden University, 2013).

52

Ibid.

53

As quoted in Duara, Decolonization, 35.

54

As quoted in Christopher W.A. Szpilman, “K.M. Panikkar: ‘Asia and Western Dominance,’ 1953,” in Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History Volume 2: 1920–Present, ed. S. Saaler and C.W.A. Szpilman (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 284-285.

55

Ibid.

56

Editorial board, Asian Relations (New Delhi: Asian Relations Organization, 1948), 24.

57

Ibid., 193.

58

For more on Gafurov see my previous work. Also see Kirasirova, “‘Sons of Muslims’ in Moscow.”

59

Anita Stasulane, Theosophy and Culture: Nicholas Roerich (Rome: Pontificia Universita Gregoriana, 2005), 44-56: John McCannon, “In Search of Primieval Russia: Stylistic Evolution in the Landscapes of Nicholas Roerich 1997–1914,” Cultural Geographies 271 (2000). For Tagore’s view resonating in socialist Eastern Europe, see Ana Jelnikar, “Srecko Kosovel and Rabindranath Tagore: Universalist Hopes from the Margins of Europe,” in The Internationalist Moment, ed. Raza, Roy, and Zachariah.

60 61

L.B. Aleav, Istoriografiia Istorii Indii (Moscow: Institut Vostokovedeniia RAN, 2013), 220-221. E.N. Pavlovskii, ed., Nauka v Tadzhikistane. Pervaia Nauchnaia Sessiia k XV-Letiiu Tadzhikskoi SSR (Stalinabad, 1945), 16.

62

B.G. Gafurov, Istoriia Tadzhikskogo Naroda v kratkom Izlozhenii. S drevneishikh vremen do velikoi oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii 1917 g (Moscow: Gos. Izd’vo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1949), 6.

63

B.G. Gafurov, Tadzhikskii narod v bor’be za svobodu i nezavisimost’ svoei rodiny (Stalinabad: Gosizdat pri SNK Tadzhikskoi SSR, 1944).

64

See Artemy M. Kalinovsky, Laboratory of socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press, 2018). Also see the special issue on Russian-Eastern interactions of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33:2 (2013).

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65

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

66

For the way Soviet cultural diplomacy was intended for a domestic audience too, see David-Fox, Crossing Borders.

67

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

68

Ibid.

69

This point further elaborates Clark’s insight that even in the most “anti-cosmopolitan” period of Stalin’s rule “nationalist or imperial trends coexisted with, and were imbricated with, some form of cosmopolitanism,” see Clark, Moscow the Fourth Rome, 4. For the term “People’s Republic of Letters” see Rossen Djagalov’s analysis of the Afro-Asian Writers Movement: “The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2011).

70

Ibid.

71

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

72

Stenogramma Zasedaniia, 1 November 1956, f.9540, op.1, d. 2, SKSSAA, GARF, Moscow.

73

Roberts, “Old Elites Under Communism.”

74

For the insight that intimate encounters may carry complex, trans-geographical meaning, see Kirsty Walker, “Intimate Interactions: Eurasian Family Histories in Colonial Penang,” Modern Asian Studies 46:2 (2012) 303-29.

75

For interpretations of modernity in Central Asian Islam, see Dudoignon, ed., Devout Societies vs. Impious States? Transmitting Islamic Learning in Russia, Central Asia and China, through the Twentieth Century (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2004). For Islam as secularized cultural heritage see Adeeb Khalid, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

76

Gafurov, Istoriia Tadzhikskogo Naroda, 272-74.

77

For a comparison with literary imaginations of the future for Afro-Asia / the Third World in the work of Marxist writers in Pakistan, see Raza in this volume.

78

In my analysis of the Tashkent Conference I build on Duncan M. Yoon ‘“Our Forces Have Redoubled’: World Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau,” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 2:2 (2015): 233-52; Djagalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters”; Constantin Katsakioris, “l’Union Soviétique et les intellectuels Africains: Internationalisme, panafricanisme et négritude pendant les années de la décolonisation, 1954–1964,” Cahiers de monde russe 47:1 (2006): 15-32.

79

Paul Stronski, Tashkent: Forging A Soviet City, 1930–1966 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).

80

Speech Mukhitdinnov, 7 October 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

81

Speech Mukhitdinnov at the First Session Asian-African Writers Conference, 7 October 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, East-West Major Project, Participation USSR part 1 (hereafter: EWMPPUSSR-1), UNESCO, Paris.

82

That the search for a shared heritage was central to the Third World project has been argued by Prashad, The Darker Nations. For community-building being as part of the postcolonial project, see Christopher Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), esp. the introduction.

83

Message of Greetings from the Prime Minister of the Union of Burma, 7 October 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

84

Message of Greetings, 7 October 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

85

Speech Mukhitdinnov, 7 October 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

soviet “afro-asians” in unesco: reorienting world history and humanism 211

86

For PRC critiques of Soviet revisionism that situate debates about cultural history at the center of the Sino-Soviet rivalry, see Jansen, “Internationalizing the thaw.”

87

Ibid. For an account of Chinese internationalist enthusiasm, see Leow, “A Missing Peace”.

88

As is suggested for instance J.S. Friedman, “Reviving Revolution: the Sino-Soviet Split, the ‘Third World,’ and the Fate of the Left, Volume I” (PhD Dissertation, Princeton University, 2011); Djagalov, “The People’s Republic of Letters.” See McGann in this volume for a more complex picture of Indian-African interactions.

89

Appendix to Letter from G. Frumkin to J. Havet, 27 December 1958, 008 (470) MP 03, EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

90

Ibid.

91

Ibid.

92

Duedahl, “Selling Mankind,” 132.

93

For such critiques see Wong, “Cultural Agency.”

94

Here I reference Wong’s description of Eastern European activists within UNESCO who tried to have the implicit purpose of the East West Project, i.e., the creation of “new” mutual values, be acknowledged in the project’s name. See Wong, “Cultural Agency,” 87-88.

95

In doing so, he advised, attention should be on the cultural values that were currently being “created,” for it were these, he believed, that attracted most distrust and misunderstanding. Letter from Gafurov to Rudolf Salat, 24 September 1958, UNESCO 008 (470) MP 03 EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

96

Ibid.

97

Letter to J. Havet from Michel Dard, 3 November 1958, 008 (470) MP 03 EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

98

Letter to J. Havet from Roger Caillois, 3 November 1958, 008 (470) MP 03 EWMPPUSSR-1, UNESCO, Paris.

99

Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in UCIAS Edited Volume 3: The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (2003), article 3.

100

“‘A Major Project in UNESCO’S Program’ article by Luther H. Evans,” 17 January 1957, 008 (540) MP 03, EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris.

101

Ibid.

102

See Benjamin Zachariah, Nehru (London: Routledge, 2004).

103

“Proposal for setting up an Institute of Historical Studies in India,” undated, 008 (540) MP 03, EWMPPI-1, UNESCO, Paris.

104

Ibid.

CHAPTER 10

A Forgotten Bandung: The Afro-Asian Students’ Conference and the Call for Decolonisation Wildan Sena Utama

Abstract The Asian-African Students’ Conference (AASC) held in Bandung in 1956 was the first Afro-Asian conference inspired by the Bandung spirit. It showed that student activism in the struggle for freedom during the colonial era continued in the decolonisation era. Although many Asian and few African countries had become independent, students still paid more attention to the problem of colonialism than national development. This conference produced a decolonisation framework in education and connected the Asian and African anti-colonial movements against colonialism, racial discrimination, and world tension. The AASC became a gateway for the Algerian liberation movement to broad the echoes of their struggle and develop solidarity from Southeast Asian countries.

Keywords: decolonisation, anti-colonialism, colonialism, education, Cold War

We should not take over the task of our political leaders, but the problem of colonialism, discrimination, and war concerns us. We can support the leaders of our respective governments to solve that problem and it is our duty to do so, because if they are leaders in the world where we now live, we will be that of the world of tomorrow. Fotso Odon, Speech in the Asian-African Students’ Conference, 1956.1

In April 1955, Bandung hosted the Asian-African Conference, an international gathering that inspired a series of movements under the banner of Afro-Asianism. This led to the emergence of the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in Cairo in December 1957 which diversified the spirit of Bandung into various movements of non-state actors years after.2 But between the Bandung to Cairo trajectory, a lesser-known conference was held in Bandung in 1956 which brought together hundreds of students from twenty-seven Asian and African countries: the Asian-African Students’ Conference (AASC). This conference explicitly replicated its predecessor, both in terms of location, vision, and model, but with younger

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participants and on a smaller scale. Willard Hanna, an American observer of the conference, therefore referred to the AASC as ‘The Little Bandung Conference.’3 Today we only associate ‘Bandung’ with the Asian-African Conference, while the Asian-African Students’ Conference held in Bandung a year later is largely forgotten. Christopher J. Lee argues that the Bandung Conference was influential in transforming anti-colonialism ‘from a type of insurgent politics to a method of statecraft.’4 Various collective initiatives under the banner of Afro-Asian solidarity that imitated the Bandung diplomatic model appeared in 1956, including the Afro-Asian Labour Conference, Afro-Asian Teachers Conference, and Afro-Asian Journalists’ Conference,5 but only the Afro-Asian Students’ Conference successfully materialised at that moment. However, the AASC and the role of students in decolonisation have been overshadowed by other more well-known Afro-Asian meetings. This chapter, therefore, attempts to elevate this conference by locating it in the trajectory of the Afro-Asian movement and more broadly in the decolonisation process. I argue that the Asian-African Students’ Conference facilitated Afro-Asian students to formulate a framework for decolonisation in the field of education and also served as a means of anti-colonial solidarity against colonialism, racial discrimination, and militarism. The 1956 AASC in Bandung should not be confused with the 1956 Afro-Asian Students’ Conference in London. They had different origins even though both claimed to be inspired by the Bandung Conference.6 The London Afro-Asian Students’ Conference held at Conway Hall, also in May 1956, was a continuation of the first Afro-Asian Students’ meeting conducted in May 1955 in the same city. This meeting gathered Asian and African students studying in the United Kingdom and initially aimed to build a better understanding among them and with British friends on the other side.7 The 1956 London Afro-Asian Students’ Conference shared the similar anti-colonial breath as the AASC: it condemned French atrocities in Algeria and the South African Government’s racial policy; it demanded the French government grant the Madagascar full independence; and renounced the aggressive military pacts, like Baghdad Pact and SEATO.8 The AASC in Bandung showed that Asian and African students’ solidarity during the colonial period continued in the era of Asia’s decolonisation. Although many Asian and a few African countries had become independent by 1956, students still paid more attention to the problem of colonialism than national development. This was reflected in the substance of the delegates’ speeches at the AASC where the non-independent African countries emphasised the importance of freedom, while the independent Afro-Asian countries, besides sympathising with the liberation movements elsewhere, underlined the profound impacts of colonialism. And the concentrated discussion on anti-colonialism has led to a heated debate among conference delegates about the main focus of the ‘student conference’: whether it

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was to be colonialism and other political issues or solely focused on students and academic issues. As they did in the colonial era, Asian and African students created transnational networks as a model of anti-colonial resistance. They traversed one place to another, developed contacts and constructed international cooperation beyond language, cultural and ideological boundaries. This was demonstrated by the Algerian students, members of the Front de Libération Nationale, who came to the AASC from Paris to seek support from their Afro-Asian fellows for their freedom struggle. They did not stop in Bandung; one of them had settled in Jakarta and from there travelled around Southeast Asia calling for solidarity. The AASC, for the Algerian liberation movement, became the important link to expand its international anti-colonial networks in Southeast Asia. However, there is a different feature between the transnational activism of Asian and African students in the colonial and decolonisation periods.9 While most Afro-Asian students during the colonial period widened their anti-colonial networks in the colonial metropole as they were students in universities overseas, generations of students in the decolonisation era did so from foreign universities, but more importantly from universities established in their homeland.10 The AASC showed these characteristics; students from Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Madagascar came to Bandung from their study places in Paris, while students from Indonesia, Burma, India, China, and so forth represented universities in their countries. However, while the anti-colonial networks of Asian and African students in colonial times are well documented, similar connections in the decolonisation period are still not widely explored.11 Therefore, through the AASC I will describe both the connections and contestations between Afro-Asian students that arose in the 1950s. Reports or studies of the international student movement in the 1950s tend to be analysed in a Cold War framework in which the leftist International Union of Students (IUS) and the pro-Western International Student Conference (ISC) competed for influence. This also prevails in the case of the AASC. Western newspapers tried to compare the AASC with the communist-sponsored Youth Calcutta Conference in New Delhi in 1948 which was coordinated by the World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY) and IUS. Meanwhile, one study investigates how the intervention of the Central Intelligence Agency and the United States National Student Association sabotaged the purpose of this conference to be more appropriate with the US Cold War policies.12 It is undeniable that there were noticeable connections between Asian and African activists and the IUS; Indonesian students, for instance, travelled to Prague, Warsaw, and Moscow to attend the IUS congresses and meetings and also joined as its members. However, there were various interests behind these relations that were too narrow if they were simplified purely for the sake of the reinforcement of the Moscow camp. So is the assumption that

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links the emergence of the AASC as an extension of the IUS in the Third World. This assumption clearly overlooks the reality that within the initiator body of the AASC, the Federation of Indonesian University Student Organisations, there were various kinds of student organisations with different ideological orientations. Also, such a binary opposition perspective obscures the big picture of the AASC as an attempt by students to strengthen ties and establish cooperation in pushing the decolonisation process and the advancement of education in Asia and Africa. This chapter examines the Asian-African Students’ Conference in the context of growing connections and interactions across the Afro-Asian world in the 1950s in which decolonisation and the Cold War greatly enabled these engagements. The creation of these links was not only carved out by the new post-colonial leaders but also by lesser-known non-state actors such as students. State and non-state actors did not walk separately but complemented each other, as shown by the patronage of the AASC by President Sukarno and officials in the Ministry of Education. This chapter also underlines the role of Indonesian students in cultivating the networks and organising all the preparations that made the AASC possible. This responds to Su Lin Lewis’s challenge that states, ‘more might be said on Indonesia’s role as an incubator of Afro-Asian networks in the years before and after Bandung, particularly at the non-diplomatic level.’13 In contrast to Bandung, where ideas were discussed in a relatively short time span, the process of negotiating the ideas behind the AASC began in 1952 and continued to change from the Asian-Arab, to the Asian, to the Asian-African Students’ Conference. Bandung played a significant role in articulating a new vision of solidarity among students, and the AASC constituted a prelude to a new era.

From Asian-Arab to Asian-African Students’ Conference The Asian-African Students’ Conference originated from the idea of ​​an AsianArab Students’ Conference, first discussed at the meeting of the Perserikatan Perhimpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia (PPMI – Federation of Indonesian University Student Organisations)14 in 1952.15 Indonesian students proposed this international meeting driven by the fact that the role of postwar independent countries had increased both in world and cultural affairs, aside from the fact they had a similar history in carrying on the same struggle against the yoke of colonialism.16 Islamic sentiment possibly played a role in the emergence of this idea as the initiator of this proposal was the Islamic Student Association (HMI), which structurally dominated the PPMI. Moreover, the idea of the conference reflected the strong connection between Indonesia and Arab countries since its independence in 1945. During the revolutionary period (masa revolusi) (1945-1949), the Arab League and

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Arab countries recognised the legitimacy of Indonesian independence which was not acknowledged by the Dutch and other Western powers.17 Meanwhile, in the early 1950s, in return, Indonesia fully supported the liberation struggle in Islamic countries of North Africa by providing an office in Jakarta for their freedom fighters. This office housed Tunisian freedom fighters Rachid Driss, Taieb Salim and Tahar Amira and Moroccan nationalist Allal Fassi.18 In 1951, the leader of Neo Destour party, Habib Bourguiba, also came to Jakarta and was invited to address the Indonesian parliament about the Tunisian struggle for independence.19 As an endeavour to promote and consolidate relations between Asian and Arab countries, the students believed there was a need for convening a broader gathering to talk about their common problems, strengthen cooperation, and mutual understanding. The decision to organise the Asian-Arab Students’ Conference was discussed again at the PPMI congress in Tugu, Bogor, April 1953 where it was agreed that the notion of ​​holding the conference was ‘in the sense of cultural and geographical commonness, free from any differences in governmental system, religion, or political conviction.’20 This proposal was brought up in international forum by Radjab Nasution, Deputy Chairman of the PPMI (1953-5) from the Islamic Student Association (HMI), when he attended the third World Student Congress in Warsaw in August 1953 sponsored by the International Union of Students (IUS).21 Radjab talked about the idea of ​​an Asian-Arab Students’ Conference outside of the congress with Lebanese, Indian, Iranian, and Burmese students. His proposal was enthusiastically accepted in a follow-up discussion in Prague. The idea was endorsed in a joint statement, known as Prague Statement, signed by Radjab (PPMI) together with Mukul Ghosal (All-India Students Federation), F. Sohrabi (Teheran University Union), Ko Tun Shein (All-Burma Students Union), Nadim Abdul Samad (National Union of Lebanese Students), and W. Busono (Indonesian Student Youth Association).22 In the Prague Statement, it was stated that there were two points that became the basis for discussion behind the holding of the Asian-Arab Student Conference: (1) ‘We felt that students can play an important role in promoting the spirit of self-respect and patriotism, in struggling for complete national independence, sovereignty and promoting the national cultures of the Asian peoples, and in promoting mutual knowledge, understanding and friendly relations among the Asian countries who strongly desire to live in peace with each other. (2) We review with concern the bad conditions of life and study, a lack of academic freedom in many Asian countries and the legacies of colonial rule still almost a free development of a patriotic and democratic education system and their work to improve these conditions.’23 In that statement, Asian-Arab students welcomed the PPMI’s notion of holding a conference in Indonesia. In order to realise this idea, it was essential to form an Asian Preparatory Committee with the task of preparing all kinds of matters related to conference ideas and techniques. The Asian

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Preparatory Committee then composed: 2 students from Indonesia (to be decided by the National Preparatory Committee), 1 India (All-India Students Federation), 1 Burma (All Burma Federation of Student Unions), 1 Japan (All Japan Federation of Student Autonomies), 1 Philippine (Philippine Student Council), 1 China (All-China Students’ Federation), 1 Iran (Teheran University Union), and 1 Lebanon (National Union of Lebanese Students).24 The Prague Statement was ratified at the PPMI meeting in Surabaya in April 1954. However, in the gathering there was heated debate about a sentence in the Prague Statement which stated that the Asian-Arab Students’ Conference could ‘develop more successfully the work of the IUS, thus strengthening the bonds of the Asian students with the over 5 million students of the world in the IUS.’ In the view of the United States intelligence, although the brainchild of this conference was genuinely neutralist-motivated, ‘it had been subverted to serve IUS purposes.’25 However, Radjab denied the allegation and argued that the statement was ‘a later and unauthorised insert.’26 And this conflict culminated to the PPMI’s withdrawal from the IUS membership as proof that this organisation did not take sides with one of the world blocs.27 On the other hand, in an effort to diminish the radical orientation within the PPMI body, the United States National Student Association (NSA) invited Radjab and Aminudin to tour American campuses from the end of 1954 to April 1955.28 In the mid-1950s, it was seen that the contestation of the Cold War taking place at the global level had intervened in the political landscape of the Indonesian national student movement. However, this disagreement did not stop the proposal for an Asian-Arab student conference. In July 1954, a Reception Committee was formed in Bandung based on the PPMI session decision which chose Bandung as the venue for the upcoming conference. Agusdin Aminudin, the new PPMI Chairperson (1954-6) from HMI, suggested that ‘Asian-Arab’ be narrowed to the Asian Students’ Conference. He thought it was more relevant to consolidate relations between Asian countries first, along with the fact that most students from Arabic countries spoke French while they did not have a well-qualified French translator.29 In the PPMI meeting in November 1954 this proposal was approved, and a National Preparatory Committee (NPC) was formed which contained Indonesian student organisations. The NPC received patronage from President Sukarno, while the Governor of West Java, the Mayor of Jakarta and Bandung were appointed as advisors. Likewise, the Presidents of the University of Indonesia, Airlangga University, Islamic University in Yogyakarta, National University, and 17 August University agreed to be appointed as honorary chairs of the NPC.30 The appointment of university representatives showed that the preparatory committee needed legitimacy from various elements of student affairs: extra and intra-campus organisations and university representatives.

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Figure 10.1. An identity card of Gunawan Wiradi, an agriculture student at the University of Indonesia in Bogor, as the Deputy Head of Documentation Section of the AASC (Gunawan Wiradi’s private archives).

The idea of the Asian Student Conference shifted again at the end of 1955. The Asian and African Conference held in Bandung in April 1955 had a tremendous impact on the students in reorienting their geographic imagination and a new vision of solidarity. The Bandung Conference was a turning point in international politics in which emerging Asian and African countries made interventions by voicing their aspirations for anti-colonialism, world peace, and Afro-Asian solidarity beyond the rivalry of the Cold War blocs. Bandung constituted a significant moment in the struggle for decolonisation and self-determination as the timing coincided with the withdrawal of France from Vietnam, the growing enthusiasm of the newly independent Asian countries in striving for decolonisation, and at a time when the struggle for African independence was surging.31 It was also present as an alternative voice from the Third World calling for world peace from the threats posed by Cold War ideological contestation and arms race.32 This conference provided inspiration as well as a model for anti-colonial movements throughout Asia and Africa to mobilise collective activism and develop transnational solidarity. Moved by the spirit of Bandung, students from Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Japan, China, and Lebanon who were members of the International Preparatory Committee (IPC) agreed to broaden the idea of the Asian Students’ Conference to the

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Asian-African Students’ Conference at a meeting in Bogor in September 1955. In an appeal issued by them, it was stated that ‘The historical results of the Asian-African Conference held at Bandung this year stand out as a beacon light in the path of all of us.’33 Although the idea of the conference was expanded to become Asian-African, there was almost no representation of African students on the stewardship of the preparatory committee – except for Egypt.34 In a report written by an Indonesian, he wrote ‘The IPC members are only from Asia, why is Africa not being asked in the IPC?’35 Similar to the Bandung Conference, the preparatory committee only consisted of five Asian countries (Indonesia, India, Burma, Ceylon, and Pakistan), known as Colombo Powers, without involving Africa. In the IPC, J. Goeltom, a member of the PPMI of the Indonesian Christian Student Movement (GMKI), was chosen as chairman. The main purposes of the forthcoming conference were ‘to discuss common problems and interests in order to promote cooperation in the fields of culture, sports, study and student welfare’ and ‘to promote mutual understanding and knowledge and to strengthen relations among students.’ Through this forum, students would also discuss what contributions students could make ‘towards promotion of peace and easing of tension.’36 Although there was an emphasis on aspects of student affairs and education, the objectives of the Asian-African Students’ Conference clearly replicate the aims of Bandung. The IPC expected more than 200 students to participate representing 45 Asian and African countries. It was estimated that around Rp. 500,000 ($ 16,500) was required for conducting the conference. President Sukarno, who was willing to be the conference patron, was ready to donate Rp. 100,000.37 The IPC decided that the conference would be held from 5 to 10 May 1956. After the session in Bandung ended, Indonesia’s J. Goeltom, Chairman of the IPC, invited other IPC members, Chen Ta Wei (China), Leonardo Ignacio (Philippine), Sukhendu Majumdar (India), Kozo Yamashita (Japan), and Nadim Abdul Samad (Lebanon) to tour several campuses and educational centres in Bandung, Yogyakarta, Surakarta, and Surabaya. During this trip around Java, they had the opportunity to exchange opinions with representatives of local student bodies about the coming Asian-African Students’ Conference. Their trip ended with a meeting with President Sukarno at his residence on 12 October 1955.

Echoing the Bandung Spirit Bandung was a transnational hotbed for Afro-Asian solidarity in the 1950s. While the majority of international meetings of the Asian anti-imperialist movement were held in state capitals, such as New Delhi, Rangoon, Tokyo, Colombo, Bandung was an exception. Located on hills with cool air, this cosmopolitan city featured art deco architecture and was considered to have international standard conference

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Figure 10.2. One of the AASC sessions took place in the hall of Gedung Merdeka (Freedom Building), the venue for the 1955 Bandung Conference. The National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia (ANRI).38

venues and accommodation like the Indonesian capital, Jakarta. More than this, Bandung had an important meaning in the history of the Indonesian independence movement given that many Indonesian leaders embarked on their anti-colonial activism while studying here, such as Sukarno and Sjahrir.39 This is why Bandung was chosen to host the Asian-African Conference in 1955. As it was symbolic in echoing anti-colonial sentiment and Afro-Asian solidarity, Jawaharlal Nehru called this city ‘the capital of Asia-Africa.’40 Given the importance of this city as a symbol of the new Asian-African era, Bandung was opted as the location for the AASC. However, we must also consider Bandung as ‘student city’ in the 1950s, where the Bandung Institute of Technology was located, alongside Jakarta and Yogyakarta. The AASC opened on 30 May 1956 at the Varia Cinema, which could accommodate approximately 2000 people. Delegates from Asia and Africa were given lodging at the Savoy Homann Hotel, a luxury art deco five-star hotel located on Asia-Afrika Road. Participants were students from twenty-seven Asian and African countries. From Asia, there were student representatives from Afghanistan, Burma, Ceylon, China, Iran, India, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, North Korea, Laos, Lebanon, Malaya, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Syria, and North Vietnam. Meanwhile, students from Africa included Algeria, Egypt, Cameroon, Madagascar, Morocco, Sudan, Togo, Tunisia, and West and Equatorial Africa. There were more representatives

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Figure 10.3. The AASC participants gathered around Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo at the opening of the conference (ANRI).

of African countries in the AASC than in the Bandung Conference. In contrast to Bandung, which only invited the highest representatives of the independent and semi-independent countries, the AASC allowed more representatives of African countries to participate because it involved non-state actors representing student organisations from non-independent countries. And also, part of the African delegates, for example Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Madagascar, did not depart from their homeland, but from their place of study in Paris. The conference opened with the playing of Indonesia’s national anthem, ‘Indonesia Raya’, at 10 a.m. Indonesian Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo, the key architect of the Bandung Conference, became the limelight at the opening of the AASC. His speech was a reflection of the basis for the Bandung Conference and the AASC and the role of students in this transitional era. Sastroamidjojo argued that both Bandung and the AASC departed from (1) a shared desire to establish an Asian-African collective identity (2) a shared desire to bring a message of peace and goodwill (3) the same belief that real progress is only possible by cooperation and understanding, with a great measure of faith and ideals.41 He also argued that in the transition from colonialism to the atomic era, students had a heavy task to prevent atoms from becoming weapons of war. After Sastroamidjojo’s speech, which was greeted with great fanfare, the committee played President Sukarno’s ‘blessing speech’ on a tape recorder. Sukarno

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Figure 10.4. Lines of students who took part in the parade welcomed the opening of the AASC (ANRI).

could not attend the AASC because he was on his first visit to the United States since Indonesia’s independence in 1945. During his visit to the US, Sukarno gave a message to the American public and also the world about the zeitgeist across Asia and Africa, explicitly seen in the title of his speech ‘The Era of Asian and African Nationalism’ at the National Press Club in Washington.42 Meanwhile, in his blessing speech at Bandung, Sukarno reminded the Afro-Asian students of the privileges they had as educated people and the accompanying social responsibility, and also on the evil of colonialism and war, and the importance of mutual understanding. Sukarno stated: ‘We can stop colonialism, we can stop war, we can build freedom everywhere. One essential for that is cooperation. And one essential for cooperation is understanding. And you, gathered here today, can learn to understand each other. Do so then!’43 The AASC was enlivened with a ‘parade of Asian-African youth and students’ from university and secondary school students, members of youth organisations,

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military naval and police-academy cadets, delegates, and conference organisers. Around thousands of people from inside and outside Bandung watched the 8-kilometre spectacle.44 The AASC delegates wore their traditional clothes to show their identity. The parade line carried banners bearing slogans: ‘We hate war, we want peace’; ‘We are fighting to destroy colonialism for the victory of Asia-Africa’; ‘Free West Irian’; and ‘The Struggle of the Malayan, Morocco, Algerian people must be supported.’45 This event could be seen as an attempt by the Indonesian committee to strengthen the relationship between participants and the wider public.46 However, the ‘echo of solidarity’ that was noticeable on the first day turned into a heated atmosphere at the next day’s first session. The session did not begin until 17.00 p.m. due to petitions from student representatives of India, Pakistan, Malaya, Ceylon, the Philippines, Laos, Japan, and Iran. The local Bandung newspaper, Pikiran Rakjat, reported that the petitioners disagreed that a country (Indonesia) could have more than one representative in the credential committee as it violated democratic principles.47 Petitioners pointed to the importance of the credential committee in authorising the mandate of each delegate. While the credential committee issue had not yet been resolved, IPC Chairman Aminudin opened the plenary session, inviting the Indonesian delegation to make a speech. However, the Indian (Pran Sabharwal) and the Philippines (Guillermo De Vega) delegates declared that the session was not official as the discussion on the credential committee structure was incomplete.48 This then caused turmoil in the meeting, as and even within the Indian delegation itself the opinion was split into two camps: ‘the moderate bloc’ supporting Sabharwal and ‘the more radical bloc’ supporting the AASC chairman. This schism within the Indian delegation showed a division had emerged since the formation of the delegation at the national level. The leader of the moderate bloc was the non-communist head of the Indian delegation, Sabharwal, who was a member of the National Union of Students India (NUSI), where since the formation of delegations to the AASC at the national level had battled to erode the left dominance of the All-Indian Students Federation (AISF). Meanwhile, the more radical bloc was led by Majumdar, an ex-Indian representative expelled from the IPC who was the general secretary of the AISF and had a connection with the IUS.49 The meeting finally resumed on 2 June at 10:30 p.m., an unusual time to commence the conference. The delegation came rushing from their hotel rooms and some arrived after enjoying the night atmosphere of Bandung or going to the cinema. The session began with the reading of a speech from the head of the Indonesian delegation. Emil Salim, the leader of the University of Indonesia Student Council, argued that Asian and African students needed to support the Bandung resolution, fight against all forms of colonialism and racial discrimination and segregation, ease world tensions and promote world peace, and control the use of atomic energy. He stated that the conference needed to set up an implementing

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body to realise cooperation between students and universities across Asia and Africa. Salim became the head of the Indonesian delegation after Aminudin, the previous chief, was appointed as a Chairman of the Presidium of the conference with the Secretary from Indonesia (Goeltom), the First Deputy chairman from Afghanistan (Mohammed Ghausi) and the Second Deputy Chairman from Pakistan (Syed Hulail Ahmad Naqvi).50 On 3 and 4 June, at the historic Freedom Building, the venue for the previous year’s Bandung Conference, representatives of delegates from twenty-six Asian and African countries read their respective speeches. The translators took turns translating the speeches due to the variety of languages used: French, Burmese, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, and Malay.51 The speeches were delivered predominantly about the damage caused by colonialism in the past, the struggle to end colonialism, the elimination of racism and discrimination, the threat of war and nuclear weapons, lessening world tension and maintaining the world peace, and the importance of mutual understanding and cooperation in academia, education, and culture. Regarding the impact of colonialism on education, Khin Maung Ohn, head of the Burma delegation, revealed that in Burma young people could only study subjects that served the interests of the colonisers, not subjects they wanted, and even then only a handful of prospective students were allowed to enter certain colleges, which took precedence to serve capitalist companies.52 The delegation from Morocco, Sentici Mohamed, and Togo, Glokpor Foli Georges, meanwhile, recounted the terrible conditions of education in their country where there was no initiative to establish universities by colonialists. If they wanted to go to college, they had to go to France and only certain people could feel this privilege.53 Among all the participants, the speech of Mohammed Benyahia from Algeria received the most attention because the Algerian liberation movement at that moment was in the world’s spotlight and attracted solidarity from Asian and African countries. Benyahia travelled to Bandung along with Lakhdar Brahimi, both of whom were members of the Union Générale des Étudiants Musulmans Algériens (UGEMA) which was affiliated with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Brahimi decided to quit his studies in Paris to accompany Benyahia in seeking support for Algeria’s struggle for independence in Southeast Asia.54 Benyahia began his speech by juxtaposing the years 1855 and 1955 and the cities of Berlin and Bandung, where what he called ‘a decisive turn in the history of mankind’ took place. He stated that ‘In 1885, the representative of the European states gathered in Berlin to share out African and Asiatic countries among themselves. In 1955, 70 years later only, the representatives of the African states met in Bandung to proclaim that the era of European predominance had ended, that the European Empire is from now on an empty concept.’55 However, even though colonial rule had collapsed everywhere, Benyahia explained that the Algerian people were still

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struggling against the French colonial rule which had 400,000 troops and more powerful weapons. Under ferocious repression, Algerian students did not have the chance to dream about cultural exchange, give invitations to visit our country, or talk about educational methods because they had decided to sacrifice both their studies and their lives to national independence. Therefore, Benyahia declared that ‘As this conference has been placed under the auspices of the Bandung principles, that is above all anti-colonialism, and as its aim is the promotion of mutual understanding and cooperation … the only fruitful means of cooperation with Algerian or colonial students is to help them shake off the colonial yoke.’56 The anti-colonial resistance of the Algerian people not only generated solidarity from other Afro-Asian delegations, but also from local students and peasants. In the midst of the AASC sessions, a group of students held a demonstration outside Freedom Building holding up placards condemning French colonialism and supporting the Algerian liberation movement. Benyahia and Brahimi, and members of the conference presidium then met the demonstrators, listened to their messages of solidarity, and expressed gratitude for their sympathy. At noon on 3 June, a group of peasants entered the conference hall delivering their agricultural produce in the form of fruit to the participants as a symbol of their support and hope for the conference. While peasant representatives conveyed that the interests of the Asian and African students could not be separated from their people, the students were touched by their solidarity, not expecting that the influence of this conference would extend to the villages.57 However, the question of who coordinated these peasants remained unclear; it was possible that the Indonesian national committee invited them to reinforce the romantic image that the AASC was not distant from the public. The participants voiced their stance to support the struggle for liberation in Asian and African countries. Representatives of the delegations from Sudan, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, North Vietnam, and West and Equatorial Africa gave full support to Algeria’s struggle for independence, meanwhile the Syrian and Lebanese delegations specifically elevated the issue of the Palestinian people who were forcibly expelled from their homeland. The call for the return of West Irian to Indonesia and Goa to India also emerged in the speeches of the delegates. However, the political overtones of the conference were protested by its staunchest critic, Guillermo De Vega. He asserted that if this conference wanted to explore ‘the political issues,’ it must discuss North Korea and South Korea, North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and China and Taiwan issues.58 According to De Vega, the AASC was ‘a student conference’ so it should discuss everything academic rather than political, devoting all its focus to student issues instead of discussing anti-colonialism, imperialism, atomic weapons, and world tensions. He then repeated Prime Minister John Kotelawala of Ceylon’s bombastic remarks about ‘colonialism’ in Bandung the previous year, arguing that any discussion of

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colonialism should touch ‘the colonialism of the East’ (the communist system), not just ‘Western colonialism.’59 Likewise, De Vega questioned the conference that adopted the Bandung Spirit: ‘Why should we adopt a spirit inspired by our elder people which caused these problems? Should we adopt the national policies of the governments of our countries? We have our own problems.’60 However, De Vega’s lambasting did not get the response as expected. Harian Rakjat wrote a mocking headline ‘All inspired by Bandung Spirit, except the Philippines.’61 De Vega’s criticisms of the ‘politicisation of the conference’ and ‘one-sided colonialism’ only resonated in the speeches of the Iranian and Indian delegates. Javad Vafa from Iran forewarned that the tyranny of the rulers who relied on dogmatic ideology was equally as evil as colonialism, whereas Sabharwal was the lone delegate who focused on discussing student issues and asserted that the main task of the student was the national reconstruction of their countries.62 However, De Vega’s assumption that political issues were not a student domain was denied by the Cameroon delegate. Fotso Odon emphasised that ‘We should not talk about politics, but it is our duty to preserve our heritage, culture, and traditions. For us, the students from Cameroons, the struggle against colonialism is one of those traditions.’63 The tensions persisted on the following day, 5 June, when the credential committee led by Egypt submitted a report for approval from all delegates. The report was accepted by all delegates except the Philippines. De Vega doubted the veracity of the report which proclaimed that all participants were credentialed. He alleged that at least eleven of the twenty-seven delegates, namely Afghanistan, Algeria, Cameroon, Iran, Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, Togo, and Tunisia, were ‘bogus representatives’ – neither qualified as students nor officially representing the country as only represented one organisation.64 Even the Chairman of the Credential Committee itself, Dr. Hassan Ashmawy of Egypt, was not a student. The head of the Egypt delegation was 38 years old, working as Assistant Professor of Agriculture at the University of Cairo. Responding to these accusations, the Syrian and Sudanese delegates explained that for some countries it was not possible for students to receive a mandate from a university in their country because in their homeland there was no university.65 They did study abroad, but they did carry the mandate of their student organisation back home.66 Chairman of the Credential Committee, Dr. Hassan, then took a stance, suggesting that if the representatives of the Philippines, which had been carrying out continuous obstruction from the beginning, tried to thwart the conference, it would be better for the Philippines to leave the conference.67 The Philippine delegation finally walked out, accusing that ‘the entire conference was ‘a hoax and farce’ under communist domination.’68 The Philippine argument was only supported by the Indian and Pakistani delegations, but they did not withdraw from the conference.

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Figure 10.5. One of the commissions was in discussion, formulating the final resolution of the AASC (ANRI).

After days of drama, the conference focused on formulating a resolution by forming five commissions to discuss issues of student education and academic and cultural cooperation and exchanges. All resolutions were made by deliberation and were unanimously accepted and greeted with big applause. And after the official event was closed, the delegates rushed to the heads of the delegations from Algeria, Indonesia and Malaya and carried them on their shoulders. This atmosphere of joy was accompanied by shouts of ‘merdeka’ (freedom), ‘hidup damai’ (long live peace), ‘hidup kerjasama’ (long live cooperation) and ‘hidup Asia-Afrika’ (long live Asia-Africa).69 The Indonesian press reported that the AASC had ended in success. The local Bandung newspaper Pikiran Rakjat wrote the headline ‘AASC Succeeds, Rumbling Sounds Echoes in Panti Budaya,’ while the leftist newspaper Harian Rakjat gave a title ‘First AASC concluded with TREMENDOUS SUCCESS: Unity, Cooperation and Tolerance Triumph.’70 Meanwhile, Western media presented the AASC through a Cold War lens where they concluded that this student conference failed to be controlled by the communist groups, paralleling the AASC with the Youth Calcutta Conference in 1948.71 The AASC must be viewed beyond Cold War framework as it represented a continuum: the student struggle for national freedom during the colonial era was still ongoing in the decolonisation era. However, if in the colonial era Asian and

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African students met and built anti-colonial networks in European metropolitan cities, they could now assemble and discuss the colonial legacy and liberation struggle of their country in their own homeland. The AASC set a stage for Asian-African students to meet for the first time, confer on national and international issues, and work together to formulate solutions under the banner of Afro-Asian solidarity. This meeting showed that Asian-African students had a moral and intellectual responsibility to be involved in solving national and international problems.

More than Academic Cooperation The AASC produced resolutions that outlined the ideal educational prerequisites for post-colonial countries, educational and cultural cooperation between the two continents, and student tasks in opposing colonialism, racial discrimination, and war. The creation of an ideal education in a newly independent country first of all required equal rights to access education. The AASC urged that every individual had the same right to acquire education properly regardless of gender, religion, social and economic status, nationality, colour, and political conviction. Second, as most Asian and African countries had been or were still under colonial rule, the social and economic conditions of students were far from satisfactory. Therefore, the resolution considered that Asian and African countries and cooperation should strive for better socio-economic conditions. Third, education in Asia and Africa must preserve the national culture, use national languages, and encourage national education. National culture, language, and education were in dismal condition, stifled by the domination of alien rule. The AASC communiqué encouraged ‘increased number of education faculties, national language is used as a medium of instruction, and more technical and higher education.’ In addition, books on the history of Asia and Africa needed to be written and circulated among Asian and African countries. The AASC also prompted the governments of Asian and African countries to explore the possibility of establishing international institutions that focus on the study of Asian and African cultures and languages.72 The second set of resolutions gave attention to how to build educational and cultural cooperation between Asian and African countries. The AASC encouraged the exchange of professors, students, books, literature, and works of art. To enable this cooperation to occur, a Students’ Exchange Fund Bureau was needed to raise funds and urge the government or private bodies to provide scholarships to different Asian-African countries. The resolution also hoped for the creation of scientific advances in Asia and Africa. Therefore, the AASC recommended to ‘hold regular seminars and conferences on scientific and other subjects and exchange experiences and result of scientific research in different parts of Asia and Africa.’ Furthermore,

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the resolution also described cultural cooperation between Asian and African students through holding Asian-African Students’ cultural festivals (including film and photography), exchange students’ literary, musical, and cinematography works, and organise seminars on history, culture, and life of Asia and Africa.73 Finally, the communiqué contained a statement that reinforced the Bandung resolution: condemning colonialism, racial discrimination, and world tension. The resolution opposed ‘colonialism in all its manifestations and recognises the rights of peoples and nations to self-determination.’ It stated that the AASC supports liberation movements in Algeria and Kenya, restoration of the right of Arabs and the return of Arab refugees to Palestine, and integration of West Irian into the territories of Indonesia. The AASC also recommended that the Declaration of Human Rights of the UN be applied in Asian and African countries and supported 24 April as the anti-colonial day of Asian-African Students. Furthermore, the conference specifically condemned racial discrimination at South African universities and supported resistance to it by students and teachers. The AASC demanded that students have a role in easing world tensions in general and in African and Asian countries in particular by adhering to the principles of the UN Charter and urging nuclear weapons tests to be stopped and nuclear science used for peaceful purpose as adopted in the International Conference on Atomic Energy in Geneva in 1955.74 Like the Bandung Conference, the AASC did not produce a consensus on the establishment of a permanent regional organisation in the post-conference. The Egyptian delegation proposed the establishment of a permanent body under the name of the ‘Asiatic-African Youth Federation’ which would have headquarters in Asia and in Africa and branch offices in the representative nations. This institution would be responsible for organising a meeting of the delegates each year, one year in Africa and one year in Asia alternately.75 This proposal worried Harry Lunn, the former president of the NSA who worked for the CIA, who had come to Bandung undercover as a journalist from the Christian Science Monitor.76 However, this proposal was opposed by Pakistan and received little support at the conference. Likewise, the proposal of the Cameroon delegation which proposed the idea of ​​establishing a ‘Bandung-Fund’ which aimed to promote cooperation between Asian and African students and support students in the oppressed countries did not materialise. Nonetheless, the AASC facilitated closer relations between Asian and African students. Several delegates of Indonesian students – Aminudin, Emil Salim, Nini Karim, Achmad Djainal Padang – were invited by a delegation of Indian students to come to the Congress of the National Union of Students of India in August 1956. They explained to Indonesian students the implementation of village community development and the role of students in the framework of the welfare of the Indian people.77 Also, China and North Vietnam invited Indonesian students to visit their country, while Burma sent an invitation for Indonesian students to participate in

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the Asian Students Games in Rangoon in December 1956. Meanwhile, the Islamic youth organisation Ansor Youth Movement (Gerakan Pemuda Ansor), which was affiliated with Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation Nahdatul Ulama, took advantage of the AASC moment by holding meetings with Islamic delegations from Pakistan, Morocco, Algeria, as well as the Chinese delegates who were Muslim.78 Egyptian students familiarised themselves with Chinese students in meetings where students sang Chinese, Arabic, and Indonesian songs. After the AASC was finished, Dr. Hassan and two other Egyptian student delegates from Alexandria University and Al Azhar stopped in China for a month at the invitation of the Chinese government.79 Meanwhile, a delegation from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam held a meeting with the Lao delegation to discuss problems facing the two countries. Vietnamese students also conducted meetings with delegates from Burma, Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco to strengthen their friendly relations. One of the AASC’s important contributions was that it became a link for the Algerian liberation movement to expand its international anti-colonial networks in Southeast Asia. The Algerian delegates who were members of the FLN went to Indonesia not only on a mission to come to the AASC, but also on a bigger duty: Benyahia settled in Indonesia as an ‘ambassador’ for Algeria and Brahimi stayed in Jakarta to learn English before settling in New Delhi.80 This plan vividly mirrored the internationalist character of the FLN, which in the 1950s also sent representatives to the Middle East, South Asia, Europe, and Latin America.81 Benyahia asked the Indonesian delegation for help to arrange a meeting with Sukarno after the AASC. Agreeing to meet with the Algerian students, Sukarno requested Indonesian students not only to take them, but also to mobilise the masses to ‘fill’ the Freedom Palace in Jakarta.82 Mass demonstrations and fiery speeches were typical ceremonial elements of Sukarno in ‘accumulating and demonstrating power’ in public.83 These elements were very important to show the symbolic support of the Indonesian people for Algeria’s freedom struggle. Before the meeting at the Merdeka Palace, Benyahia and Brahimi demonstrated at the French embassy in Indonesia with Indonesian students.84 At the Palace, Benyahia made a tearful speech telling of the fate of the Algerian people who were suffering under French colonialism. Sukarno, who was struck by the speech, declared: ‘The Republic of Indonesia defends Algeria! Tonight, I order the Minister of Foreign Affairs to go to the UN! Anyway, we will help Algeria with all our might.’85 The Indonesian government facilitated an office on Serang Road, Menteng, Jakarta, as the FLN headquarters in Southeast Asia and from here the Algerian students campaigned for and sought support for Algeria’s independence. However, Benyahia did not stay long and returned to Cairo due to illness and Brahimi eventually stayed in Jakarta and replaced him as the FLN representative. Jeffrey Byrne has stated that as ‘intrepid, resourceful, a firm believer in the power of diplomacy

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Figure 10.6. Mohammed Benyahia received a banner from the reception committee as a symbol of the AASC’s support for Algeria’s freedom struggle (ANRI).

and internationalism, Brahimi offers an example of how the FLN’s hardscrabble diplomacy managed to thrive against the odds.’86 From 1956 to 1961, Brahimi developed contacts with the Indonesian leaders from a broad spectrum of political backgrounds, with Mohammad Natsir from the Masjumi Islamic party, IJ Kasimo from the Catholic Party, and Hamid Algadri from the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI).87 Rosihan Anwar, a well-known journalist and member of the PSI who knew Brahimi, said that Brahimi’s formative years (22 to 27) in politics was forged by his interaction with socialist-democrats in Jakarta.88 From Jakarta Brahimi also travelled around Southeast Asia as part of his ‘diplomatic’ duties as an FLN overseas representative. Although it was proposed to be held in Cairo in June 1957, the second AASC never materialised. In February 1959, the Afro-Asian Youth Conference was conducted in Cairo, but it was the realisation of one of the resolutions produced by the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference in 1958.89 The proposal for an Afro-Asian agricultural symposium as the realisation of the AASC resolution was scheduled to be held at the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Indonesia in Bogor in 1959. However, this ended in a fiasco due to the lack of solidity of the local committee. The second AASC proposal was once again proposed by the United Arab Republic General Federations of Students to be held in August 1961, but again this attempt was unsuccessful.90 The AASC initiator from Indonesia, PPMI, held an international

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student conference inviting student representatives from 35 countries in 1962 in Jakarta. The event was called the Student Solidarity Meeting for the Liberation of West Irian, an attempt by Indonesian students to organise a campaign for the liberation of West Irian.91 The fiasco of holding the second AASC is probably not only related to the difficulty in consolidating collective movement but also because the years of student activism depend on the period of study. Students are not professionals, like politicians, writers, or journalists, so when the initiators of the AASC were busy with studies or graduated, regeneration was needed to continue the efforts they have pioneered. This is what made the AASC different from the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference, and the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Conference which were more sustainable despite the schisms within them.

Conclusion Within two years Bandung hosted conferences that coalesced international networks of Asian and African leaders and activists. In contrast to the widely celebrated the 1955 intergovernmental Conference of Asian-African Countries, the 1956 Asian-African Students’ Conference is not well-known in the public memory. There are three possible causes. First, in contrast to other Afro-Asian movements that emerged afterwards, the AASC was organised not by renowned figures, but by students who were just starting a career in political activism. Second, the AASC was short-lived when compared to other Afro-Asian movements given that students did not stay active as ‘youth activists’; they transformed into political leaders, technocrats, or activists with other professional backgrounds. Third, although this conference sustained the Bandung Moment, the AASC was in the shadow of Bandung. This chapter locates the Asian-African Students’ Conference in a larger narrative of the Bandung Moment and more importantly as part of the decolonisation movement in the 1950s. This is important to emphasise the role played by students in the anti-colonial and Afro-Asian movements and the position of the AASC in strengthening the ongoing decolonisation process. In his first-hand report of the conference, Willard Hanna appreciated that the AASC provided opportunities for students across Asia and Africa to meet and have an extensive dialogue on their concerns. Yet, he closed his report with a conclusion that ‘the AASC may be the by no means novel or surprising one that Asian-African students, like their Asian-African elders, are still profoundly stirred by the old slogans of anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism, are inspired at least equally by the emerging concepts of Asian-African nationalism and of a joint Asian-African front in international affairs, are groping for a formula of reconciliation not only

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between pro- and anti-communists but between East and West, and have seized upon one new watchword which both East and West are likely to hear much more: the ‘Bandung Spirit.’92 I argue that this view fails to capture the whole picture of the zeitgeist of the Asian and African countries at that moment, where anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism were not merely catchwords but part of the struggle to build a new world order. In addition, the binary narrative of West versus East was not appropriate as the Afro-Asian students who gathered were not anti-Western, but opposed imperialist action carried out by Western powers. The AASC provided a venue for Afro-Asian students to formulate the ideal educational condition for post-colonial countries. They constructed a decolonisation framework in education to tear down what Anibal Quijano has called ‘the coloniality of power.’93 European colonialism created a discriminatory education system on the basis of race, class and gender, and therefore the AASC asserted that education in post-colonial countries must guarantee equal rights to access education. The AASC also encouraged the use of national languages ​​and the writing of Asian and African histories. As a result of colonialism, the colonial language replaced the mother tongue in Asian-African countries. This was exemplified by Syrian delegates who shared the story of an Algerian friend who suffered from not being able to speak his mother tongue, Arabic. Meanwhile, colonial domination caused the history of Asia and Africa to be written as the history of the Europeans in the colony. In Indonesia, this had led historians and intellectuals to rewrite the history of their own nation based on an Indonesiasentris perspective replacing Neerlandosentris. Furthermore, the impact of the Afro-Asian solidarity movement could be seen in teaching at universities. The two most important universities in Indonesia, the University of Indonesia and Gadjah Mada, invited the Secretary General of the Bandung Conference, Roeslan Abdulgani, as visiting professor to give lectures on the History of Afro-Asian Awakening and Revolution in the early and mid 1960s.94 Nevertheless, one of the crucial contributions of the AASC was that it gave rise to what Elisabeth Armstrong has called the ‘solidarity of possibility.’95 Through their participation in the AASC, young Algerians were not only successful in echoing their struggle for independence to their Afro-Asian comrades, but also carved out new relationships with Indonesian students which led to the facilitation of an office in Jakarta by Sukarno. This office was the FLN’s overseas headquarters in Southeast Asia and from here Brahimi was actively forging new networks to increase the force of the liberation struggle in his homeland. The Indonesian government maintained relations with the Algeria leaders, supported the issue of Algeria in UN sessions, and welcomed the establishment of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic (GPRA) in Cairo in September 1958.96 Thanks to the great support from Indonesia, President of GPRA Ferhat Abbas visited Jakarta in 1961.

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An Indonesian national newspaper, Suluh Indonesia, ran the headline ‘The people of Jakarta welcome their comrades in arms.’97 For a week, Abbas not only held diplomatic meetings with Indonesian leaders in Jakarta, but also toured Bandung, Yogyakarta, and Surakarta. In Bandung, Abbas visited the Freedom Building, the venue for the Bandung Conference and the Asian and African Students’ Conference, which was at that moment used as the building of Provisional People’s Consultative Assembly (Majelis Permusyawaratan Rakyat Sementara). For Abbas, this place had an important meaning in the struggle for the liberation of his homeland. Perhaps one of its most lasting legacies was the AASC’s formation of new nodes of Algeria’s anti-colonial networks in Southeast Asia and a greater international campaign from the Third World for Algerian independence.

Notes I am grateful to Elisabeth Armstrong, Su Lin Lewis, and Rob Skinner for providing helpful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to the participants of Other Bandungs seminars and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill-University of Bristol decolonisation workshop and Norman Joshua, Eunike Setiadarma, Deni Rachman, and Thiti Jamkajornkeiat for helping access resources. 1

Fotso Odon, ‘The Student Delegate of Cameroons,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, Bandung May 30-June 7, 1956 (Bandung: Indonesian National Preparatory Committee for the AsianAfrican Students’ Conference, 1956), 90.

2

Christopher J. Lee, ‘Between a Moment and an Era: The Origins and Afterlives of Bandung,’ in Christopher J. Lee (ed.), Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), 17.

3

Willard Hanna, The Little Bandung Conference: A Letter from Willard A. Hanna (New York: American Universities Field Staff, 1956).

4

Christopher J. Lee, ‘Anti-Colonialism: Origins, Practices, and Historical Legacies,’ in Martin Thomas and Andrew S. Thompson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Ends of Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 445.

5

See Harian Rakjat, 9 May, 25 May, and 18 June 1956; Bintang Timur 9 May 1956.

6

‘Manifesto of the Afro-Asian Students’ Conference in the U.K.,’ 15 May 1955, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312) Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

7

‘Manifesto of the Afro-Asian,’ 15 May 1955, W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312), University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

8

‘The Second Afro-Asian Students Conference,’ 7 August 1956, FCO 141/5050, The National Archives (TNA), London, 4.

9

These terms refer to the periodisation that took place in Asia where the end of World War II and Indonesia’s independence in 1945 marked the beginning of decolonisation. The colonial era discussed here stretches from the early twentieth century to 1945, while the decolonisation period encompasses from 1945 to the 1950s.

10

See Dan Hodgkinson and Luke Melchiorre, ‘Introduction: Student Activism in an Era of Decolonization,’ Africa 89, Supplement S1 (2019), S1-S14.

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11

See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2003); Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Marc Matera, Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (California: University of California Press, 2015); Klaas Stutje, Campaigning in Europe for a Free Indonesia: Indonesian Nationalist and the Worldwide Anti-colonial Movement, 1917-1931 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2019). Exceptions are works from Talal Al-Rashoud, ‘From Muscat to the Maghreb: Pan-Arab Networks, Anti-Colonial Groups, and Kuwait’s Arab Scholarship (1953-1961),’ Arabian Humanities 12 (2019); and Pedro Monaville, ‘The Political Life of the Dead Lumumba: Cold War Histories and the Congolese Student Left,’ Africa 89, Supplement S1 (2019), S15-S39.

12

See Karen M. Paget, Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).

13

Su Lin Lewis, ‘Asian Socialism and the Forgotten Architects of Post-Colonial Freedom, 1952-1956,’ Journal of World History 30, no. 1-2 (2019), 55-88.

14

PPMI is a federation of extra-university organisations in Indonesia that is founded in 1947 as a communication and cooperation institution that concerns national and universal interests of student affairs, see Dawam Rahardjo, ‘Gerakan Mahasiswa dalam Perspektif Sejarah’ in Dawam Rahardjo, Intelektual, Inteligensia, dan Perilaku Politik Bangsa: Risalah Cendekiawan Muslim (Bandung: Mizan, 1993), 89.

15

Berita Persiapan Konperensi Mahasiswa Se Asia-Afrika, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden Republik Indonesia 1950-1959, no. 521, National Archives of the Republic of Indonesia (ANRI), Jakarta, 1.

16

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, Bandung May 30-June 7, 1956 (Bandung: Indonesian National Preparatory Committee for the Asian-African Students’ Conference, 1956), 15.

17

M. Zein Hassan, Diplomasi Revolusi Indonesia di Luar Negeri (Jakarta: Bulan Bintang, 1980); Kevin W. Fogg, Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

18

Departemen Luar Negeri Indonesia, Pewarta Departemen Luar Negeri (Jakarta: Departemen Luar Negeri Republik Indonesia, 2004), 143-4.

19

Ketua Partai Neo-Destour, Habib Burquibah Berpidato tentang Perjuangan Kemerdekaan Tunisia di Hadapan Seksi Luar Negeri DPR, 16 April 1951, Arsip Foto Kementerian Penerangan Wilayah Jakarta 1951, no. 190, ANRI.

20

Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 1.

21

‘Report from Indonesia to the coming Afro Asian Students Conference,’ Indonesia Social and Political Developments Collection, no. 18, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam; Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 1.

22

Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 2; ‘Asian-African Students Conference,’ 26 January 1956, FCO 141/5050, TNA.

23

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 16; Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 1.

24

Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 2.

25

‘The Forthcoming Bandung Student Conference,’ Department of State Office of Intelligence Research, 30 April 1956, FO 371/123271, TNA.

26

Hanna, The Little Bandung Conference, 4.

27

‘Report from Indonesia,’ Indonesia Social and Political Developments Collection, no. 18, IISH; Hanna, The Little Bandung Conference, 4. See also ‘Annual Session of the Council of the International Union of Students,’ August 1954, International Union of Students (IUS) Collection, no. 83, IISH.

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28

Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, 147.

29

Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 2; ‘Asian-African Students Conference,’ 26 January 1956, FCO 141/5050, TNA.

30

Panitia Penjusun Biro Pemuda Departemen P.D. & K., Sejarah Perdjuangan Pemuda Indonesia (Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1965), 252.

31

Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 99.

32

‘President Sukarno Speech at the Opening of AA Conference on April 18, 1955,’ Dr. Roeslan Abdulgani Archives Period 1950-1976, no. 1806, ANRI; Final Communiqué of Asian-African Conference in Bandung, 24 April 1955, L.N. Palar 1928-1981 Archives, no. 123, ANRI.

33

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 22.

34

The IPC also provided three representatives seats for students from Burma, Egypt, and Iran. However, they could not attend the meeting.

35

‘Report from Indonesia,’ Indonesia Social and Political Developments Collection, no. 18, IISH.

36

Berita Persiapan, December 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI, 6; The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 20.

37

National Preparatory Committee for Asian-African Students’ Conference to Sukarno, 16 October 1955, Kabinet Presiden, no. 521, ANRI; Berita Persiapan K.M.A.A, no. 2, March 1956, 2.

38

All photo collections from ANRI come from the inventory of Arsip Foto Kementerian Penerangan Jawa Barat 1956.

39

See John D. Legge, Sukarno: A Political Biography (New York: Praeger, 1972); Rudolf Mrazek, Sjahrir: Politics and Exile in Indonesia (Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1994).

40

Roeslan Abdulgani, The Bandung Connection: The Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955 (Singapore: Gunung Agung, 1981), 165.

41

Ali Sastroamidjojo, ‘Address of the Prime Minister of Indonesia Dr. Ali Sastroamidjojo,’ in The AsianAfrican Students’ Conference, 36-37.

42

‘The Era of Asian and African Nationalism,’ Speech by President at the National Press Club, 18 May 1956, Kabinet Presiden, no. 2293, ANRI.

43

Sukarno, ‘Blessing Speech of Dr. Sukarno, President of the Republic of Indonesia,’ in The AsianAfrican Students’ Conference, 47. See also Mimbar Penerangan, no. 7, July 1956, 445-6; Pewarta Kemlu, no. 5-6, May-June 1956, 273.

44

Harian Rakjat, 31 May 1956, 1.

45

Harian Rakjat, 31 May 1956, 1.

46

The certain festival-like atmosphere of the AASC resembled to the Bandung Conference where the organisers allowed close physical access between the people and the conference delegates. See Naoko Shimazu, ‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,’ Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2014), 225-52.

47

Pedoman, 1 June 1956, 1.

48

Pikiran Rakjat, 1 June 1956, 1.

49

See Gene D. Overstreet and Marshall Windmiller, Communism in India (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), 400.

50

British Embassy Jakarta to South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, London, 7 June 1956, FO 371/123271, TNA; Koesnadi Hardjasoemantri, ‘Titik Singgung yang Selalu Berkelanjutan,’ in Wisaksono Noeradi (ed.), 70 Tahun Emil Salim: Revolusi Berhenti Hari Minggu (Jakarta: PT Kompas Media Nusantara, 2000), 23.

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51

The Malayan delegation read the speech in Malay initially to show appreciation for the Indonesian host, then continued with English. Malay language is the root of Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia.

52

Khin Maung Ohn, ‘Student Delegation of Burma,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 61.

53

Sentici Mohamed, ‘Student Delegation of Morocco,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 111; Glokpor Foli Georges, ‘Student Delegation of Togo, in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 142.

54

Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New

55

Mohamed Benyahia, ‘Student Delegation of Algeria,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 54.

56

Benyahia, ‘Student Delegation of Algeria,’ 59.

57

Harian Rakjat, 4 June 1956, 1.

58

Guillermo De Vega, ‘Student Delegation of the Philippines,’ in in The Asian-African Students’

York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 42.

Conference, 124-5. 59

De Vega, ‘Student Delegation of the Philippines,’ 125; New York Times, 8 June 1956.

60

De Vega, ‘Student Delegation of the Philippines,’ 122.

61

Harian Rakjat, 5 June 1956, 1.

62

Javad Vafa, ‘The Student Delegate of Iran,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 74; Pran Sabharwal, ‘The Indian Student Delegation,’ in The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 79; New York Times, 6 June 1956, 15.

63

Odon, ‘The Student Delegate of Cameroons,’ 90-91.

64

New York Times, 6 June 1956, 15; Harian Rakjat, 6 June 1956, 1.

65

Harian Rakjat, 6 June 1956, 1.

66

Harian Rakjat, 6 June 1956, 1.

67

New York Times, 6 June 1956, 15; Harian Rakjat, 6 June 1956, 1.

68

‘Indonesia Wary of Youth Parley,’ New York Times, 7 June 1956, FO 371/123271, TNA.

69

Hanna, The Little Bandung Conference, 23.

70

Pikiran Rakjat, 8 June 1956, 1; Harian Rakjat, 8 June 1956, 1.

71

‘Bandung Juniors,’ Manchester Guardian, 7 June 1956, FO 371/123271, TNA; New York Times, 8 June 1956, 23.

72

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 160-1.

73

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 160-5.

74

The Asian-African Students’ Conference, 167-8.

75

New York Times, 5 June 1956, 9

76

To see Lunn’s role in sabotaging the AASC’s aims through the American proxies, see Paget, Patriotic Betrayal, chapter 9 ‘The Spirit of Bandung.’ New York Times, 7 June 1956 and Harian Rakjat, 1 and 5 June 1956 also reported about Lunn’s suspicious activities in Bandung.

77

Pedoman, 15 June 1956, 1.

78

Harian Rakjat, 7 June 1956, 1.

79

From Cairo to Foreign Office, 23 May 1956, FO 371/123271, TNA.

80

Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 42.

81

Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 41.

82

Eka Budianta, ‘Hitam Putih Emil Salim,’ in Iwan Jaya Aziz, et. al (eds), Pembangunan Berkelanjutan: Peran dan Kontribusi Emil Salim (Jakarta: Kepustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2010), 546.

83

Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Jakarta: Equinox, 2006), 26-27.

84

Sintong Silaban, Sabam Sirait: Untuk Demokrasi Indonesia (Jakarta: Pustaka Forum Adil Sejahtera, 1997), 95.

a forgotten bandung 239

85

Budianta, ‘Hitam Putih,’ 546.

86

Byrne, Mecca of Revolution, 42.

87

Rosihan Anwar, Napak Tilas ke Belanda: 60 Tahun Perjalanan Wartawan KMB 1949 (Jakarta: Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2010), 95.

88

Anwar, Napak Tilas, 95.

89

‘Afro-Asian Youth Conference, Cairo, February 1959,’ 16 October 1958, AC/52-D (58) 50, NATO Archives Online.

90

‘Review of Afro-Asian Activities, December, 1960-June, 1961,’ 28 July 1961, FCO 141/10962, TNA, 6.

91

Api Kartini, May-June 1962, 3.

92

Hanna, The Little Bandung Conference, 26.

93

Anibal Quijano, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,’ Cultural Studies 21:2 (2007), 168-78.

94

See Wildan Sena Utama, ‘Afro-Asianism in the Indonesian Academy,’ in Afro-Asian Visions Blog, https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/afro-asianism-in-indonesian-academy-d38223fd884d. See Surat Putusan Menteri Perguruan Tinggi dan Ilmu Pengetahuan Republik Indonesia, 29 June 1961, Roeslan Abdulgani, no. 425, ANRI; Siti Baroroh Baried to Roeslan Abdoelgani, 10 August 1965, Roeslan Abdulgani, no. 1392, ANRI.

95

Elisabeth Armstrong, ‘Before Bandung: The Anti-Imperialist Women’s Movement in Asia and the Women’s International Democratic Federation,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41:2 (2016), 305-31.

96

Pengumuman Pemerintah no. 135 tentang Hubungan dengan Pemerintah Aljazair, 27 September 1958, Kabinet Presiden, no. 592, ANRI.

97

Suluh Indonesia, 21 January 1961, 1.

Yesterday and Today yesterday a peasant a soldier without rank today he lies prostrate in Beirut the tale still shakes the earth with trampling steps the colonialists swallow cities everything withers and lies scorched no time to gaze at sweetheart and parents where will sorrow go where the enemy steps in front yesterday a peasant a common soldier today he lies prostrate in Beirut facing victory in his heart over the dust of the roads heavy steps resound the Arab patriots enter town their voices echo in the hearts arise ye Arab patriots the age of victory is right ahead yesterday a peasant a soldier true today in Beirut he was slain in Beirut he will live again Ferdinand Lodewijk Risakotta Transl. Bintang Suradi Dedicated to the Second Conference of Afro-Asian Writers Indonesia Sings of Afro-Asia (Jakarta: League of People’s Culture Indonesia, 1962).

CHAPTER 11

Dispatches from Havana: The Cold War, Afro-Asian Solidarities, and Culture Wars in Pakistan Ali Raza

Abstract This chapter traces the journey of Abdullah Malik, a noted writer, journalist, and communist from Pakistan, to the Cultural Congress of Havana in 1968. Through Malik’s account, this chapter ties the Havana Congress to larger debates around culture, socialism, and freedom in Pakistan during the Cold War. In doing so, it documents the significance of international conferences and congresses for progressives given the tense battle of ideas in Pakistan. In that sense, the Havana Congress was not simply an isolated event organized at the behest of Cuba’s revolutionary government. Instead, it was emblematic of a post-Bandung world in which debates over culture, politics, and the future of the Third World were central to the worldview and imagination of progressive intellectuals, writers, artists, and poets.

Keywords: Cold War, Third Worldism, Pakistan, Cuba, progressive writers

For a week in January 1968, socialists from across the world convened in Cuba for the first Cultural Congress of Havana. The Congress was described by one delegate as an ‘international conference’ for ‘enlightened and independent thinkers, communist writers, journalists, artists, scientists, doctors and religious divines’.1 With over 400 delegates from more than 70 countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas, the purpose of this august assembly was to raise a rallying cry against imperialism, and more specifically, American imperialism. Its more immediate concern, however, was to deliberate upon ways in which the ‘malign’ cultural influence of (American) Imperialism could be combatted. The attending delegates made passionate appeals to their fellow intellectuals, artists, and writers across the Third World to combat the pernicious and reactionary cultural influence of the United States and the grotesque role it had played in retarding the development of their arts and literature. Third World intellectuals were also asked to lend their support to the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese people against American imperialism. After a week of intense and fractious debates, the conference eventually concluded

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with a fiery two-hour speech by Fidel Castro who declared the conference, ‘the first of its type’, an unqualified success.2 Castro was, however, only half correct. The Congress was certainly the first of its kind to be convened in Havana. It was also, Castro claimed, unique in terms of the diversity of its representation and the unanimity expressed by its delegates against the ‘universal enemy’ of mankind: ‘Yankee Imperialism’.3 And yet, the Havana Congress was part of a longer history of similar Congresses and conventions, including, most obviously, the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (better known as the Tricontinental Conference), held in Havana in 1966.4 What the Cultural Congress of Havana signified was that future of the Third World, along with the attendant questions of socialism and anti-imperialism, was contingent on the crucial role of ‘culture’. How would the Third World be imaginatively cultivated through literature and the arts? How was Third World literature to be understood and defined? What were the responsibilities of progressive intellectuals, writers, poets, and artists in the development and cultivation of this cultural sphere? Such questions had been asked in virtually all Afro-Asian Writers Conferences from the 1950s to the 1970s. In that sense the Cultural Congress of Havana was very much reflective of a period in which progressive intellectuals across the recently decolonized world sought to carve a new cultural space, and a new future, for their respective countries. As the declaration of the 1961 Afro-Asian Writers Congress in Tokyo put it, the movement in AfroAsian countries for independence from European Imperialism may have been a political movement from an ‘objective’ standpoint, but more than anything else, it was a cultural revival from a human standpoint.5 Joining this celebration of Third World solidarity in Havana were luminaries of the Afro-Asian world, including CLR James, John La Rose, Aime Cesaire, Roberto Matta, Rene Depestre, and Abdul Rahman Al-Sharqawi. Their presence made the conference an even more special occasion for Abdullah Malik (1920–2003), a prolific writer, journalist, and communist from Pakistan. Malik, along with Pakistan’s most prominent poet, and recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, had been invited to Havana for the Congress. While Faiz was prevented from attending the conference by Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship, Abdullah Mailk had no such constraints. He was based in London at the time and took the opportunity to visit Cuba, the land of his dreams. For progressives across the Third World, including Pakistan, revolutionary Cuba stood as a powerful symbol of socialism and anti-imperialism. As Malik put it, it was as important for the young generation to learn about Cuba’s success as it had been for his to learn about Lenin’s and Mao’s revolutions.6 More than anyone else, Cuba stood for all that the Third World could, and should, be. More than Vietnam, Algeria, or other states, it was Cuba that provided not only a template for socialism and anti-imperialism, but also the leadership for what was imagined as

dispatches from havana 245

the Third World. And with the Havana Congress, Cuba also emerged as yet another trailblazer for reopening the question of culture, socialism, and freedom. Much like their comrades elsewhere in the Third World, these questions were significant for Pakistani leftists. Indeed, debates around national culture and its uncertain trajectory had occupied the attention of intellectuals, writers, and artists since the country’s inception in 1947. Conducted between ostensibly opposed political and ideological camps, these debates aptly reflected anxieties relating to the direction and precarious future of the nascent state. For progressive writers and intellectuals, Pakistani literature had to be oriented towards addressing questions of socio-economic injustice and Anglo-American imperialism. As part of their mission therefore, Pakistani progressives – through poems, short stories, plays, travelogues, and commentaries – wrote extensively on socialism and anti-imperialism. In doing so, they also sought to align Pakistani literature and cultural expression with similar cultural experiments elsewhere in the socialist world. A key part of that was cultivating the imagination of a post-Bandung Third World that would collectively inaugurate a new destiny, a new future for humanity at large. For that reason, paeans, commentaries, and tributes to national liberation heroes, independence struggles and socialist movements from across the Afro-Asian world – from Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere to the Algerian and Vietnamese wars for independence – were regularly penned and disseminated through print, radio, and other cultural and academic platforms. There was, then, a lot at stake for Abdullah Malik and his interlocutors at the Havana Congress. For Malik, the Havana Congress, promised intellectual sustenance, continued support, solidarity, and important lessons for progressives in Pakistan. In that, it was like the Afro-Asian Congresses before, and after, it. Together, these international conventions were significant for Pakistani progressives given the tense battle of ideas in which the role of literature and the arts were continually up for debate. The Havana Congress, then, was not simply an isolated event. Instead, it was emblematic of a post-Bandung world in which debates about culture, politics, and the future of the Third World were central to the worldview and imagination of progressive intellectuals, writers, artists, and poets, in Pakistan and elsewhere. This chapter, in charting Malik’s sojourn in Cuba, will link up the politics of the Havana Congress with larger debates and discussions around culture, socialism, and freedom in Pakistan during the Cold War.

‘We Are and We Are Not’ Irwin Silber (1925–2010), music critic, editor, publisher, and political activist, is celebrated for his songbooks and writings on American folk music. Of all his works,

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his edited anthology, Voices of National Liberation, is perhaps the least known of his contributions. Silber, too, had attended the Havana Congress and Voices of National Liberation was his glowing tribute to the vision of the Third World articulated by intellectuals and artists in Havana. In his introduction to this anthology of speeches, declarations, proceedings, and resolutions, Silber termed the emergence of the ‘Third World’ the most significant historical development since the end of the Second World War. It was there, he wrote, that ‘the destines of humanity will be resolved’. From the Korean peninsula, to Cuba, Algeria, the Middle East, Cuba, Santo Domingo, South Africa, Angola, and Vietnam, he exclaimed, ‘an old world is dying and a new one is being born’. And ushering in this new world were the ‘offspring’ of this Third World, men (and only men) like Mao Tse Tung, Fidel Castro, Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh, WEB Du Bois, Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X. For Irwin Silber, the Havana Congress marked a major step in the development of the revolutionary ideology of the ‘Third World’. This was, he remarked, ‘the time of the liberation of peoples’.7 These peoples, constituting the vast majority of the world’s population, had long been denied a voice and an opportunity for cultural, social, economic, and political expression. They existed, but their social, cultural, and political existence had long been denied by European imperialism and its American successor. Eloquently summing up this double bind was the Cuban writer, Edmundo Desnoes, who declared in his speech to the Congress: ‘we are and we are not’.8 For Silber and his fellow delegates, that way of the world was fast beginning to recede. ‘The wretched of the Earth’, he claimed, were at long last beginning to claim this world for their own. And in doing so, they were casting off the definitions imposed on them by European and American imperialisms and were defining themselves anew. Silber’s remarks were perhaps the most cogent summary of the proceedings at Havana. Speaker after speaker reflected on the need for a social, scientific, technological, economic, political, and cultural renewal of the Third World. Indeed, for all the euphoria surrounding national liberation movements, questions of freedom and independence would remain insufficiently answered without answering the concomitant question of what a Third World should look like. Without the creation of this world, ‘independence’ from western colonialism and imperialism would be incomplete and be an independence in name alone. For that reason, the creation of this world was as much the responsibility of intellectuals, writers, artists, scientists, as it was of the leaders of a rapidly decolonizing world. Imperialism had eroded and cheapened the meaning of ‘Man’ and had reduced him to a racist and ‘selfish, greedy, war-like, power-hungry man’. In its place, a New Man had to be crafted, a ‘man’ who would advance ‘humankind to a new level of civilization and culture’. In sum, ‘a personality, a system of values, a code of morality, a science – in short – a culture’ based on the specific and common conditions of the Third World had to

dispatches from havana 247

be inaugurated by its intellectuals.9 Indeed, the five ‘commissions’ of the Congress aptly conveyed the ambition and the urgency of these critical tasks. Together, the commissions on ‘Culture and National Independence’, ‘Integral Growth of Man’, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals with Respect to the Problems of the Underdeveloped World’, ‘Culture and Mass Media’, and the ‘Problems of Artistic Creation and Scientific and Technical Work’, extensively deliberated on these pressing matters and produced by the end of the conference a series of resolutions and treatises that called on intellectuals across the Third World to respond to the need of the moment and orient themselves and their craft to ushering in a rejuvenated world and a redeemed humanity. Why were intellectuals considered to be at the heart of the battle for national liberation? As the Commission on the ‘Responsibility of Intellectuals’ put it, there was ‘a profound relationship’ in the tricontinental world ‘between the problems of the revolution and those of culture’. ‘Pure’ intellectual activity, the delegates argued, did not exist. The intellectual necessarily had to take a position in a world riven by strife and inequality. Moreover, intellectuals could ‘serve the revolutionary struggle on different fronts: the ideological, the political, and the military’. Indeed, their participation was crucial because: Every struggle against imperialism and neo-colonialism automatically becomes a struggle for the access of people to culture: the struggles for national liberation thus assume the wonderful and heroic form of a defense of knowledge and beauty. The intellectual is, therefore, twice bound to them: his struggle is at the same time one to change the world and to transform reality in the domain of art and science.10

The cultural sphere was where the stakes for freedom and socialism were highest. Colonial and imperialist domination had ‘deform(ed) and annihilated the culture of subjugated peoples’ in what amounted to a ‘cultural genocide’.11 Countries under imperialist domination had to liberate themselves by recovering ‘their social being, their humanity, their dignity and their capacity for appreciating beauty’, all of which had been alienated and eroded by colonialism.12 The question of creating the New Man, then, could not be adequately answered without recognizing that ‘art and literature, as forms of the social consciousness of the highest human communication, constitute an essential factor for the formation of the integral man’.13 While the definition of what the ‘integral man’ could or should look like was considerably expansive and occasionally convoluted, there was a clear consensus that the route to cultivating this individual lay through a cultural expression that rejected the ‘deforming elements of imperialist influence’.14 These fiery speeches and treatises left a profound impression on Abdullah Malik. The Havana Congress marked the first opportunity for Abdullah Malik to

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visit Cuba. Precisely what Cuba meant to him was indicated by the fact that his daily reporting of his seventeen-day visit, including his description of the Havana Congress, was couched in a much longer account of the island, together with a mournful depiction of its tortured colonial history and an ecstatic celebration of its anti-imperialist and revolutionary present. Arranged in the form of letters, Cuba say Chand Khutoot (Letters from Cuba), is a compilation of thirteen ‘letters’ followed by daily journal entries of Malik’s stay in Havana and his experiences during the Havana Congress. Addressed to his son Kausar, the letters were initially penned in the first few months of 1968 and later edited and compiled by Malik during his brief stint in jail under the dictatorship of General Yahya Khan in 1971. Far from being unusual, the epistolary form was quite common for texts of this genre. The letters presented in these texts frequently combined historical analysis with political commentaries, travelogues, and personal experiences. Thus, Malik’s ‘letters’ addressed issues ranging from the significance of Cuba’s revolution to an overview of Cuba’s history from Christopher Columbus to the Cold War. In between, his letters also commented extensively on Fidel Castro’s commendable leadership, Cuba’s anti-imperialism, its support to national liberation struggles around the world and involvement in Angola, the Cuban missile crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion, and Cuba’s relationship with the United States and the USSR. These letters were then followed by a concluding account of Malik’s trip to Cuba and his impressions of the Havana Congress. Clearly, the form of the text itself was suggestive that the Havana Congress for Malik was both a continuation and a culmination of Cuba’s revolutionary history. But this text served another purpose too. For its intended audience in Pakistan, Cuba say Chand Khutoot, was intended to introduce revolutionary Cuba to the Pakistani public, or at any rate, those who were aligned with the Left. To that extent, Malik was hardly alone in this endeavor. Other leftist writers, intellectuals, and activists regularly wrote about their travels in the socialist and communist bloc. The renowned poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, whilst denied permission to attend the Havana Congress, wrote a travelogue of Cuba when he was finally allowed to visit.15 This was in addition to countless other texts that reproduced revolutionary tracts, treatises, speeches, and political commentaries from across the socialist and communist world. Within this literary world, Abdullah Malik was one of the most prolific writers in Pakistan. With more than two dozen books to his name, he had written other accounts of his travels in the socialist bloc – Arz-e-Samarkand o Bokhara, Prague say Chand Khutoot, Sofia say Chand Khutoot, Soviet Union: Naya Aaienaur Safar-Nama – along with his other works on the progressive movements in East and West Pakistan, and beyond. The explicit purpose of his travelogues was to dispel the alleged myths and misconceptions that people had of socialist and communist countries. The mass media under western, and specifically, American

dispatches from havana 249

imperialism, as the adverts for his other books in Cuba say Chand Khutoot alleged, had succeeded in portraying an image of socialist countries as repressed societies where there were no individual freedoms, civil liberties, material resources, social and economic advancement, family life, and so on. To correct these ostensible misconceptions, his works offered detailed and celebratory accounts of socialism in these countries. He was, an advert claimed, the first writer and intellectual to have extensively toured socialist countries and written about them.16 Malik struck a similar tone in his reporting of the Havana Congress. His admiration for Cuba wasn’t merely an expression of his communist sympathies. Rather, as a noted writer and intellectual, he considered it his duty to rally to the cause of Cuba and national liberation struggles the world over. There had been an earlier moment, he remarked, when intellectuals, journalists, artists, writers, poets, and political activists had come together to fight for socialism and progressivism against fascism and imperialism. The event in question was the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). At that time, he wrote, no one had asked whether literary figures should ally themselves with explicitly political causes. Instead, those individuals felt duty-bound to join the socialist and progressive camp. If anything, it had been morally incumbent on them to do so.17 Much like their forebears, intellectuals and artists in the present moment could not afford to distance themselves from the moral and political crises of their moment. And chief amongst the crises confronting them was the domination of American imperialism and the struggle for national and socialist self-determination across the Third World.

The Cold War, Culture Wars, and Pakistan In making this argument, Malik was also alluding to another history of struggle. This struggle was relatively closer to home. By way of a formal chronological marker, this struggle began in 1935 when an organization by the name of the All India Progressive Writers Association (Anjuman-i-Tarraqqi Pasand Musaneefeen) was formed by political dissidents and intellectuals in London. Founded by literary luminaries like Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand, the founding manifesto of the PWA issued a clarion call for re-orienting literature in the Indian subcontinent. It began by noting the ‘radical changes’ underway in Indian society. ‘Fixed ideas’, ‘old beliefs’ and outmoded political institutions, it claimed, were rapidly giving way to a new society and Indian literature had been slow in responding to the changes. Indian literature was, instead, afflicted by a tendency to ‘escape from the actualities of life’. It tried to find ‘refuge from reality in baseless spiritualism and idealism’ with the result that it had become ‘anaemic in body and mind’ and had ‘adopted a rigid formalism and a banal and perverse ideology’. In doing so, it merely became

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part of the ‘spirit of reaction’ that sought to stymie the march of progress. What, then, should the role of Indian writers be? In its most oft-quoted passages, the manifesto went on to say that, It is the duty of Indian writers to give expression to the changes taking place in Indian life and to assist the spirit of progress in the country … It is the object of our Association to rescue literature and other arts from the priestly, conservative, and decadent classes in whose hands they have degenerated so long, to bring the arts into the closest touch with the people and to make them the vital organs which will register the actualities of life, as well as lead us to the future. While claiming to be the inheritors of the best traditions of Indian civilization, we shall criticise ruthlessly, in all its political, economic, and cultural aspects, the spirit of reaction in our country, and we shall foster through interpretative and creative work (with both native and foreign resources) everything that will lead our country to the new life for which it is striving. We believe that the new literature of India must deal with the basic problems of our existence today – the problems of hunger and poverty, social backwardness and political subjection, so that it may help us to understand these problems, and through such understanding help us to act.18

The formal expression of this politics had long been in coming. As Shabana Mahmud notes, socialist and communist literature was profoundly influential in the aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. Much of it was banned by the Indian government. Russian writers such as Gorki, Gogol, Turgenev, and Chekov were widely translated into Urdu and other languages. Chekov, in particular, was profoundly influential. Indeed, it is difficult to understate his influence on the thematic and formal development and evolution of the genre of short stories. Influenced by these and other English and French writers, Indian writers sought to ‘explore and experiment with new styles and techniques in writing’.19 The PWA, then, sought to provide a formal orientation to rapidly evolving literary forms and concerns. And in so doing, it left an indelible imprint on the Indian literary world and, in particular, on Urdu and Hindi literature. With decolonization and Partition in 1947, the PWA split into its constituent Pakistani and Indian branches.20 In Pakistan, the PWA also functioned as a front of the Communist Party of Pakistan after the latter was banned in 1954. Whilst limited in numbers, the influence of progressive writers cannot be understated. They were writing and attempting to influence the trajectory of a nascent nation-state. Evoked most famously by Faiz, who compared the dawn of independence to a leprous daybreak,21 progressive writers recognized that substantive freedom lay further along the horizon. The dreams they had of independence and decolonization remained unfulfilled.22 Additionally, freedom from religious orthodoxy and Anglo-American imperialism – both frequently viewed as two sides of the same coin – were also

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very much in the sights of these writers. More importantly perhaps, these writers also sought to cultivate the spirit of Afro-Asian solidarity that was very much the prevailing sentiment at the time. These sentiments were expressed through poems, short stories, journals, and non-print mediums like theatre, radio, and films. Figures like Patrice Lumumba, Nyerere, Castro, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, in addition to the more familiar figures of Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, were frequently venerated. Similarly, Pakistan writers regularly participated in Afro Asian Writers Conference, where again, the question of culture was paramount. If the question of culture was crucial for progressive writers and their allies, it was equally important for their opponents and detractors. Despite their varying intellectual, ideological, and political concerns, they were united by their contention that the progressives were ‘anti national’. For the progressives, this charge was, unfortunately, all too familiar. Hardly shy in voicing their internationalist sympathies, progressives in both the colonial and post-colonial state were suspected of having dual, and conflicting, loyalties. In the 1950s, these attacks were also led by former communists who turned against the macabre legacy of Stalinism. Regardless of their specific affiliations, though, the detractors of progressives argued for a socio-political polity that was disdainful of class antagonisms and cultural, linguistic, ethnic, and political ‘separatism’. They argued for a strong state that was capable of instituting a uniform social, political and cultural order that was distinctly ‘Pakistani’ and in touch with its ostensibly enlightened Indo-Islamic heritage.23 Within this artistic and intellectual constellation, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) emerged as one of the most important platforms arraigned against progressive literature and progressive politics. The Congress was founded in June 1950, at a convention of ‘distinguished writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists’ in Berlin who gathered in ‘defence of creative and critical thought’. The founding Congress also issued a ‘Manifesto for Free Men’ which set out the CCF’s agenda. Amongst the 14 points of the manifesto upholding the values of peace and freedom – and, in particular, intellectual freedom, declared as ‘one of the inalienable rights of man’, – the Congress unequivocally condemned totalitarianism in a broadside aimed at the Soviet Union and the Socialist bloc. Totalitarian states were declared as the ‘greatest challenge which man has been called on to meet in the course of civilized history’. The ‘theory and practice of these regimes’ the manifesto noted, ran ‘counter to the basic rights of the individual and the fundamental aspirations of mankind as a whole’. Here too, the intellectual was called upon to take sides. The intellectual could not afford to ignore threats to intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. ‘Indifference or neutrality in the face of such a challenge’, the manifesto declared, amounted to ‘a betrayal of mankind and to the abdication of the free mind’. ‘The fate of man for generations’ depended on the choices these intellectuals made.24

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The Pakistan chapter of the CCF – with its Bangla and Urdu names of Pakistan Shakha Shanskhritik Azadi Pratishthan and Pakistan Kamiti Anjuman-e-Azadi-eTahzib – was founded in 1956. In addition to adopting the manifesto of the Berlin Congress as its guiding principle, the Pakistan Committee also dedicated itself to activities and objectives that were specific to its context. Chief amongst them was the commitment to highlight ‘the positive role of religion in combatting the atheistic principles of communism’. Alongside, the Pakistan Committee also pledged to highlight ‘the role of tradition in arts and literature’.25 That too, was a broadside aimed at the progressive commitment to overcome the influence of tradition, in both content and form, in arts and literature. Far from a marginal group, CCF Pakistan worked with some of the most eminent intellectuals and artists in East and West Pakistan such as AK Brohi, Dr. Mahmud Hussain, Sir Mohammad Zafarullah Khan, Professor Abdus Salam, Professor MM Sharif and others. It also worked in close collaboration with leading institutions like the Universities of Karachi, Dacca, and Punjab. Unbeknownst to most of its affiliates and members though, the CCF was propped up and supported by the CIA.26 It wasn’t until the mid-1960s that the links between the two were revealed in a series of damaging exposes in the American press.27 Whilst progressives had long suspected these linkages, the CCF’s affiliates in Pakistan were by and large oblivious to these connections, despite the fact that Congress’s activities were indisputably aligned with the Anglo-American camp. Thus, the association regularly expressed its fears of how the ‘fascination for communist ideology (had) cast a spell’ in Pakistan, particularly within the student community. The Soviet Union’s astronomical progress and achievements, along with the failure of democracy and emergence of dictatorships in Afro-Asian countries, it claimed, had left ‘young men’ disillusioned with western political institutions.28 It was thus incumbent on intellectuals in Pakistan not only to combat the dangers of an intellectual regimentation ostensibly promoted by communist ideology, but also to probe how their cultural, social, and religious resources could be employed to combat the pernicious influence of both extreme materialism and extreme collectivism.29 In making this claims, CCF Pakistan explicitly promoted Islam as an antidote capable of transcending these divides and providing a blueprint for Pakistan. As one conference noted, at no time had the role of religion been more important.30 Such arguments were incomplete without repeated critiques and attacks on the Soviet Union and its treatment of writers, intellectuals, and artists. Thus, in a resolution passed by CCF Pakistan in 1958 against the treatment of Nobel Laurate Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago,31 the Soviet ‘Empire’ was condemned for the ‘disgusting pressure’ brought to bear on Soviet writers. The Soviet Union’s tactics, the resolution noted, only revealed the ‘intended ultimate degradation of the human mind by Communism and the terror and inherent weakness of the whole system based on fear of police terror and concentration labour camps’. The

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resolution went to declare ‘Russian Communism’ as a ‘fanatical creed’ that did not tolerate any form of freedom of expression. It was, in fact, the origin, the lodestone, for the ‘total liquidation of a free press in the Asian and European countries under Communist control and the tragic subjugation of all arts and literature to totalitarian orders in the absurd name of the so-called socialist realism’.32 Few resolutions, statements, speeches, conveyed CCF Pakistan’s opposition to the socialist bloc and its allied intellectuals, artists, and writers than this statement. The Committee, then, was part of a broader cultural, political, and ideological battle between progressives and their opponents in Pakistan. This was a battle of ideas for the future of Pakistan in which the United States and the Soviet Union were actively involved through their patronage of one camp or the other. From its very inception in 1947, Pakistan had been a source of concern for the Anglo-American camp. At a moment when communists were on the verge of victory in China and on the march in South East Asia, Pakistan was viewed as a ‘fertile field for Soviet intervention’. As it was, the Soviet Union was only separated from Pakistan by a tiny sliver of Afghan territory.33 For their part, the ruling Muslim League shared Anglo-American fears of communist encirclement. It also didn’t help that Pakistan, in the considered view of the British High Commissioner, ‘abound(ed) with excellent material for communist agitation’.34 From its very inception, Pakistan was one of the many battlegrounds on which communism was fought. The battle against communism was necessarily multi-pronged, in which ideational and cultural realms were as important as the use of state power. The invocation of Islam was crucial to this strategy. Notwithstanding the fact that communism had made inroads in ‘Muslim societies’, Islam could still be deployed as a crucial bulwark against communism in the battle over ideas and future trajectories. The daily Dawn summed up it best when it argued how ‘the spiritual force of Islam’ could play its part in repulsing ‘the false philosophy of Communism’.35 Pakistan, in many ways, was viewed as a crucible and as a laboratory where a new kind of Islam, more in tune with modern requirements, could fashion. This was an Islam that could not only provide Pakistan with an identity, it was an Islam that could also be exported elsewhere in the Muslim world. This was by and large a project actively supported by the Pakistan State. But this was also where the American backed CCF, alongside other platforms and political organizations, became even more significant. The CCF and its allies were instrumental in providing the intellectual heft and grist for this project. And for its part, the Pakistan government too, unequivocally supported these platforms. Thus, CCF platforms were regularly frequented and addressed by state and government functionaries.36 That alone was an indication of how central and significant these debates and platforms were. Much like their leftist counterparts in the shape of Afro-Asian conferences, platforms like the CCF were global in scope, and drew

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sustenance, ideological legitimation, and financial support from each other and their Cold War patrons. And again, similar to their leftist counterparts, these platforms, associations, and networks also saw the present moment as a crisis. With rapid decolonization in Africa and Asia, and the seemingly inexorable march of communism, the question of culture and the arts and their role in cultivating the New Man, was equally paramount for the CCF and similar platforms. Both camps sensed the urgency of their times. Both understood that the prevailing situation was untenable. Somewhere, somehow, one side would succumb and give way. The stakes for both were very high indeed.

Glimpsing the Future This urgency was powerfully reflected in the hundreds of impassioned speeches delivered at the Havana Congress. Speaker after speaker in the more than 150 speeches delivered at the Congress expressed their fears for their crisis-ridden moment. There was little doubt that American imperialism was intensifying its dominance and that social, cultural, economic, and political inequities between the Third World and the Euro-American World were intensifying. And yet, this moment also held out the promise of a transformed world. That was the official tone of the Congress too. Thus, while noting that this was a moment in which ‘American imperialism posed a universal threat to the future of culture and to the future of mankind itself’, the Congress also ‘emphasised the failure of U.S. imperialism in its useless attempt to crush the justice that is rightfully the peoples and of stopping the inexorable course of History’. Thus, despite everything that had been thrown in its way, ‘the image of the New Man’ was finally emerging after a prolonged and torturous history of struggle.37 There were few better examples of that than the ongoing titanic struggle in Vietnam, which the Congress paid rich tributes to. It was this conviction in a future that had long been in the making that led attending delegates to close the inaugural Cultural Congress of Havana with the resounding cries of: ‘The great heroic people of Vietnam will win! Mankind will win! Human culture and civilization will defeat the modern savagery of US imperialism! Long live the freedom and the independence of the peoples!’38

Malik too shared these convictions. But his account also complicated the triumphalist declarations of the Congress. Such slogans were in any case de rigueur for leftist conferences and public meetings, whether in Pakistan or elsewhere. Their triumphalism masked more complicated realities and unresolved internal crises.

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This is where Malik’s day-to-day reporting is at its most instructive. As a member of the ‘Commission on Culture and National Independence’, Malik witnessed several fractious debates that threatened to fracture the unity of socialist intellectuals that was loudly proclaimed on the official rostrum. His observations thus stand in stark contrast to the official and celebratory reporting of the Congress. Chief amongst the arguments reported by Malik was the dispute between Arab and European delegates on the question of Palestine and Zionism. In the joint appeal to intellectuals being drafted by the Commission, Arab delegates insisted on the insertion of a clause condemning Zionism and supporting the Palestinian struggle for self-determination by any means necessary. Their insistence did not sit well with their European counterparts, who insisted that while Israeli aggression was condemnable, it did not acquit Arab countries of their anti-Semitism and treatment of religious minorities. If anything, Arab countries had deliberately whipped up anti-Semitism to deceive their citizenry. In response, Arab delegates accused their European detractors of legitimating Zionism. There was little room for a compromise on the issue, not least because some Arab delegates, according to Malik, as official representatives of their states, had to toe the line of their governments. Matters were further worsened when it came to the question of which countries were the victims of American imperialism. In the case of Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and the Congo, there was little argument that they were the victim of imperialism. But that left out countries who claimed to be the victim of American aggression in other ways. As one delegate declared in an impassioned speech, they too had struggled against American imperialism and colored their land in their blood. And yet, their sacrifices hadn’t been mentioned in the final communique.39 These disputes, sometimes over paragraphs, in other cases over solitary sentences, indicated that a lot more was a stake at the Havana Congress than a group of like-minded intellectuals convening over their mutual opposition to American imperialism and capitalist and neo-colonial cultural hegemony. Like other socialist and Afro-Asian conferences, this Congress too was an opportunity for the host government to use it for its political purposes. As was evident from his concluding speech, this was an excellent opportunity for Fidel Castro to highlight the achievements of the Cuban Revolution and his government’s implacable opposition to ‘Yankee imperialism’ and support for national liberation struggles. To that end, special exhibitions and tours showcasing the rapid advances and achievements of the revolution were arranged for the conference delegates. Aside from Cuba, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of Guinea, Algeria, and the United Arab Republic, amongst other sympathetic states, had either sent their official representatives or sponsored the visits of their delegates. Other delegates, like Abdullah Malik, came in their independent capacity. Even so, the Congress, like conferences before it, was a site of intra-governmental politics. The Havana

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Congress was not simply an occasion where internationalist solidarities could be expressed and enacted. It was also a site where respective governments conducted their diplomacy. For Malik, though, the Havana Congress revealed a deepening schism within the socialist bloc. In his conversations with one delegate after another, he realized that the politics of internationalism was often the first casualty of socialist revolutions. Socialist states, he wrote, often pursued their own narrow, national interests over their commitment to internationalism. That was reflected in their failure to ‘fully support’ revolutionary movements in other countries. For that reason, he added, intellectuals from other nations, and particularly from Latin American countries, made the Soviet Union a target of their critique. It was only their Cuban hosts who managed to mediate and temper their criticism. The same was true for leftist intellectuals allied with either China or the Soviet Union, or, as was the case for most, with neither. There was little space for such intellectuals within the deep and irreconcilable Sino-Soviet split. In a similar vein, he continued, some delegates were uncomfortable with the way that Cuba had allegedly used the Havana Congress for its own purposes. Others expressed their disquiet at the deification and hero worship of Che Guevara.40 Amongst other things, ‘Major Ernesto Che Guevara’ had been declared as the very personification and ‘the best concrete representation’ of the ‘Integral Man’ proposed by the Congress.41 To further complicate matters, he commented, there was also a ‘politics of pioneers’ underlying the Congress. As the latest pioneer in the world of revolution, Cuba had supplanted China and the Soviet Union as the leader of the Socialist Bloc and the Third World.42 That didn’t necessarily sit well with every delegate. This seemed a far cry to Malik from the ostensibly golden days of internationalism inaugurated by the Spanish Civil War. Back then, he wrote, progressive intellectuals the world over rallied unitedly to the defense of Internationalism against Fascism. Precisely how seminal that moment was to him is reflected in his extensive remarks on the Spanish Civil War in his concluding note on the Havana Congress. For young men in his earlier years, Spain had been the symbol of revolutionary fervor. Barcelona and Madrid were the capitals of internationalism. The Spanish Civil War, had set their imaginations alight and had reinvigorated their literature. His generation had been inspired and moved by the writers and poets who wrote their songs, poems, ballads, and elegies for lost lovers whilst fighting in their trenches in defense of life and beauty. Then too, he wrote, an international conference of anti-fascist writers, poets, and intellectuals had convened in Spain in defense of the democratic republic, even if it meant opposing and condemning their own governments’ support for fascists. Simply put, ‘Spain was the Vietnam of its time’.43 A similar moment now confronted progressives the world over. This was a historic opportunity for progressive intellectuals, artists, poets, and writers to redeem themselves.

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Still, notwithstanding his disquiet about the prevailing condition of internationalism and socialist unity, Abdullah Malik was deeply moved by his experiences in Cuba. For all its complications, the Congress had afforded Malik an unprecedented glimpse into what a revolutionary future could and should look like. For that, he was deeply grateful to the Cuban government, which had graciously invited and hosted him. After all, he added, there were few opportunities for touring and travelling the world for ‘middle-class Asians’ like himself. And it was only his luck, he wrote, that he was in London when the invitation was issued. Had he been in Pakistan, he wryly noted, it would have been impossible to travel to Cuba.44 The other invitee, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, had discovered this when Pakistan’s American-aligned military dictatorship prevented him from attending the Congress. There was, then, much to be grateful for. For that reason, he wrote, even if he didn’t know what the outcome of the conference would be, or even for there would be any outcome at all, he was still grateful for the opportunity. And most importantly, ‘he saw the world’ and met ‘leftist intellectuals from around the world’. Through their discussions, he wrote, he learnt about their ideas, their struggles and the general state of the communist world.45 Where else, after all, would he have had such conversations with those far removed from his context and struggle? Its triumphant declarations aside, this was perhaps the most understated accomplishment of the Havana Congress. Like other conferences and congresses, Havana afforded activists and intellectuals like Malik to meet like-minded individuals. This was especially crucial to those figures who lived under repressive governments and regimes allied with the United States. Such opportunities, whilst rare, were a great source of sustenance and rejuvenation for someone like Malik. For Pakistani and Indian comrades, they were even more important. Restrictive travel regimes, periodic bouts of hostilities, and a mutual distrust of progressives and communists between the two countries meant that these international forums were often the only venues where Indian and Pakistani intellectuals could meet.46 Thus, the one delegate who Abdullah Malik immediately befriended was his counterpart from India, Professor Lajpat Rai. ‘Lajpat’, as Malik referred to him, was an expert on the economy of Latin America. He also spoke Spanish. His expertise was a reminder to Malik of what Pakistan lacked. It was truly unfortunate, he wrote, that Pakistan had been unable to produce experts on other regions. Nor, for that matter, could it have been otherwise. It was only in an atmosphere of cultural and intellectual independence, he mused, that such expertise could be cultivated. More than an intellectual, however, ‘Lajpat’ was a friend to Malik. Together, they toured Havana, its environs, and reminisced about old times and mutual acquaintances.47 But ‘Lajpat’ too, Malik noted with disappointment, didn’t have much progress to report when it came to the communist movement in India.

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Happily, though, there was much to celebrate about communism in Cuba. The Havana Congress had afforded Malik the opportunity to witness the advances and achievements of the Cuban Revolution for himself. That too was an understated accomplishment of the Congress. As an invited delegate, Malik was hosted by the Cuban government for nearly three weeks during which he was assigned a guide and an interpreter who accompanied him on daily tours. Typically, these were tours of villages, communes, schools, factories, museums, and historical sites like the Bay of Pigs and the revolutionary martyrs’ memorial. It seemed that the Cuban government was eager to showcase its achievements to the invited delegates. And for his part, Abdullah Malik, and many others, were eager to witness and learn from those achievements for themselves. Tellingly, Malik devoted considerably more space to his tours and impressions of Cuba than to his reporting of conference debates and proceedings. The former clearly seemed more intriguing to him. As an outsider looking to learn from the revolution, he was thoroughly impressed with what the Cuban government had achieved in such a span of time. Only a few years ago, he wrote, the very same spaces he visited – like his hotel, formerly the Hilton, and after the revolution, the Liberty Hotel – were frequented by the rich and privileged, usually from the United States. Now they were the sites of revolutionary celebration and activism. He was equally impressed with the Cuban government’s policies in relation to culture and the arts. As part of the Congress, cultural performances and exhibitions were arranged for the delegates. Typically, these exhibitions told stories of the island’s chequered history and the coming of the revolution. One dance performance, for instance, highlighted Cuba’s African heritage and its painful slave past. Another exhibition, he reported, showcased the atrocities wrought by European imperialism on the Third World and demonstrated how western cultural production systematically degraded and demeaned the colonized: cultural productions like the film Tarzan, which portrayed black Africans as barbaric and subhuman and the white race as noble and civilized.48 That, at any rate, was the tone of the conference speeches too. Speaker after speaker, from Edmundo Desnoes to delegates in various committees, had fiercely criticized how their ‘own image’ had been ‘deformed’ by the ‘press, radio and television in highly industrialized countries’, to the extent that their very humanity had been ‘obliterated’.49 Malik, too, agreed with this assessment in his reporting of these exhibitions and performance. Not only did they expose the hollowness and racism of western cultural productions, but they also underscored for him how Cuban communists had employed culture and the arts to impart a politically enlightened education to their people.50 As ever, there was much to learn from Cuba. Malik was equally impressed by what he considered to be the astonishing socio-economic advances made by the Cuban Revolution. Amongst other things, he got the opportunity to attend a rally of Fidel Castro where a housing scheme was

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due to be launched for Cuban workers. Arriving at the rally, Malik noted the ‘sea’ of men and women who patiently waited under floodlights and countless red flags to listen to Castro. Flanked by his party leadership, a ‘resplendent’, ‘handsome’, and smartly uniformed Fidel Castro strode to the speaker’s dais amidst thunderous applause and adulation. What followed was a Castro special. There was, after all, no speaker as ‘electrifying’ and ‘magical’ in the communist world as Fidel Castro. But more than witnessing Castro’s persona and charisma, this rally was eye-opening for Malik in other ways as well. For one, it showcased the astounding developmental achievements of the Cuban revolution. The housing scheme being inaugurated – with 125 houses, and a school, nursery, and parks – was completed in a mere 50 days. Moreover, the participation of ordinary people in this scheme and the back and forth Castro had with them in his speech, were for Malik the very exemplification of a genuine and substantive democracy. This model of a people-centered democracy was unthinkable in Pakistan.51 In other trips, Malik and his tour guide visited model farms, communes, and villages, where he witnessed how peasants and volunteers from cities worked and farmed together.52 On one trip, he and other delegates visited coffee plantations around Havana where tens of thousands volunteers worked in ways that seemed remarkable to him. Amongst them, he approvingly noted, were approximately ten thousand girls and women. These women worked on plantations – for which they were reportedly paid a daily wage of four dollars – after attending to their household chores. Men, too, lent their labor. Clerks and officials from government ministries, he wrote, came in delegations to lend a hand in plantations. Even more extraordinarily, he ran into the minister of agriculture who, resplendent in the uniform of an ordinary farm worker, was hard at work alongside thousands of other workers. The honorable minister showed him the innovative techniques through which coffee was being cultivated in Cuba. He also introduced him to other workers, amongst them, a school teacher, a writer, and an ‘in charge’ of a beauty salon for women. For all intents and purposes, an astonishing experiment with little or no precedent was being performed out in Cuba. Cuba, he wrote, had managed to avoid the pitfalls that other socialist states had fallen into. Not only had it resisted the threat posed by imperialism, it had also introduced a profound cultural and social shift which prevented the emergence of a party oligarchy and bridged the divide between rural and urban.53 His visits to coffee plantations, memorials, exhibitions, rallies, villages, and other sites, exemplified the significance of these achievements. Throughout it all, Malik was treated as an honored guest. The attention given to him, and many other delegates no doubt, would have been unthinkable for him in Pakistan, where the Left was constantly persecuted by the military regime. Wherever he looked in Cuba, it seemed that a ‘new human’ and a ‘new society’ was being created.54 To be sure, he wrote, there were still many signs of the Cuba of old.

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Here and there, one did encounter unpaved roads and primitive-looking huts. But ‘old Cuba’ was fast giving way to ‘new Cuba’.55 As far as he was concerned, this was a society where labor had dignity, where bureaucrats and ministers worked and engaged with workers and peasants, where people were content and satisfied.56 This was, in so many ways, the land of his dreams, a land of poets, a place they had long dreamt of.57 It was, simply put, the future he and his fellow progressives yearned for.

Towards the Third World All this seemed a world away from Pakistan. Still an underdeveloped country where ignorance and illiteracy were widespread, Pakistan, for Malik, was yet to be free even after twenty years of formal independence. It was dependent on western imperialism for aid, for development, for its very survival. Its cultural sphere and communications were managed and dominated by these very same interests. Meanwhile, politicians who dared to challenge this imposition were summarily deposed. Pakistan, Malik wrote, had no peoples’ movement or democracy to speak of.58 Given the restrictions imposed by the military regime, Malik feared returning to Pakistan. His last days in Cuba were filled with a sense of dread and foreboding. How would his employers, friends, enemies, and most importantly, the government, react to his trip to Cuba?59 As it turned out, he was right to fear the consequences of his activism. He was jailed in 1971 for his support of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, which was neither the first, nor the last time, he ran afoul of the law. It was only in prison that he found the time and opportunity to compile the journal of his Cuban sojourn, along with his remaining ‘letters’ on Cuban history, politics, and most importantly, the Revolution. Still, for his all tribulations and fears, the Havana Congress had afforded Abdullah Malik a glimpse into the past, present, and future of the Third World. That term too was of recent origin, he noted. Previous geographical imaginaries had spoken of the ‘non-aligned’, of ‘Africa and Asia’, of the ‘underdeveloped world’ and the ‘tri-continental’. The ‘Third World’, he wrote, was in some ways the latest iteration of previous political and spatial imaginations. But for Malik, this Third World was constituted of those countries that were struggling to overthrow colonialism and neo-colonialism in their struggle for socialism.60 The Havana Congress offered him, and others, the opportunity to witness the fleeting and tenuous assertion of the Third World. And equally importantly, it offered him an opportunity to meet kindred spirits around the world. As fleeting and precarious as it may seem in retrospect, it was a moment of triumph and optimism for the delegates of the Havana Congress. That was especially true for Irwin Silber, who wrote in his foreword how this was ‘the era of the disintegration of world capitalism, the

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painful and terrifyingly beautiful climax to a fabulous period in world history’. These ideas and concepts, he wrote, together with the men and women giving them shape and texture, were ‘the opening notes to a new era in which the exploitation of man by man will come to an end; an era whose dimensions will be measured on an intergalactic scale and whose substance will be based on the free and fullest fruition of the human personality’.61 Notwithstanding his more guarded view, this statement would have resonated with Abdullah Malik too. The future that Silber wrote about may have seemed distant to his comrades in Pakistan, but it was nonetheless a future that many believed was within reach. Even under successive military dictatorships, the world, and especially the Third World, seemed on the cusp of revolutionary, transformative change. That explained, in part, both the relevance and resonance of progressive politics and scholarship in Pakistan. Aided by a progressive trade union, students, and political movements, progressive activists and writers from the 1950s to the 70s took an active role in the Pakistani cultural and public sphere. For many, it was in the sphere of culture and the arts where a template for a new and emancipated future would be crafted. And this is precisely where conferences, congresses, and international symposiums like the Cultural Congress of Havana were important. For all their (retrospectively) misplaced optimism and internal divisions, they nonetheless helped forge a transnational community of writers, intellectuals, poets, artists, and activists that drew sustenance from each other. Indeed, the existence of these networks for a relatively small community of progressives in Pakistan could not be ignored. And this is precisely where Abdullah Malik travelogues become illuminating, for they help shed light on a past full of hope and possibility, in both Pakistan and the much-vaunted ‘Third World’.

Notes An extended version of this essay was first published in the Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019). The editors thank the journal for permission to include an abridged version in this volume. 1

Abdullah Malik, Cuba say chand khutoot (3rd edition, Lahore: Kausar Publishers, 1987), 2.

2

‘Castro Speech Closing Cultural Congress’, 13 January 1968, accessible at http://lanic. utexas.edu/ project/castro/db/1968/19680113.html.

3

Ibid.

4

See Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New Press, 2007), 105-115.

5

‘Afro Asian Writers Convene in Tokyo’, March 28, 1961, in ‘Files Related to Bandung I & II, Afro Asian Solidarity Committee and Sino Soviet Relations, 1951–71’, RG 59 A1 5518 Box 1, US National Archives.

6

Malik, 10.

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7

Irwin Silber, ed., Voices of National Liberation: The Revolutionary Ideology of the ‘Third World’ as Expressed by Intellectuals and Artists at the Cultural Congress of Havana January 1968 (New York: Central Book Company, 1970), xiii–xiv.

8

Ibid., 15.

9

Ibid., xvii.

10

Ibid., 291.

11

Ibid., 292.

12

Ibid., 280.

13

Silber, 285.

14

Ibid., 288.

15

Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Safarnama Cuba (Lahore: National Publishing House). Also see Tareekh Meri Shahid Hogi (Fidel Castro) (Lahore: National Publishing House).

16

Malik, 216-18.

17

Ibid., 156.

18

‘Manifesto of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, London’. Left Review, February, 1936.

19

Shabana Mahmud, ‘Angare and the Founding of the Progressive Writers’ Association’, Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 2 (May 1996): 453 (447-67). Also see, Akhtar Hussain Raipuri, Adab aur Zindagi (Anjuman-e-Tarriqi-e-Urdu Aurangabad, Deccan, 1935) for a detailed exposition of this argument.

20

Also see Carolien Stolte’s account of the PWA in this volume.

21

‘Subh-e-Azadi’ in Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Nuskha Hai Wafa, 116. The evocative phrase, ‘leprous daybreak’, comes from Victor Kiernan’s translation of the poem. See ‘Freedom’s Dawn’, in Poems by Faiz, ed. Victor G. Kiernan (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1971), 122-27.

22

Indeed, this was a sentiment shared by the Left generally. I have documented this in more detail elsewhere. See, Ali Raza, ‘An Unfulfilled Dream: The Left in Pakistan ca. 1947–50’, South Asian History and Culture 4, no. 4 (2013): 503-19, and ‘The Illusory Promise of Freedom: Mian Iftikharud-din and the Movement for Pakistan’ in Muslims Against the Muslim League, ed. Ali Usman Qasmi and Megan Robb (New Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Also see, Anushay Malik, ‘Alternative Politics and Dominant Narratives: Communists and the Pakistani State in the early 1950s’, South Asian History and Culture 4:4 (2013): 520-537. For a broader overview of communist politics in Pakistan see, Kamran Asdar Ali, Surkh Salam: Communist Politics and Class Activism in Pakistan 1947–1972 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2015).

23

For an excellent overview of these debates, see Sadia Toor, The State of Islam: Culture and Cold War Politics in Pakistan (Pluto Press, 2011), and specifically, chapters 2 and 3. Equally noteworthy is Kamran Asdar Ali’s work on cultural debates within the progressive camp in Pakistan. See Kamran Asdar Ali, ‘Communists in a Muslim Land: Cultural Debates in Pakistan’s Early Years’, Modern Asian Studies 45:3 (2011), 501-34.

24

CCF Box 261 Folder 10, ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom: Pakistan Committee: A Report, May 1956–December 1959’, 3-4.

25

Ibid., 8.

26

See in particular, Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Publications, 2000). In a meticulously researched study, Saunders shows the extent of CIA’s involvement with the CCF. In terms of finances alone, the Congress was the beneficiary of a million dollars per year from the CIA. Also see the important work of Patrick Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America (Harvard University Press, 2015). Another important work is Giles Scott-Smith and Charlotte A. Lerg, eds., Campaigning Culture and the Global Cold War: The Journals of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (Palgrave, 2017).

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27

These revelations first came to light in 1964 in the ‘left leaning’ journal, the Nation. In the following years, other papers also revealed the extent of these linkages. In 1965, for example, the New York Times reported to its readers that ‘the CIA has supported groups of exiles from Cuba and refugees from Communism in Europe and anti-Communist liberal organizations of intellectuals such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom and some of their newspapers and magazines’. Quoted in Tity de Vries ‘The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal: Catalyst in a Transforming Relationship between State and People’, The Journal of American History 98:4 (2012): 1082. See also Iber, Neither Peace Nor Freedom, 234.

28

CCF Box 261 Folder 10, ‘Programme of Youth (Sponsored by the Pakistan Committee)’, 1.

29

Ibid., ‘Religion and Freedom’, 10.

30

Ibid.

31

The publication of which was also backed by the CIA. Documents outlining the CIA’s role have been declassified and can be accessed at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/collection/ doctor-zhivago. For a (relatively more) scholarly treatment, see Peter Finn and Petra Couvee, The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle Over a Forbidden Book (Pantheon, 2014).

32

CCF Box 261 Folder 10, ‘A Report’, 24-25.

33

IOR/L/P&J/12/772 CAIP, Despatch from Office of HCUK, Karachi, 130-131.

34

IOR/L/P&J/12/772 CAIP, Despatch from Office of HCUK, Karachi, 132.

35

IOR/L/P&J/12/772 CAIP, Extract No. 28, from High Commissioner for the UK in Pakistan, Karachi to Commonwealth Relations Office, 4th February 1949, Pol. 10825/49.

36

See for instance, excerpts of the speech by President Iskander Mirza to the ‘International Islamic Colloquium’ partly organized by the CCF in January 1958. CCF Box 261 Folder 10, Report on International Islamic Colloquium, Lahore, December 29 1957 to January 8 1958, 7.

37

Silber, ‘General Resolution, Cultural Congress of Havana’, 320 and 322.

38

Ibid., 326.

39

Malik, 167-71.

40

Ibid., 183-85.

41

Silber, 286.

42

Malik, 182-85.

43

Ibid., 194-5.

44

Ibid., 181-82. 45 Ibid. 46 Which is a situation that tragically persists to this day.

45

Ibid.

46

Which is a situation that tragically persists to this day.

47

Malik, 186 and 189.

48

Ibid., 186.

49

Silber, Speech of Edmundo Desnoes, 16.

50

Malik, 160.

51

Ibid., 122-5.

52

Ibid., 177.

53

Ibid., 191.

54

Ibid.

55

Ibid., 176-7.

56

Ibid., 191.

57

Ibid., 178.

58

Ibid., 112.

59

Ibid., 201.

60

Ibid., 168-170.

61

Silber, xviii.

CHAPTER 12

Microphone Revolution: North Korean Cultural Diplomacy During the Liberation of Southern Africa Tycho van der Hoog

Abstract North Korea is an overlooked actor in studies of Afro-Asian solidarity or the Cold War, even though it developed an independent foreign policy and managed to forge connections to African liberation movements. This chapter explores North Korea’s cultural diplomacy during the liberation of southern Africa through the establishment of Juche Study Centers. Juche, the official ideology of North Korea, was marketed in Africa through public meetings at Juche Study Centers, the distribution of translated literature, film viewings, and travel opportunities to Pyongyang. Juche was a vague philosophy that resonated with African views of post-colonial nation-building. Today, few people take Juche seriously but the fraternal ties between North Korea and African political regimes have withstood the test of time.

Keywords: North Korea, Cold War, cultural diplomacy, liberation struggles, Juche

On 8 April 1975, the Council of Ministers of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) held an extraordinary meeting in Dar es Salaam to discuss the unfolding liberation of southern Africa. The fight for independence had reached a critical stage. Angola and Mozambique were in uncharted territories after the sudden collapse of the Portuguese Empire and would soon descend into civil war, while Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe), South West Africa (modern Namibia), and South Africa were subjected to white-minority rule. African national liberation movements (NLMs) were at the forefront of the struggle, which was fought on two fronts: the diplomatic arena and low-intensity guerilla warfare on the ground. “This, for us, is a crucial meeting. The Southern African crisis for us is a matter of life or death”, said Vernon Mwaanga, the Zambian Minister of Foreign Affairs, to the assembled OAU Council of Ministers. “Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe and Namibia have written the history of their independence struggle in blood. Zambian blood is part of the ink with which that history is being written.”1 The explicit transnational nature of southern Africa’s liberation struggles was particularly felt

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in Zambia.2 As one of the Frontline States, Zambia harbored freedom fighters from all over the region and suffered therefore from imperial pressure, violence along its borders, and the influx of refugees.3 At the end of his speech, Mwaanga made an interesting observation about the character of the liberation struggles: “A very strange form of revolution seems to be emerging in our ranks and that is ‘Microphone Revolution’, based on making nice speeches for public consumption at home.”4 The term ‘Microphone Revolution’ is a useful metaphor to view one of the key questions of this era: peaceful means versus violence, diplomacy versus the armed struggle. It is true that actions speak louder than words. Nonetheless, words mattered during the liberation of Africa, because it was diplomacy that helped NLMs to rally support and aid for their cause from individual governments, multilateral fora such as the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the OAU Liberation Committee, and international solidarity movements. The struggle was often fought through a microphone. The NLMs operated as ‘governments-in-waiting’ and wielded an elaborate diplomatic strategy, resulting in connections that were truly global.5 One loyal but largely unknown ally of African freedom fighters was the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), a country that – according to its own mythology – successfully resisted the yoke of Japanese colonialism and had vowed to support the liberation of Africa. North Korea used this opportunity to disseminate its own brand of socialist ideology, named Juche (주체). Through Juche Study Centers, which were founded across Africa, North Korea facilitated discussions, film screenings, and exhibitions to illuminate Africans about the wonders of North Korea and Juche thought. Texts from Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il were translated into English, Afrikaans, and Swahili. Numerous Africans were invited to travel to Pyongyang for scholarships, military training, or political meetings. This chapter offers a critical analysis of Juche Study Centers and seeks to understand why they were founded, how they operated, and their impact in Africa. While they may seem like an obscure relic of the past, some Juche Study Centers continue to exist. Their history illustrates the important role that North Korea played in the contemporary history of southern Africa. The DPRK is often misunderstood as a ‘hermit kingdom’, an isolated country without international ties. But in truth, extensive relations existed between African NLMs and North Korea, relations that remain relevant today because several contemporary African governments continue to support the DPRK despite international sanctions against the North Korean regime. Before focusing on Juche Study Centers, this chapter will first explore the historical background of inter-Korean competition in Africa and the diplomatic connections between exiled African liberation movements and the DPRK. In the next part, Juche will be the central focus. The chapter will discuss the establishment of Juche Study Centers in Africa and how they operated. In addition to public

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meetings, the distribution of literature, film screenings and travel are the main components of North Korean soft power. Finally, it will be discussed how Juche inspired African political elites in the development of post-colonial nation states, through examples of African contributions to Juche journals. Through its novel focus on North Korea, this chapter decenters the roles of China and the Soviet Union during the era of African decolonization. North Korea is an overlooked actor in studies of Afro-Asian solidarity or the Cold War, even though it developed an independent foreign policy and managed to forge connections to African liberation movements that have withstood the test of time. Unfairly, the DPRK is often seen as an agent of either China or the Soviet Union but this was not the case. Juche Study Centers, the topic of this chapter, are an illustrative example of the lived experiences of Afro-Asian connections: exiled African freedom fighters or post-colonial nation-builders engaged with North Korean ideology. As the Cold War progressed, the DPRK gradually became more involved in the pursuit of SouthSouth cooperation, which is why most Juche Study Centers appeared to be active in the 1970s and 1980s.

A Tale of Two Koreas The Korean peninsula was, prior to the end of the Second World War, colonized by the Japanese Empire. When Japan surrendered in 1945, Korea was divided by the United States (US) and the Soviet Union. For thousands of years Korea used to be a unified state and the post-WWII division was meant to be temporary. However, throughout the subsequent years the leadership in both parts of the peninsula became consolidated and in 1948 two separate states were established: the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the south and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in the north. In 1950 the DPRK invaded the south, signaling the start of the Korean War, which ended with a stalemate in 1953 and has not yet resulted in a formal peace treaty. The stalemate of the Korean War made both Koreas realize that international allies were necessary in order to strengthen their own contested position as a legitimate government. At this time, the decolonization of the African continent was in full swing, meaning that at a rapid pace new non-aligned countries became independent. Lydia Walker vividly describes this “moment of seeming national possibility of the late 1950s and early 1960s, when at times new states were recognized every week.”6 The independent African states became members of the United Nations General Assembly, where they “began to turn the table on the Korean question.”7 Korea was the oldest Cold War issue debated in the UN, and African states seemed to favor North Korea over its southern rival.8

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The ROK was at first uninterested in establishing diplomatic ties with African countries as a result of its Hallstein-type doctrine, which prevented the South Korean government from establishing ties with communist countries or North Korean allies. This policy changed in the late 1960s but South Korea remained an unattractive partner for African national liberation movements, as it was governed by a far-right dictatorship and was strongly aligned with the United States. The US was unpopular in Africa because of its domestic policy of segregation, its ties to the apartheid regime of South Africa and the disastrous Vietnam War.9 The DPRK, on the other hand, developed a different strategy and was much more successful in appealing to the NLMs.10 North Korea was ruled by a charismatic leader, Kim Il Sung, and proudly advertised its own heroic liberation struggle history.11 But perhaps more importantly, the state was some sort of economic miracle. Bombed to absolute ruins during the Korean War, North Korea quickly rebuilt its towns and cities and was for a while economically superior to its southern rival. This ability to rise like a phoenix from the ashes was appealing to African liberation movements, who sought to similarly transform their countries after independence was gained. While during the 1960s most of Africa was liberated, only southern Africa was still largely embroiled in a complicated and often violent struggle against colonialism and white settler regimes. It is therefore that North Korea supported NLMs. North Korea before the 1990s was a vastly different country than it is today. The 1990s signify an important historical juncture, as the Soviet Union was dissolved and North Korea could no longer depend on the Soviet’s economic assistance. As a result, North Korea’s public distribution system collapsed and a widespread famine ensued. In 1994 Kim Il Sung passed away and his son, Kim Jong Il, took command.12 Since the end of the Cold War, the DPRK became primarily interested in earning hard foreign currency and was much less interested in promoting its ideology and providing global assistance to newly independent nations. One question that pervades this story is how we can interpret the motivation behind African-DPRK cooperation. Were these strategies informed by pragmatism or ideology? Ideology, as Christopher Clapham argues, “is not merely an alien imposition on willing Africans. It also strikes a local resonance, and serves to build moral linkages that extend beyond mere economic interests.”13 This chapter will show that many Africans were indeed receptive to the ideas of Juche philosophy. On the other hand, North Korea was forced to abandon its African Juche Study Centers when it faced economic hardship and focused on earning money instead of spending money. Perhaps we should not think of this question as a dichotomy, because Juche was able to do both: it appealed on ideological grounds to southern African freedom fighters and simultaneously forged practical close connections between liberation movements and the North Korean regime.

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Figure 12.1. A DPRK stamp commemorating the 10th anniversary of the Bandung conference. While the stamp proudly depicts the African and Korean peoples standing shoulder to shoulder, North Korea was not present at Bandung! The text in the top-right corner means: Asia Pacific Conference (Bandung Conference) 10 year anniversary. The text in the bottom-light corner means: Joseon stamp.

I contend in any case that it is too easy to simplify this collaboration as a purely communist friendship. We must be careful not to interpret the decolonization of Africa purely in Cold War terms, in other words, as an existential battle between capitalism and communism.14 This robs African national liberation movements and their North Korean partners of their agency. NLMs and North Korea had mutual interests and were mainly driven by pragmatism, as is perhaps best explained by Eduardo Mondlane, the chairman of the Mozambican liberation movement FRELIMO: Every time I go to the United States, I am asked again and again whether FRELIMO is “pro-East” or “pro-West”, “pro-communist” or “pro-capitalist”. My answer as president of FRELIMO is that FRELIMO is pro-Mozambican, principally, primarily and finally.15

North Korea is similarly often misunderstood as a pawn within the greater family of communist states. I disagree with the idea that the DPRK was only an emissary of the Soviet Union or China. After the Sino-Soviet split of 1956 North Korea was able to skillfully maneuver between both major powers while remaining largely independent in its own foreign policy, particularly in Africa.16 North Korea was not part of the Bandung Conference in 1955, but became a proud member of the Non-Aligned Movement in 1976, a major diplomatic achievement because South

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Korea was denied membership. The DPRK also became a member of the Afro-Asian Peoples Organization (AAPSO), an institution based in Cairo that fully supported the North Korean plans for the reunification of the peninsula.17 The DPRK moved through multilateral fora with relative ease and boasted of its allegiance to the new independent nations of the world (see fig. 12.1), but it is mostly the competition with the ROK that motivated its endeavors in the African continent.18

Diplomacy in Exile Exile politics were an essential dimension of the liberation wars in southern Africa. Colonial governments violently opposed African national liberation movements, forcing these organizations to establish bases abroad. In places such as Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Lusaka (Zambia), and Luanda (Angola), the NLMs came in contact with each other, and with non-African governments and aid organizations.19 The liberation of southern Africa thus had a strong international dimension. Without the material and political support of foreign governments and other organizations the NLMs had little chance of succeeding in their goals. In their development as full-fledged organizations, liberation movements mirrored the state that they vowed to overthrow. National liberation movements operated as proto-states long before independence: they were ruled by a president, a vice-president, and a central committee that acted as a cabinet, each NLM had an extensive bureaucracy with various thematic departments, an army, and hosted public institutions such as schools and hospitals.20 Foreign missions functioned as embassies and were extremely important in mobilizing international support and material aid.21 In exile camps the NLMs were for the first time able to rule over their own citizens.22 Today, most countries in southern Africa continue to be firmly ruled by parties with roots in the struggle for independence: amon g them are Angola (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola – Partido do Trabalho,  MPLA), Botswana (Botswana Democratic Party, BDP), Namibia (South West Africa People’s Organisation, SWAPO), Mozambique (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique, FRELIMO), South Africa (African National Congress, ANC) and Zimbabwe (Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front, ZANU-PF). Importantly, North Korea established contact with these organizations long before the respective dates of independence. NLMs usually had to choose between two paths towards independence: diplomacy (negotiation) or war (a violent uprising), and most of them used both. The Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere summarized this dilemma shortly after a debate on southern Africa in the Commonwealth Summit Meeting: “We want majority rule out of a conference or out of a battlefield”.23 North Korea offered opportunities for

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Figure 12.2. Robert Mugabe and Kim Il Sung meet in Pyongyang, in 1993 (AP).

both strategies. Next to military support, the regime forged diplomatic ties with all major liberation movements in the region. One way to do this was by manifesting itself in multilateral fora and the hosting of international conferences. A diplomatic victory for North Korea was the organization of an Extraordinary Ministerial Conference of the NAM in Pyongyang, from 9 to 13 June 1987.24 The decision to organize this conference was made at the 8th Non-Aligned Summit in Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1986.25 Kim Il Sung expressed in his opening speech his “deep gratitude” to the Zimbabwean government.26 Robert Mugabe, Prime Minister of Zimbabwe and Chairman of the NAM, maintained a personal friendship with Kim Il Sung (see fig. 12. 2) and delivered a statement at the Pyongyang Conference.27 After four days of consultations, the conference adopted the Pyongyang Declaration and Plan of Action on South-South Co-operation, an extensive program (22 pages) on the basis of “collective self-reliance”28, a phrase once firmly embedded in the discourse of the NAM but now solely used by North Korea.29 In addition, the Declaration voiced strong support for SWAPO and the ANC and condemned the apartheid regime in South Africa.30 Even more important, perhaps, were the personal invitations of African freedom fighters to Pyongyang. Virtual all leaders of the NLMs in southern Africa, most of them future presidents, met with Kim Il Sung during the Cold War to underline their mutual agreement for cooperation. On 11 June 1986, for example, the North Korean regime arranged a banquet in Pyongyang in honor of SWAPO, the national

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Figure 12.3. Kenneth Kaunda, his wife, Betsy Kaunda, and a large Zambian delegation meet with Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang, 1987 (Eugene Makai).

liberation movement of Namibia. Namibia would only be liberated four years later, but Sam Nujoma (the future president) and his comrades were received as statesmen-in-waiting. Nujoma thanked the DPRK “for the practical material assistance, political and diplomatic support” and in turn offered SWAPO’s “full support” for the DPRKs foreign policy objectives.31 In his response, Kim Il Sung promised that “his Party and people would firmly stand by SWAPO in the future too, and support and encourage the just liberation struggle of the Namibian people”.32 Such meetings also occurred in the cases of Seretse Khama, Robert Mugabe, Samora Machel, Leabua Jonathan, José Eduardo dos Santos, Kenneth Kaunda, France-Albert René, and other prominent southern African politicians (see fig. 12.3 for an example). The history of African-DPRK cooperation remains largely unwritten for two reasons. In the first place is it difficult to obtain primary source material. North Korea is not accessible for critical researchers while most liberation archives in southern Africa are closed to the public.33 In addition, the relationship between North Korea and African countries is tainted by its contemporary illegal nature. Most of the current dealings, such as the construction of monuments by North Korean forced labourers, the repair of military hardware, and the narcotics trade, are illegal.34 The United Nations Panel of Experts, which monitors UN sanctions against North Korea, has reprimanded African governments for their unwillingness in submitting reports and responding to enquiries.35 Thus, research on this topic is sensitive and little work has been done in the past.

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Exporting Juche Usually translated as self-reliance and understood through its main principle that “man is the master of all things”, Juche replaced Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the DPRK in 1955. While it is often assumed that Juche serves as North Korea’s guiding principle for policy-making, and is thus closely entangled with its iconic ‘hermit kingdom’ status, Brian Myers has argued that Juche “was never meant to work ideologically.” Instead, the philosophy is part of North Korea’s multi-track discourse, which consists of the inner track (propaganda for domestic consumption only), the outer track (propaganda for domestic consumption but aware of outside monitors), and the export track (propaganda for outsiders). Juche was specifically designed for export.36 Changing the state ideology from communism to Juche made North Korea more appealing to the non-aligned countries of the world, which was an advantage for Pyongyang’s desire to marginalize South Korea during the Cold War.37 Precisely because Juche was vague and emphasized self-reliance, it was remarkably compatible with the philosophies of liberation movements around the world, including those in Africa (see fig. 12.4). After decades of oppression by capitalist colonizers it was only natural that they would take inspiration from socialism while their political programs were built around the ideas of political and economic independence. Mark Nash described how Marxism and communism resonated with nationalist movements in Africa, constituting a “major ideological force in African culture and politics.”38 Juche hinted at key socialist principles and continuously underlined the importance of self-determination. The main strategy of North Korea to export Juche to the outside world was the establishment of Juche Study Centers in foreign countries. Very little documentation exists of this phenomenon, but during archival fieldwork in Namibia I stumbled upon an extensive collection of Cold War era editions of the ‘Study of the Juche Ideas’ journal. This proved to be an unexpected treasure trove. Published by the International Institute of the Juche Idea (IIJI, an organization founded on 9 April 1978 in Tokyo, Japan) the journal is closely aligned with North Korea and consists of written contributions from Juche followers from around the world. The journal also contains short texts by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il and provides basic data about the organization of Juche Study Centers and seminars outside North Korea. I found the journal in the archives of the former United Nations Institute for Namibia (UNIN), an educational body set up by the United Nations Council for Namibia in Lusaka, Zambia, on 26 August 1976. UNIN was created to facilitate education for exiled Namibians in preparation for an independent Namibia. It was closed in September 1990, six months after Namibian independence, and its archives were donated to the University of Namibia (UNAM), in Windhoek.

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Figure 12.4. A North Korean poster depicting the various peoples of the world united through Juche.

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It is telling that an educational body for Namibians in exile assembled such an extensive collection of Juche journals, with editions running from 1979 to 1990.39 The journals regularly featured contributions from African authors and therefore provide an unique insight into the reception of Juche in southern Africa. The next sections will describe the organization of Juche Study Centers and the contents of the journal based on the issues that I found in Windhoek.

Juche Study Centers in Southern Africa The very first Juche Study Center in the world was established in Africa, in Mali to be precise. On 15 April 1969 the “Study Group of the Works of Comrade Kim Il Sung” was founded on the occasion of the 57th birthday of Kim Il Sung.40 Mali was the first African country that established full diplomatic relations with the DPRK, in 1958.41 “Juche”, wrote the journal devoted to this ideology, “like oasis, has been flowing into the hearts of the African people who recently liberated themselves from the colonial rule of imperialism and are on the way of building a new society.” The meeting was attended by several Malian intellectuals. In 1985 the National Committee for the Study of the Juche Idea in Mali was established. Mali was a model for study centers around the world. Local chapters were coordinated through a national committee, and in time continental bodies emerged, such as the African Regional Committee for the Study of the Juche Idea. The International Institute of the Juche Idea is the global body that oversees all activities.42 Based on the available North Korean journals in the UNAM Archives and other archival sources it can be estimated that people from at least 29 African countries were engaged in the study of Juche during the Cold War.43 In reality this number might be higher, for the data set is incomplete because I was unable to track down all editions of the Study of the Juche Idea journals, and archival sources about African-North Korean cooperation are scarce. While Juche Study Centers were eventually established all across Africa, the majority of local chapters seemed to be located in West Africa and relatively few centers were located in southern Africa. This discrepancy might be explained through the fact that West Africa was the first African region to be liberated from colonialism, and southern Africa the last. Unlike the rest of the continent, southern Africa remained largely occupied during 1960-1990. Political independence and formal diplomatic ties were logical requirements for the establishment and funding of Juche Study Centers. The distinctions between these centers, North Korean embassies and friendship societies were often blurred: Juche meetings were sometimes held in embassy offices and the embassies provided funding and reading material for the study groups.44 Independent countries (Zambia, Zimbabwe,

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Mauritius, Madagascar, Tanzania) were thus able to host such institutions, while occupied countries like Namibia and South Africa were, for practical reasons, not. When the latter two became independent, it was too late: the Soviet Union had collapsed and North Korea was in dire need of money, and decided to trade its soft diplomacy approach for a quest for hard foreign currency. Juche Study Centers became a lot less important.45 During the Cold War, however, the export of North Korean ideology was at full speed. Exiled southern African freedom fighters who were not able to set up or join Juche Study Centers in their home countries frequented study groups in liberated parts of Africa. When Sierra Leone hosted the first Pan-African Seminar on Comrade Kim Il Sung’s Juche Idea between 18-20 December 1972, among the fifty delegates from sixteen African countries were representatives from the MPLA and SWAPO.46 Zimbabweans studying in Sierra Leone attended the “Group for the Study of the Immortal Juche Idea of the Supreme Leader Comrade Kim Il Sung”, prior to Zimbabwean independence in 1980.47 SWAPO members attended study groups in Tanzania and Sierra Leone, prior to Namibian independence in 1990.48 As reported through descriptions in the Study of the Juche Idea journal, public meetings of individual chapters took place according to a set protocol. Usually a portrait of Kim Il Sung was symbolically placed in the room (this is also a significant custom in North Korea) and sometimes classic books or photographs from the Supreme Leader were displayed. The journal always highlighted the attendance of high-ranking African officials. Sometimes a speech will be given, sometimes a lecture, but the meeting would always adopt a number of proposals, working plans, and letters for Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il (and sometimes for both). On special occasions, meetings could last several days, such as the “National Meeting on Socialist Revolutionary Charter of Madagascar-Juche Idea”, held in Antananarivo, Madagascar, from 31 August to 2 September 1988. Gatherings like these were given special attention in North Korean propaganda: descriptions boasted about the number of participants and reported glowing well-wishes from foreign attendants for Kim Il Sung. Organized under the auspices of the National Committee for the Study of the Socialist Revolutionary Charter of Madagascar and the Juche Idea of the Malagasy Vanguard of Revolution (short titles were never North Korea’s forte), this meeting was apparently visited by some 200 persons, “including senior officials of the party and government”.49 Occasionally a pan-African seminar was organized, for example in Sierra Leone in 1973 (see fig. 12.5).

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Figure 12.5. Book cover of The great idea of Juche radiates over the revolutionary struggle of the African peoples, published in preparation of the Pan-African seminar on the Juche Idea in Sierra Leone, 1973.

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Inspiration for the Party Walker stressed that “Independence was not simply a rupture: it involved the re-routing and re-visioning of continuities of rule.”50 During the tumultuous wars of liberation in southern Africa, exiled liberation movements had years and sometimes decades to imagine the state before they were able to actually produce the state. As governments-in-waiting they absorbed ideas on how to organize a state and create a nation.51 The ideology of Juche provided several appealing ideas on this matter. We can see this influence clearly in the African submissions to the Study of the Juche Idea journal, which details how Juche can be applied to the development of recently liberated African countries. The Study of the Juche Idea mainly consisted of submitted articles by non-Korean authors and a significant part of them were from Africa. North Korean state propaganda can become monotonous and repetitive since it is designed by the Kim regime, but the journal is written by real, non-Korean people and gives us thus an insight into the global appeal of Juche. In the case of the African contributions the authors were usually well-established men in high-ranking positions in society: journalists, ruling party officials, Members of Parliaments, or university employees. To a certain extent, Juche provided the ideological scaffolding that was useful for the construction of one-party rule. Take for example Edson Shirihuru, in the early 1980s a Member of Parliament for ZANU and a man with impeccable struggle credentials in the Zimbabwean liberation struggle. He attended the West African Regional Seminar on the Juche Idea in Lagos, Nigeria, in June 1980 and this experience encouraged him to establish the National Committee for the Study of the Juche Idea in Zimbabwe shortly thereafter.52 In 1981 he published the article “Sovereign State Power and Building of National Economy in New-Emerging Countries” in the Study of the Juche Idea.53 Referring to the selected works of the “respected and beloved” Kim Il Sung, Shirihuru argued that it was “very important to use state power as a powerful weapon” to consolidate national independence.54 Shirihuru later became the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), an extremely important position within the Zimbabwean state, until he died in custody in 1993 following the disastrous end of a mysterious love affair.55 Juche and African state ideologies complemented each other well. In southern Africa, the first independently elected governments were former liberation movements and these organizations strongly believed that they not only deserved, but were also destined to rule. Their rule was legitimized by their role in the revolutionary liberation struggle. In this respect Juche formed a useful inspiration – it was exactly the sort of vague ideology that emphasized the importance of a glorious revolution and the privilege to rule by a single, united organization. The DPRK was

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irrefutable evidence of this idea. Despite enormous external pressure, the Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) had governed North Korea since its inception in 1948. While in truth this history is far more complicated, North Korean mythology constantly connected the earthshattering victory over Japanese colonialism to the eternal rule of the WPK. In 1988, the Study of the Juche Idea organized a roundtable to discuss Kim Jong Il’s text “On Some Problems of Education in the Juche Idea.” The participants included several educators from Zambia and Zimbabwe who reflected upon the value of Juche for their respective home countries. It was particularly the following excerpt of Kim’s philosophy that resonated with them: “For the popular masses to be an independent subject of the revolution, they must be united into one organization with one ideology under the guidance of the party and the leader. Only the masses who are united in this way can shape their destiny independently and creatively. The subject of the revolution means the integrated whole of the leader, the party and the masses.”56

The African participants of the roundtable used the transformation of their national liberation movements into independent governments to illustrate the usefulness of Juche philosophy. The participants included a delegation from the UNIP School in Zambia. Zambia was ruled by the United National Independence Party (UNIP) of Kenneth Kaunda and had recently become a one-party state. The Zambians underlined the similarities between the teachings of Kim Jong Il and Zambian humanism, a philosophy developed by Kenneth Kaunda. The dean, D.S. Bwalya, wrote that the “principle of revolutionary duty and comradeship” revolves around unity and “the cohesion of the leader, the party and the masses.” K.M Mutumweno, a senior teacher at the UNIP School, argued that the University of Zambia should award the “outstanding thinker and theoretician” Kim Jong Il an honorary degree.57 Another member of the roundtable was Kempton Makamure, a professor at the Law Faculty of the University of Zimbabwe. He explained the “correctness” of Kim’s philosophy through the “national-liberation struggle of the Zimbabwean people” and underlined the importance of uniting around one leader, who should preside over one organization: “a single ideology under the guidance of the party.” This also referred to ZANU, the former liberation movement that has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, while its leader Robert Mugabe was in power until 2017. At the time of the roundtable, ZANU was eliminating its opposition under the guise of protecting the hard-won independence. The feared Fifth Brigade, trained and armed by North Korea, killed more than 20,000 people in Matabeleland, where Mugabe’s main opposition resided.58 Makamure wrote that Juche “provides us with a powerful theoretical and practical weapons capable of building up the firm independent

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subject of the revolution”. James Bwerazuva, the rector of the Mkoba Teachers College and participant of the roundtable, agreed: “But, today the absolute majority of the Zimbabwean people are firmly united as one under the leadership of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and Premier Mugabe to become the independent subject of history, and are building a new life in Zimbabwe. Indeed, the proposition that the independent subject of history means the integrated whole of the leader, the party and the masses is a valuable truth that can be clarified only by the Juche idea.”59

In a different article, from 1986, F.K. Chihota explained the intimate knowledge of ZANU officials of Juche. Chihota was the Deputy Chairman and the Secretary General of the National Committee for the Study of the Juche Idea, the organization founded by former Member of Parliament and intelligence director Shirihuru. In a piece aptly titled ‘Beamlights of Juche Also Here in Zimbabwe’ Chihota detailed that seminars of local Juche Study Centres were sponsored by the Ministry of Education and the Department of Information of ZANU, and visited by “high-ranking” government officials and party members. “In the coming years, under the guidance of the ZANU (PF)”, promised Chihota, we will further deepen our study of the Juche idea”.60 But despite the profuse language that celebrated the eternal friendship between the Korean and African peoples, the story of the Juche Study Centers shows that the relationship between North Korea and southern Africa was mainly pragmatic. It was a terrific advertisement for the anti-imperial credentials of the DPRK, but there is no evidence of genuine collaboration between North Korean and African intellectuals in the pursuit of Juche thought. North Korean citizens never visited the study centers, except for the occasional diplomat. There are no examples of joint articles or books by African and Korean authors. The appeal of Juche seemed to be limited to certain African elites that were closely intertwined with the prevailing regimes of their countries, and did not reach the masses. But as Frederick Cooper recently pointed out, “unequal relationships are still relationships and they can be pushed and pulled on.”61 It is a fact that the Study Centers did exist and managed to excite interest in Juche, and thereby in North Korea.

Soft Power through Literature, Film, and Travel Cultural diplomacy was used to boost North Korea’s image in Africa.62 While South Korea concentrated on trade diplomacy, North Korea was interested in “concluding cultural agreements” with African partners and relied “heavily” on cultural diplomacy.63 Juche Study Centers were a key component in the display of North Korean soft

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power in Africa. In addition to the organization of public meetings, the Centers had a key role in the execution of cultural diplomacy, for example through the distribution of North Korean literature and the organization of film viewings.64 The Centers were also a gateway for travel to Pyongyang, so that African elites could attend training sessions or political meetings. This section will describe how Juche Study Centers were important hubs for the distribution of North Korean soft power during the Cold War. The personal papers of Mose Penaani Tjitendero, a high-ranking SWAPO official, show that North Korean literature easily appeared on the bookshelves of key figures in Africa’s liberation struggles.65 In 1964 Tjitendero traded South West Africa for exile in Tanzania and steadily climbed the ranks of SWAPO. He eventually became the first speaker of the National Assembly of Namibia and was declared an official national hero when he passed away in 2006. His personal papers are preserved in the UNAM Archives and a sizable collection of North Korean books and journals indicates his interest in the DPRK, while bulletins from the DPRK embassy in Windhoek illustrate the post-colonial presence of North Koreans in Namibia.66 Whether this kind of literature had any effect on Tjitendero and other freedom fighters is hard to say. Tjitendero is not an exception. Archives all around southern Africa hold North Korean literature, which was also routinely gifted to African leaders during the visits of North Korean delegations. In 1973, for example, the North Koreans visited Botswana and provided the cabinet of Botswana with a number of presents. The British High Commission in Gaborone noted that the visit was “a fully mounted propaganda exercise:” Books and brochure and photographs of the illustrious (almost deified) leader of the national Kim Il-Sung, praising the glories of the North Korean brand of national socialism were dished out by the hundredweight to all Ministers and Senior Civil Servant and to anyone else who fancied a set of the red-covered publicity material. The “independent” nature of Northern Korean communism was discernible from a total absence in the literature of any references to Mao Tse-tung or other occupants of the Chinese Pantheon.67

In addition, the cabinet received Korean porcelain and “pieces of fabulous Korean dried root with alleged aphrodisiacal qualities” (the British embassy in Gaborone gleefully commented that they: “don’t know if there were any private requests from Ministers for second helpings”). The Koreans travelled through Lusaka in order to circumvent problems with the South African authorities.68 Such visits were fairly typical and were usually reciprocated by African delegations to North Korea. While speaking at a mass rally in Pyongyang in 1976, Seretse Khama, the first president of Botswana, professed his admiration for Juche, “which he likened to Botswana’s national principle of ipelegeng/boipelego (self-reliance/self-help).”69

282 tycho van der hoog

Literature for the global export was translated and produced by the Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House, an organization that falls under the Propaganda and Agitation Department of the Workers’ Party of Korea.70 The Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House published books by North Korea’s leaders, which often concerned the development of Juche. Examples are titles such as “On carrying forward the Juche idea” or “On the Juche idea of our party” by Kim Jong Il, which I found in the National Library of Namibia.71 The apartheid regime in South Africa and Namibia banned these books because of its communist contexts. The words of Kim Il Sung and others were not only translated into English, but also in specific African languages such as Swahili and Afrikaans. In the National Archives of Namibia I found copies with titles such as “Basiese beginsels van die opbou van die revolusionere party” (Basic principles of building the revolutionary party) and “Die historiese les van die opbou van sosialisme en ons party se algeme lyn” (The historical lesson of building socialism and our party’s general policy).72 In Tanzania, North Korean newspaper articles were translated into Swahili by the local Peter Msungu, who visited North Korea and was a member of a Tanzanian Juche Study Center. Msungu, however, “pretended to do the work himself” and instead delegated the work to a friend while cashing in on North Korea’s remuneration.73 In addition to translated books from its leadership, the DPRK distributed international newspapers (such as the Pyongyang Times) and magazines (such as Korea Today or the Foreign Trade of the Democratic People’s Republic). The latter, to take one example, is an English language monthly magazine which explains the rules and regulations of the DPRK on joint ventures and features successful North Korean businesses. In a Namibian archive I found a copy from 1987 (three years before Namibian independence) which, among other things, contained a colorful feature of the West Sea Bathing Resort, a popular holiday destination.74 This goes to show that the DPRK was actively seeking to monetize their fraternal ties with newly or soon-to-be independent nations in Africa. In Zimbabwe in the 1980s, the local Juche Study Centers stimulated the development of the ‘Kim Il Sung Bookshop’ in Harare, where such pamphlets were distributed.75 Those interested in Juche could also enjoy a range of publications from the IIJI. The bookshop not only sold the Study of the Juche Idea, it also offered the bulletins ‘Age of Juche’ and the ‘Banner of Independence’, both produced by the IIJI. In 1973 a “Kim Il Sung Works’ Library” was funded by North Korea in Mauritius.76 Zimbabwe and Mauritius were not exceptional cases. In 1989, the IIJI had distributed North Korean propaganda to eighty countries across the world.77 Art has always played a vital role in North Korea, where it serves the political leadership.78 “Film show is one of the important methods,” wrote Chihota, the Deputy Chairman and Secretary General of the National Committee for the Study of the Juche Idea in Zimbabwe. “Since all the people cannot visit Korea to see the

microphone revolution 283

Figure 12.6. A North Korean poster depicting Kim Il Sung admired by his African supporters. Notice the Juche banner.

realities there, film shows were frequently arranged to show the realities of Korea where the Juche idea has been materialized and realize the correctness of the Juche idea.”79 It is noteworthy that the first-ever Non-Aligned Movement Film Festival was held in Pyongyang, on 1 September 1987. The theme was “The Role of the Film Industry in the Anti-Imperialist Struggles.”80 North Korean films highlighted the amazing qualities of Kim Il Sung and were famously anti-American.81 In the earlier-mentioned visit from North Korea to Botswana, a film show was organized at the Capitol Cinema and publicly announced over Radio Botswana.82 Juche Study Centers all across the continent organized film screenings and in some cases the North Koreans produced films in Africa. In Tanzania, a North Korean camera crew shot the Swahili documentary film “Tanzania Yasonga Mbele” (Tanzania Forges Ahead). British diplomats predicted that this endeavor promised to be “an effective piece of propaganda” because it would show “Tanzanians parading in the North Korean way” and would be a pioneering step in a young and upcoming film industry.83 Film screenings were also held in other parts of Africa.84 Every once in a while the DPRK would organize Juche seminars in Pyongyang, allowing foreign delegations to visit the socialist paradise on earth. In the 1980s alone, at least 200 students from various African countries (including Madagascar,

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Tanzania and Zambia) were invited to attend Juche courses.85 Such meetings, for example the ‘Seminar on Treatise of Secretary Kim Jong Il “Let Us Advance under the Banner of Marxism-Leninism and the Juche Idea”’, held on 11 September 1983, were regularly frequented by African visitors, in this case by delegations from Madagascar and Tanzania.86 In the case of Zimbabwe, between 1982 and 1984, 30 people had been sent to Pyongyang to acquaint themselves with the finer details of Juche thought, sometimes up to three months at a time.87 In addition to seminars about Juche, North Korea also invited delegations from NLMs for political meetings, and hosted all sorts of political conferences.88 First-hand reports from Africans visiting North Korea are rare, especially in the case of southern Africa.89 One exception is O.T. Mupawaenda, a Deputy Librarian of the University of Zimbabwe in the 1980s. He visited Pyongyang for a month, together with two fellow countrymen (a lecturer in law and a Ministry of Justice officer). Sponsored by North Korea, these gentlemen received an all-expenses-paid trip around Pyongyang in 1986. Mupawaenda submitted an exultant article to the Study of the Juche Idea journal, with the title “Present Times and Idea of Independence, Friendship and Peace”.90 Interestingly, he also wrote about his experiences in a Western scientific journal, published by the US-based SAGE Publications. “The Korean experience”, said Mupawaenda in 1987, “was far more rewarding, gratifying and interesting than previous visits to other countries, socialist, capitalist or non-aligned.”91

Conclusion Mwaanga, the Zambian Minister of Foreign Affairs, condemned the ‘Microphone Revolution’ that he witnessed in southern Africa, a revolution based on speeches for “public consumption at home.”92 While he surely was not referring to North Korea, this concept is an apt description for the rise of Juche Study Centers across the region.93 The metaphor of a microphone is not only useful to determine who speaks, but also to determine who listens. Juche was an ideology specifically developed to boost North Korea’s global image, a tool in the soft diplomacy strategy that the East Asian state deployed across the world. The exiled national liberation movements of southern Africa were particularly receptive to this message. Juche was part of the ‘export track’ of North Korean propaganda, as Myers has argued, while Juche Study Centers were simultaneously fantastic sources for the ‘inner track’ of North Korean propaganda: domestic North Korean media made grateful use of the African love declarations for their country. North Korean citizens were thus constantly reminded that Kim Il Sung was indeed a leading world figure and that foreign leaders envied the DPRK (see fig. 12.6 for an artistic

microphone revolution 285

illustration). But during the Cold War many Africans seriously considered Juche to be an inspirational ideology and used the opportunity of the Centers to meet people, read literature, watch films, and travel. Today, no party or government official in southern Africa is involved in the development of Juche thought. Hardly anyone outside of North Korea takes this philosophy seriously. Even a former North Korean Party Secretary for Juche, Hwang Jang Yop, admitted that Juche was created to enhance North Korea’s standing in the world when he defected to South Korea, thus shattering its last shreds of credibility.94 When in the 1990s the communist system collapsed in North Korea the export of Juche was no longer a priority and earning hard foreign currency became the number one objective. Juche Study Centers largely disappeared in Africa, except for a few cases that resolutely continue.95 Examples can be found in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Nigeria, Ethiopia, the DR Congo, and Guinea.96 Juche has been largely reduced to a niche phenomenon, in some cases upheld by local chapters from the Korea Friendship Association, which was founded in 2000 and is formally recognized by the DPRK. Assessing North Korea’s practical contribution to the liberation of southern Africa, it is likely that their military support was in the end much more influential than their soft diplomacy. Yet, the impact of the latter must not be underestimated. In addition to the (domestic) propaganda opportunities for North Korea, Juche helped to strengthen the ties with African liberation movements. This is where the true significance of Juche comes to light: it highlighted the DPRK as an example of a successful party-state based on the mythology of a liberation struggle. North Korea not only actively helped NLMs to achieve power through military aid, it subsequently provided inspiration to remain in power despite mounting pressure from opposition parties or foreign governments. North Korea had then a similar effect on Africa as China has today, which in the words of Clapham is “likely to adapt and modify the African experience, but is highly unlikely to change it fundamentally.”97 The global Juche revolution never happened. But today, most of southern Africa is ruled by former NLMs that were supported by the DPRK during the Cold War. These movements have evolved into government administrations that continue to cooperate with the DPRK. One significant revenue stream for North Korea is the lucrative construction business in Africa, as North Korean art studios design and build monuments, cemeteries, museums and other public buildings.98 In addition, North Korea also engages in a plethora of illicit activities and military cooperation.99 This proves that the AfricanDPRK relationship is not dead, it is merely adapted to changing circumstances. In this way the DPRK has turned soft power into hard currency.

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Notes 1

NAN, CCO, 39/12/1/3/1, Vredesoffensief in Afrika/Zambia, 1975.

2

J. Alexander, J. McGregor and B.-M. Tendi, “The Transnational Histories of Southern African Liberation Movements: An Introduction,” Journal of Southern African Studies 43:1 (2017), 1-12.

3

G.M. Khadiagala, Allies in Adversity: The Frontline States in Southern African Security 1975-1993 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994).

4

NAN, CCO, 39/12/1/3/1, Vredesoffensief in Afrika/Zambia, 1975.

5

T.A. van der Hoog, Monuments of Power: The North Korean Origin of Nationalist Monuments in Namibia and Zimbabwe (Leiden: African Studies Centre Leiden, 2019), 43.

6

L. Walker, “Decolonization in the 1960s: On Legitimate and Illegitimate Nationalist Claims-Making,” Past & Present 2042:1 (2019), 227-64.

7

J. Owoeye, “The Metamorphosis of North Korea’s African Policy,” Asian Survey 31:7 (1991), 630-45.

8

S.-S. Park, “Africa and Two Koreas: A Study of African Non-Alignment,” African Studies Review 21:1 (1978), 73-88; Owoeye, “North Korea’s African Policy,” 630-45.

9

Owoeye, “North Korea’s African Policy,” 630-45.

10

Park, “Africa and Two Koreas,” 73-88.

11

The Soviet Union and China, two other important communist donor countries, were, in contrast to North Korea, never colonized. The DPRK consistently emphasized its anti-colonial history.

12

Although prior to Kim Il Sung’s death, Kim Jong Il already diverted power to himself.

13

C. Clapham, “Fitting China In,” in C. Alden, D. Large and R. Soares de Oliveira (eds.), China Returns

14

Similar to how Matthew Connelly warned for the broad consensus among historians that “a Cold

to Africa (London: Hurst, 2008), 364. War dichotomy framed U.S. policymakers’ perceptions of the emerging Third World”, see: M. Connelly, “Taking Off the Cold War Lens: Visions of North-South Conflict During the Algerian War for Independence,” American Historical Review 105:3 (2000), 739-69. 15

UNAM Archives, PA 3/5/1/4, Voices of liberation in Southern Africa: The perimeter of the white bastion / Wolf Roder. – Waltham: African studies association, 1972.

16

This was also the impression of British diplomats working in Africa. “I have seen no reason yet to change the assessment that North Korea does not act as a Soviet or Chinese surrogate”, wrote the diplomat P.J.D. Whitehead in 1985. “The North Koreans have pitched their appeal, in the eyes of recipients of their aid, very much as a small, unthreatening country, seeking and promoting independence of great power influence.” NAUK, FCO 21/3213, Relations between Uganda and North Korea: P.J.D. Whitehead to Mr Currie, 12 July 1985. See also Owoeye, “North Korea’s African Policy,” 630-45.

17

NAI Library, Pamphlet Collection, Regional cooperation: AAPSO.

18

And of course, similar rivalries to the DPRK-ROK competition existed in the past. Examples are the competition between the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, and the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany.

19

See H. Macmillan, The Lusaka Years: The African National Congress in Zambia, 1963-1994 (Johannesburg: Jacana, 2013); G. Roberts, Revolutionary State-Making in Dar es Salaam: African Liberation and the Global Cold War, 1961-1974 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).

20

H. Melber, “Southern African Liberation Movements as Governments and the Limits to Liberation,” Review of African Political Economy 36:121 (2009), 451-59.

21

SWAPO, for example, opened a full-fledged Diplomatic Mission in New Delhi, India, on 22 May 1986. Sam Nujoma travelled to India and was welcomed by Rajiv Gandhi, “in a ceremonial welcome

microphone revolution 287

accorded generally to heads of government.” He mission was celebrated as SWAPO’s first embassy. UNAM Archives, PA4/1/4/113, (i) First SWAPO’s Embassy abroad Inaugurated. 22

C. Williams, National Liberation in Postcolonial Southern Africa: A Historical Ethnography of SWAPO’s Exile Camps (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

23

NAN, CCO, 39/12/1/3/2, Vredesoffensief in Afrika/Tanzania/Koerant uitknipsels, 1975-1976.

24

See for extensive documentation of the conference the Diplomatic Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of South Korea, which closely monitored North Korean activities during the Cold War: ROKDA, 25166, 남남협력에 관한 비동맹 특별 각료회의. 평양, 1987.6.9-6.13. 전17권 (V.1 기본대책) (and the next 16 volumes).

25

ZANU-PF, Zimbabwe News, Vol 20, No. 9, September 1989; See for more details about the meeting in Harare: NAUK, FCO 21/3602, North and South Korea and the Non-Aligned Movement Summit, Harare, August-September 1986.

26

Kim Il Sung, “Let Us Develop South-South Cooperation. Congratulatory Speech at the Extraordinary Ministerial Conference of Non-Aligned Countries on South-South Cooperation”, in Kim Il Sung: Works 40 (Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1995).

27

Mugabe also spoke at the World Youth Festival in Pyongyang, in July 1989. UNAM Archives, PA4/1/2/73/22, Report of the delegation of the United Nations Council for Namibia to the extraordinary ministerial conference of the movement of non-aligned countries on South-South co-operation, held at Pyongyang from 9 to 13 June 1987, A/AC.131/260, 5 October 1987; NAUK, FCO 21/4436, World Youth Festival, Pyongyang, North Korea, July 1989.

28

UNDL, A/42/411, Letter dated 87/07/06 from the Permanent Representative of Zimbabwe to the United Nations addressed to the Secretary-General.

29

K. Fischer, “Collective Self-Reliance: Failed Idea or Still a Valuable Contribution Worth Considering?” Paper Presented at the Conference “(Conflicting) Political Ontologies and Implications for Transformative Action,” University of Ljubljana, 27 May 2016. The term is still being used in official DPRK communication.

30

UNAM Archives, PA4/1/2/73/22.

31

SWAPO Information Bulletin, June 1986, part of the uncatalogued Franz Irlich Collection of the Namibia Scientific Society.

32

UNAM Archives, PA44/1/4/115, (iii) Leader of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Pledges Support for SWAPO, 21/86.

33

C. Saunders (ed.), Documenting Liberation Struggles in Southern Africa (Uppsala: Nordic Africa Institute, 2010).

34

See for instance A. Berger, Target Markets: North Korea’s Military Customers in the Sanctions Era (London: Routledge, 2016); J. Rademeyer, Diplomats and Deceit: North Korea’s Criminal Activities in Africa (Geneva: The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2017); The Sentry, Overt Affairs: How North Korean Businessmen Busted Sanctions in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Washington: The Sentry, 2020); The Sentry, Overt Affairs: Artful Dodgers: New Findings on North Korean Sanctions-Busting in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Washington: The Sentry, 2021).

35

For example in the case of Namibia. S. Iikela, “UN Sets Deadline for North Korea Ties,” The Namibian, 7 May 2019.

36

B.R. Myers, North Korea’s Juche Myth (Busan: Sthele Press, 2015).

37

Myers, North Korea, 5.

38

M. Nash (ed.), Red Africa: Affective Communities and the Cold War (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2016), 7-21.

39

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, Study of the Juche Idea: 1979-1990; UNAM Archives, PA3/6/117, Study of the Juche Idea. – Tokyo: International Institute of the Juche Idea, 1982.

288 tycho van der hoog

40

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 45, April 1989.

41

I. Dobrzeniecki, “Juche Ideology in Africa: Its Origins & Development,” Acta Asiatica Varsoviensia 32 (2019), 117-38.

42

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 45, April 1989.

43

Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, Zimbabwe.

44

In Tanzania, for instance, the Tanzania-Korea Friendship Society was founded in 2 April 1970. The society held regular monthly meetings at the North Korean embassy in Dar es Salaam, during which Juche texts were discussed. The society was led by Chief Adam Sapi and Peter Msungu. NAUK, FCO 95/860, Tanzania: relations with North Korea: C.T. Hart to M. Bryan, 28 September 1970. See also Dobrzeniecki, “Juche Ideology in Africa,” 117-38.

45

Interview with a defected North Korean diplomat with working experience in Africa, 19 July 2021.

46

Dobrzeniecki, “Juche Ideology in Africa,” 117-38.

47

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, Vol. 2, No. 1, April 1979.

48

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 48, January 1990; Vol. 2, No. 1, April 1979.

49

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 24, January 1984.

50

L. Walker, “Decolonization in the 1960s,” 227-64.

51

See also H. Melber, “From Liberation Movements to Governments: On Political Culture in Southern Africa,” African Sociological Review 6:1 (2002), 161-72.

52

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 33, April 1986.

53

Shirihuru received military training from China in the 1960s, which he completed with Emmerson Mnangagwa. They were part of the ‘Crocodile Group’ or ‘Crocodile Gang’, which attacked whiteowned farms in Rhodesia. Mnangagwa became later responsible for the North Korean trained Fifth Brigade. E. Mnangagwa, “My Life in Politics,” The Herald, 24 November 2017.

54

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, Vol. 4, No. 3, October 1981.

55

Rashiwe Guzha, a secretary in the CIO, disappeared in May 1990 and has never been found. She had allegedly broken off a love affair with Shirihuru, who then murdered her and dissolved her body in acid. Shirihuru died under mysterious circumstances in August 1993, while awaiting trial. L. Guma, “The Love Scandals that Rocked Zanu-PF,” Bulawayo 24, 27 January 2018.

56

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 40, January 1988.

57

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 40, January 1988.

58

Van der Hoog, Monuments of Power, 52-53.

59

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 40, January 1988.

60

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 33, April 1986.

61

L.A. Lindsay and M.E. Ochonu, “History Class: An Interview with Frederick Cooper,” Africa is a Country, 18 November 2020.

62

Owoeye, “North Korea’s African Policy,” 630-45.

63

Park, “Africa and Two Koreas,” 73-88.

64

In the 1960s and 1970s North Korea clearly outperformed South Korea in terms of cultural diplomacy. Today it is the other way around. As Yongkyu Chang rightly states, “current transcontinental cultural exchange is predominantly led by the South”. See Y. Chang (ed.), South Korea’s Engagement with Africa: A History of the Relationship in Multiple Aspects (Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 5.

65

This was also recognized by British diplomats in the case of Eastern Africa, where one bureaucrat was “struck how frequently the works of Kim Il-sung appeared on officials’ desks”. This worried

microphone revolution 289

the British Foreign Office, who called for a “comprehensive study of the North Korean role” in Africa. NAUK, FCO 21/2319, Relations between North Korea and countries other than the UK: W.N. Wenban-Smith to Mr. Elliot, 29 October 1982. 66

In addition to North Korean books, Tjitendero the monthly magazine ‘Korea Today’, and the ‘Pyongyang Review’. UNAM Archives, PA3/6/67, Korea today. – Pyongyang: The Foreign Language Magazines, 1992; UNAM Archives, PA3/5/3/273, Pyongyang review. – Pyongyang: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1988.

67

NAUK, FCO 45/1283, Diplomatic relations between Botswana and other countries: G.D. Anderson to S.G. Cook, 8 March 1973.

68

NAUK, FCO 45/1283.

69

B.T. Manatsha, “Geopolitical Implications of President Seretse Khama’s 1976 State Visit to North Korea”, Botswana Notes and Records 50 (2018), 140, 145.

70

North Korea Leadership Watch, “KWP Propaganda and Agitation Department,” November 2009.

71

NLN, F001 – LCA/06128, On carrying forward the Juche idea / Kim Jong Il; NLN, F001 – LCA/01319, On the Juche idea of our party / Kim Jong Il.

72

NAN, F002-AA/0251, Basiese beginsels van die opbou van die revolusionere party: verhandeling geskryf ter geleentheid van die 47ste herdenking van die stigting van die Werkersparty van Korea/ Kim Jong Il; NAN, F002-PA/0805, Die historiese les van die opbou van sosialisme en ons party se algeme lyn: toespraak voor die senior amptenare van die Sentrale Komitee van die Werkersparty van Korea, 3 Januarie 1992 / Kim Jong Il.

73

NAUK, FCO 95/860.

74

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/138, Foreign Trade of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea: 1987. 31 years later, the US president would praise North Korea’s “great beaches” upon meeting Kim Jong Un.

75

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 33, April 1986.

76

Young, “Guerilla Internationalism,” 106.

77

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 45, April 1989.

78

M.-K. Yoon, “Aestheticized Politics: The Workings of North Korean Art,” unpublished PhD thesis (Leiden University, 2014). The DPRK also organized other forms of cultural displays in Africa, such as photographic exhibitions, advertisements in African newspapers, and the organization of mass displays. Various independent African nations signed cultural agreements with the DPRK. NAUK, FCO 31/948, Political relations between Somali Democratic Republic and North Korea; NAUK, FCO 105/1889, Bilateral relations between Lesotho and communist countries; NAUK, FCO 106/850, Political relations between Zambia and communist countries; NAUK, FCO 36/2764, Involvement of Korea in Rhodesian problem.

79

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 33, April 1986.

80

UNAM Archives, PA3/6/89, Newsletter [Non-Aligned countries]. – Harare: The COMINAC II Secretariat, 1987-1990: Vol 5 No 2, September-December 1987.

81

Young, “Guerilla Internationalism,” 110-11.

82

NAUK, FCO 45/1283.

83

FCO 31/692, Relations between North Korea and Tanzania: C.T. Hart to M. Bryan, 17 April 1970.

84

For example in Burundi, Somalia, Uganda, Niger, Guinea, Liberia, and Mali. B.R. Young, “Guerilla Internationalism,”, 107-08.

85

Dobrzeniecki, “Juche Ideology in Africa,” 117-38.

86

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 24, January 1984.

87

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 33, April 1986.

290 tycho van der hoog

88

Another example is a journalism conference held in Pyongyang in 21-26 June 1983. Nearly 3000 delegates from all across the world flocked to the DPRK in the Year of World Communication to learn about the power of information and communication. SWAPO, among other delegations, participated. UNAM Archives, PA1/14/1/1, Namibia Today, Lusaka, Zambia (official organ of SWAPO): Namibia Today, 2:1, 1978.

89

See for other African memories of travels to Pyongyang: B.R. Young, “One African Man’s North Korean Juche Adventure,” NKNews, 7 March 2013; M. Macías, 나는 평양의 모니카입니다 (Goyang: 예담, 2013).

90

UNAM Archives, PA4/5/421, No. 46, April 1989.

91

O.T. Mupawaenda, “A Zimbabwean Librarian Visits North Korea,” Information Development 3:1 (1987), 44-45.

92

NAN, CCO, 39/12/1/3/1, Vredesoffensief in Afrika/Zambia, 1975.

93

In an interview with Tanzanian Daily News, Mwaanga explained that political speeches were not enough – he felt that the practical experience of the Frontline States was being marginalized in favor of passing fiery resolutions. This occurred at a time when African states had diverging views on the détente policy of South Africa. See NAI Library, Pamphlet Collection, Zambia: Foreign Relations.

94

Myers, North Korea, 6. Another example is the story of Kim Young Hwan, a South Korean national who joined the northern Worker’s Party of Korea from abroad but lost his believe in Juche after meeting Kim Il Sung and realizing it was a sham. Choe Sang-Hun, “One Man’s Tale of Two Koreas, Changed Allegiances, Torture and Fear,” New York Times, 23 August 2012.

95

See for example http://www.juchea.com/ (last accessed 10 November 2020).

96

Data from 2018, see Dobrzeniecki, “Juche Ideology in Africa,” 117-38.

97

Clapham, “China Returns to Africa,” 369.

98

Van der Hoog, Monuments of Power.

99

J. Rademeyer, Diplomats and Deceit. See the Panel of Experts reports of the United Nations for several examples of military cooperation between North Korea and numerous African states.

CHAPTER 13

Eqbal Ahmad: An Affective Reading of Afro-Asianism Amza Adam

Abstract Born in Pakistan and educated in the United States, Eqbal Ahmad became one of the most influential anti-imperialist intellectuals of the 1960s-90s. He built a complex network of ideas and friendships across continents and crossed paths with leading third-world figures, creating a living geography of Afro-Asianism. By starting from the affective life and intellectual stances of Ahmad, this chapter explores how the emergence of Afro-Asianism as a political project was the result of affective conditions that emerged during revolutionary times. It does so by engaging with affect and emotion beyond the restriction of the subject, to explore the affective armature of Afro-Asianism which shaped history from the colonial period to post-colonial times.

Keywords: Eqbal Ahmad, Afro-Asianism, decolonization, affect, history of emotions

“The function of good intellectual work is to apprehend reality in order to change it” —Eqbal Ahmad.1

Introduction The “Bandung Spirit” was more than a manifestation of the politics of Afro-Asianism. It was inscribed onto a longer period of transition and big changes on a global scale. According to one of the most important intellectuals of the postwar Global South, Eqbal Ahmad (1930?-1999)2, this transition was initiated by modernization, a process that was at the root of “a shift in the fundamental equation of human condition” which he identified as “the Third World transition from rebellion to revolution”.3 This shift changed the nature of the state, which became a concrete target of the people in need of a more just system. The challenge of the post-colonial period, he thought, was to deal with the inherently violent and inegalitarian process of modernization by allowing the people to protect their interests and aspirations through participation in transformative political processes. Even though Third

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World revolutionary movements did succeed in mobilizing people against state power, they failed to appease the political tensions of post-colonial times. In a 1995 interview, Ahmad recounted the excitement that he and other young Pakistani college students had felt about the Bandung conference and the promise of a non-aligned, “Third Force” in the world.4 Yet Ahmad believed that Bandung’s failure began with the decision to adopt the model of rapid industrialization. Postcolonial political leaders failed to understand the modernization process. Blinded by their desire to become like the West, they did not understand the sacrifices that industrialization involved, and the brutal forces it unleashed on its population. Ahmad argued: “if you started wrong you are going to get it wrong”.5 As a result, post-colonial states reproduced the model of colonial states. It was for this reason that Ahmad became disillusioned with Bandung in the later years of his life. This disillusionment was rooted in Ahmad’s reflections on the political and economic realities of the previous forty years. Ahmad broke with the universalizing narratives that tend to understand this revolutionary period “merely in terms of anti-colonialism, national independence, or economic development”6 and the Cold War frame. Following Ahmad’s understanding of world-making events, this chapter argues that the idea of revolution is central to the understanding of the promise of the Bandung era, which has to be analyzed from the larger context of the twentieth century, which was, as much as the nineteenth-century, a century of revolutions, and more specifically, a century of Third World revolutions.7 This echoes Karl Marx’s warning of the pitfalls of theorizing the nineteenth-century international order on the basis of the role of the five great powers of the time, as it would undermine the most important force of the century and the next: revolution, or to take his formulation, “the sixth great power.”8 The Bandung moment was filled with the idea that changes for a better world were not only desirable, but politically achievable. As Hannah Arendt notes, the core of politics is more concerned with “what should be” rather than “what is”.9 Academics have mostly been concerned by this political understanding of historical time, asking themselves “what were these projects?”, “how were they put into action?” and “what kind of world vision can we deduce from these questions?” The idea of revolution, too, is a projection into the future more than a particular vision of the present. The classical perspective on politics as a rational impetus to social change is particularly useful in observing the consolidation of new solidarities across continents, but it often overlooks primal phenomena such as affect and emotion. Indeed, in order to understand the political impulse of the mid-twentieth century, one must deal with its core: a set of bodily feelings, collectively shared by a group of people who went through similar experiences. This chapter situates Ahmad’s life and thoughts in that affective space. Following his early life in South Asia and later years in North Africa, this essay shows how an analysis of his

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affective life can not only clarify the formation of Ahmad’s own ideas, but also shed new light on the international politics and social transformations of his time. In this way, the essay also makes an argument for an affective reading of Afro-Asianism and the Bandung era at large. I will do so by trying to reflect upon affect and emotions beyond the restraints of the subject, in order to interrogate their action at the structural level. This follows the French economist and philosopher Frédéric Lordon, who calls for a Spinozist approach to the social sciences, allowing for reflection upon the role of affects and emotions without succumbing to subjectivism and sentimentalism.10 As such, this chapter will use the notions of affect and emotion beyond the restriction of the subject for an affective and emotional understanding of the Afro-Asian moment. However, contrary to Lordon, this chapter will not comply with anti-subjectivism. The individual lens has relevance to the historian. The dialectic between the individual and the norm renders lived experience livelier. By looking at the lived experience of Ahmad, we will understand that Afro-Asian connections are not necessarily the result of conscious political projects. Ahmad experienced both British and French colonialism in Asia and North Africa, respectively. These experiences left him with the deeply rooted conviction that, despite cultural, economic, religious, social or even political differences, Africans and Asians shared a common struggle, and therefore a common human condition. Acknowledging similarities did not mean erasing differences. Ahmad denounced the academic pitfalls of considering the Third World as a monolith. Nor did the acknowledgment of similarities mean restricting his geographical horizon. Ahmad became equally rooted in North America, where he spent a great part of his life. Ahmad was a man of his time who embodied the transition from the colonial to the post-colonial world.

The Embodiment of Afro-Asian Bonds: Affective and Intellectual Formations Ahmad was born in Bihar, a state located in the eastern part of India, into a wealthy family of landowners. He lived with Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi for several months in 1937 along with other children from Muslim and Hindu communities.11 Gandhi had come to Ahmad’s home region to organize a march with Muslim and Hindu youth in order to appease communal violence and to show that they could live together in peace. Ahmad’s mother asked Gandhi to take Ahmad with him. During this march, Ahmad was exposed to the art of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which had a substantial impact on his own perception of activism in defense of the weak.12 Ahmad’s father was a lawyer who was concerned with the working conditions of the peasants. He ceded an important part of his lands to the people, and defended

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peasants against the exploitation of his fellow landlords.13 His actions challenged the traditional and economic order of the village and antagonized other landlords. One day in 1937, while sleeping with his son Eqbal in his arms, neighboring landlords – among them relatives – took their revenge in a gruesome killing that Eqbal witnessed in its entirety.14 The murder of his father had an important impact on Ahmad’s psyche, his intellectual work and his engagement with social justice causes. Ahmad’s childhood exposure to violence was continuous. When the partition of India happened in 1947, Ahmad fled with his older brother. They hopped onto a government train and got to an airport. His brother left the country but Ahmad was not able to board. Instead, he joined a group of people marching to the Pakistani border. He experienced the sight of people in agony, bodies inert, left behind by the riots that caused close to a million deaths.15 Ahmad settled in Lahore with his brother and obtained a bachelor’s degree in History and Economics, and a Master’s degree in Modern History at Foreman Christian College. However, Ahmad’s critical intellectual growth occurred in the United States, where he developed strong critical thinking skills and distanced himself from his first attraction to nationalism. He became, what his close friend Edward Said would have considered, a true intellectual enriched by his exile.16 At Occidental College in Los Angeles, Ahmad studied the historical struggles of Native Americans and how their depiction in the media served to create a stereotypical image of them. He drew similarities with the way the US media distorted the images of Muslims to control public opinion. In the US, Ahmad faced blatant racism for the first time, especially when he took a trip to the South to see for himself the result of Jim Crow legislation.17 He joined Princeton University in 1958, where he obtained the Proctor Scholarship (1960-1961), the Graduate College’s highest honor. Even though he recognized that his years at Princeton nourished him intellectually, Ahmad also considered it a site of conformism. At Princeton, Ahmad started a PhD in Politics and Near Eastern Studies. He developed a strong interest in North Africa, particularly in comparing Moroccan and Tunisian trade unions. However, after antagonizing the Secretary General and founder of the Union Marocaine du Travail (UMT) Mahjoub Ben Seddik (1922-2010) with too pertinent and troubling questions, Ben Seddik shut the doors of the trade union to Ahmad, who then decided to focus on Tunisia.18 This did not deter Ahmad from placing Tunisian trade unions in their larger North African context, as he attempted a comparative understanding of Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisia trade unions for his doctoral dissertation.19 During that time, Ahmad also substantially deepened his understanding of French imperialism by following the courses of the French historian Roger Le Tourneau who joined Princeton University in 1959. As reported by Ahmad’s friend and biographer Schaar, the vivid discussions and arguments with Le Tourneau on the Algerian

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revolution led them both to drastically deepen their perspectives.20 The encounter also motivated Ahmad to join Le Tourneau when he returned to the university of Aix-en-Provence a few years later. In 1961, Ahmad went to Paris to study French. He found a loading job at Les Halles market and worked with five Algerians with whom he spent time with after work.21 On October 16, Ahmad was arrested by the police at a restaurant with a group of Algerians and was kept in custody for eight hours before being released.22 The night of the arrest, Ahmad was hit by the police twice with rifle butts, but he was more impressed by the smartness of the most important man of the group who managed to escape, and by the courage and sense of unity of the others.23 The art of escaping the police would be perfected by Ahmad himself in the years to come, as he helped to hide Anti-Vietnam protesters from the FBI. In the early 1960s, Ahmad went to Tunisia to start his fieldwork, and made short trips to Morocco and Algeria.24 If his time at Princeton developed his critical thinking, his North African stay truly forged his political mind allowing him to become an astute analyst of world affairs, and a skilled activist. In North Africa, Ahmad befriended leaders of the Algerian revolution such as Belkacem Krim (1922-1970), one of the founders of the Front de Libération National (FLN) and Vice-President of the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA). Krim was at the head of the delegation that signed the Evian accords, which ended the war and formalized Algeria’s independence. Ahmad also befriended Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) who was at that time editing FLN’s newspaper El Moudjahid and who is now considered one of the major figures of Third-Worldism and perhaps one of the most influential revolutionaries of the century.25 During his stay in Tunis, Ahmad met President Habib Bourguiba (1903-2000) and interviewed him for his doctoral research.26 He also became close to Ahmed Tlili (1916-1967) who was the founder of the Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail (UGTT) from whom Ahmad learned the history, ideological influence and political affiliation of the trade union.27 According to Schaar, Tlili demonstrated to Ahmad the importance of mass organizing and one could add the central role of trade unions in establishing a well-balanced society.28 More than a conventional researcher detached from his subject, Ahmad built lively knowledge on local political struggles. He befriended the people he studied; a sort of participant observation that extended as far as helping to smuggle weapons to Algerian revolutionaries.29 Ahmad rooted himself deeply in the core of the revolutionary movements he studied. Ahmad returned to the United States to finish his PhD. In view of his experiences in North Africa, preeminent figures in the anti-Vietnam War movement solicited his advice. In fact, while working at the Institute for Labor and Industrial Relations at Cornell University (1965-1968), Ahmad was asked by Daniel Berrigan to help manage his underground activities together with his co-activists.30 Later, Daniel Berrigan and his group were condemned for burning hundreds of draft files with homemade napalm. They refused to surrender to the authorities, and Ahmad

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helped to hide Berrigan from 200 FBI agents while, at the same time, organizing public events where Berrigan could make brief appearances. 31 In 1971, when indicted for plotting to kidnap Henry Kissinger (then the United States National Security Advisor to President Richard Nixon), Ahmad and his fellow activists became known as the Harrisburg Seven.32 Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Ahmad became more interested in the Middle East, which had by then become central to US foreign policy.33 During that time, he developed an expert knowledge of the politics of the region. According to Edward Said, “Arabs learned … more from him about the failures of Arab nationalism than from anyone else.”34 His counsel was requested by leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders, notably Yasser Arafat. After the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, Ahmad became more deeply involved with the region’s politics. He became acquainted with Ashraf Ghani, the later president of Afghanistan, while the latter was a graduate student at Columbia University.35 Ahmad also interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini in January 1979 in Paris, and Osama Bin Laden in 1986, when the latter was still an American ally.36 During all these years Ahmad maintained his bond with the Indian subcontinent, where he had family and friends. He travelled to Pakistan regularly after his acquittal for his implication in the Harrisburg Seven case in 1972, writing for local journals such as the Dawn where he criticized the excess of nationalism and fundamentalism and provided sound analysis of what he considered as America’s dangerous politics in support of the dictatorial regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq as well as the Mujahedeen and later the Taliban in the region. Ahmad also wrote pieces in Lotus journal, which was edited by his good friend, the Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz. This journal aimed to propagate knowledge of Afro-Asian literature and to participate in the emancipation of Afro-Asian culture.37 Through these personal engagements, Ahmad was able to develop prescient insights that diverged from most narratives of the period. He cultivated an empirical method of understanding the world, which he found to be particularly effective in non-democratic countries with curbs on information. As explained by Schaar, Ahmad nurtured his relationships with opposition leaders, artists, poets, journalists, activists and intellectuals who provided him with information that did not appear in world media.38

The Imperatives of Affect and Emotion Historical studies of the shape of the postwar world tend to ignore the idea that affect is what primarily drives actions and social life. As Jan Slaby and Jonas Bens state: “All political practices are affective. Political action and its institutional and

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organizational architectures are embedded in and productive of affective dynamics … The longing for radical change, the wish for soothing security, the commitment to a set of communal values, the denouncement of certain deeds as morally wrong – acts and orientations deeply embedded in all kinds of political processes – cannot be conceived without taking affect into account”.39 Affect is difficult to define, as shown by Brian Massumi. He explains that it is an in-between stage of experience, situated at the interval of the registration of an event on the body and the conscious emotion that emerges out of it.40 It can be studied from different levels, starting from the individual to the global. When studying the collective expression of affect, its impact on larger groups and its faculty to bend the course of history, the notion of “political affect” is the most relevant concept to employ. The notion of political affect is to be paralleled with what John Protevi calls “body politics,” defined as “the ways in which politics, psychology and physiology intersect in socially embedded and somatically embodied affective cognition.”41 An affect, as an emotion, is communicative. It goes back and forth between what is physiologically felt, and the environment. The affect is the stage of an emotion before it is processed. For example, one can enter a room after an argument happened between two people and not know what happened, but still feel “the atmosphere” before being “sad,” “happy,” “angry,” or “scared”.42 The tension in the room impacts the people who enter. In scholarly work, the idea of emotion is associated with “processes of governing and stabilization,” while affect has tended to be associated with “processes of resistance and transformation.”43 This makes sense when one considers emotion as processed affect, because a process is something that “shapes” or “bends”. An affect, by contrast, is elementary – when unprocessed it is potentially dangerous. In the context of the relationship between the colonial power and its subject, Frantz Fanon is sometimes considered “a scholar of colonial affectivity.” 44 In Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon explains how colonialism was an embodied feeling for the colonized. By enduring physical and mental brutality, the indigenous population accumulates bodily tensions. As these tensions increase, the colonized feel the need to release them by using their muscles. These bodily tensions are expressed in all aspects of human existence, even in indigenous dreams, which he analyzes as dreams of movement and action.45 However, it is at the end the praxis of violence that ensues should the colonial situation persists. For Fanon there is an “affect”, a sort of “energy” that emerges from the colonial situation which the revolutionaries have to seize to transform it into a powerful impetus for change. The atmosphere of the Bandung era emerged from the colonial situation; it was also driven by affects that tried to be shaped into constructive emotions – such as “hope”, “confidence” and “common belonging” – that were at the root of new

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political projects. The following pages will shed light on the affects and emotions that were seminal in Ahmad’s growth as an intellectual and activist, as well as the set of emotions that were shared and cultivated among those with similar experiences of the brutality of colonization and imperialism in Africa and Asia. Ahmad will be used as a window on that historical time.

Ahmad and the Affective Armature of Afro-Asianism Ahmad’s affectivity is profoundly connected to his experience in the Indian subcontinent and his early political development in North Africa. The early years of Ahmad’s life exposed him to the horrors of class, communal, religious, and largely political expressions of violence which embedded in him deep convictions that stemmed from affective experiences. When, in 1996, he was invited to talk about the murder of his father during a radio interview with his close friend and journalist David Barsamian, Ahmad said the following: “that played an important role because apart from leaving on me a very deep scar on me as a child, unconsciously I must have absorbed certain conclusions about life. One was that class is more important than blood relationship and that property is more dear to people than friendship or loyalties. Because in the murder of my father some relatives themselves were involved. They felt their property rights were threatened by his politics… He was involved with nationalism and gifting lands, thus setting bad examples.”46 Ahmad mentions “a very deep scar” that had repercussions for the way he understood life and society. He explained having “unconsciously … absorbed” a particular relationship to life and its interpretation, thus referring to the full maturation of an affect starting from an unnamed “scar” into a processed rational narrative about the significance of class and blood in his understanding of the way society functions. This way of processing trauma, from affect to emotion to the construction of a narrative, is a well-known mechanism that has long been studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. It allows individuals to give meaning to an event from which they have suffered. It is from affect and emotion that Ahmad developed rational answers to the apparent absurdity of what he endured. The shock of the killing led Ahmad to seclude himself for several years, living in his own world, having trouble expressing himself. Schaar believes that this event played an important role in the development of Ahmad’s quirky mind and his original perspectives.47 Given the importance of this event to Ahmad’s life, it is unsurprising that Marxist analysis had a particular impact during his early intellectual development as it offered the soundest explanation of the event: a class and property issue that transcended blood and communal relationships.

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Even later, towards the end of his life, Ahmad believed that there was no better explanation of historical turns and processes than historical materialism.48 He was convinced that every individual, regardless of their background and social belonging, had a role to play in the making of history. Again, Ahmad’s peculiar way of acknowledging the role of common people in the making of history shouldn’t be restricted to his purely intellectual and theoretical affiliations. Indeed, Schaar mentions that Ahmad often recounted the story of the “opium eater” whom he had met in Delhi before starting the march to Pakistan.49 In a BBC documentary, Ahmad recalled that story as a “most profound memory”, narrating how, when Ahmad and others first saw the drug addict bent over, they laughed at him; however they witnessed the same person straightening up, day by day, until he raised up as the leader of the caravan.50 This taught Ahmad how even the most powerless and miserable individual can become an influential personality and, we can assume, an actor of history. Furthermore, the weeks he spent as a child in the company of Gandhi, along with his memory of seeing poet and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore at his home in 1940, gave him a sense of proximity to these historical figures. Ahmad saw Gandhi and Tagore as accessible political leaders and thinkers, made of flesh, just like himself, ready to engage and create change. Through these encounters, Ahmad must have understood that he too could be part of history and influence the political decisions that would have a drastic impact on the world, opening the path to a life of activism. This idea of having a grip on the course of history and acting to create change in the present and the future is central to the spirit of the Bandung era. I have explained how several affective and emotional experiences during his time in India may have influenced Ahmad’s reading of history. But affect and emotion do not function in a vacuum, they are also transmitted between people, generating powerful collective forces.51 The affect that coursed through the Bandung period – and fused into bodies on a large scale – stemmed from shared wounds and experiences. The new sense of solidarity, along with the transnational exchanges of bodies and ideas, brought together many political leaders to participate in the same driving force towards the materialization of common political projects. Ahmad’s political mind developed within this context but matured in Africa. Ahmad’s life trajectory was intricately entwined with North Africa, a region known in the Third World for its resistance to colonial forces. This dated back to the 1921 Rif War, the first anti-colonial war of the century, led by Abdelkrim Al-Khattabi. Abdelkrim and his people resisted both Spanish and French colonial empires for five years, as a result of which he came to be known as the first and one of the greatest anti-imperialist guerilla leaders of the century. Although the quantity of academic study into the Rif War’s legacy falls short of its historical significance, Abdelkrim’s actions nonetheless echoed all over the world, from

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the cover of the Time Magazine, which named him Man of the Year in 1925, to France’s first demonstrations in solidarity with colonized people organized by the Communist Party.52 More pertinently, Abdelkrim’s resistance reverberated throughout the Global South. People such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh are said to have been influenced by Abdelkrim’s tactics and leadership.53 The Rif people’s resistance not only demonstrated to the colonized world that determination and military ingenuity could match the oppressor’s technology and brutal force, it also showed them that it comes at a high price. Ahmad arrived in North Africa one generation after these events had left, consciously or not, an indelible mark on peoples’ bodies and minds. At that time, North Africa was once again at the center of Third World revolutionary movements, but this time it was the volcanic atmosphere of the Algerian resistance. In North Africa, especially in Tunisia, Ahmad soaked in new collective bodily synergies, revolutionary life and ideas. Indeed, during Ahmad’s stay in the region, at the beginning of the 1960s, Tunisia had become the hub of the Algerian revolution. It was the main asylum for Algerian political dissidents who were risking their lives by opposing French imperial power. Tunisia, and also Morocco, hosted bases of the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN)54, and it is in Tunis that the Gouvernement Provisoire de la République algérienne (GPRA)55 established their headquarters. During Algeria’s War of Independence (1954-1962), the FLN extended their reach and alliances beyond national borders and continents. The organization not only sent emissaries and delegations across continents, such as Fanon in West-Africa, but also supported less official groups such as the Union Générale des Etudiants Algériens (UGEMA) who participated in the Afro-Asian Students’ Conference (AASC), which is covered by Wildan Sena Utama in this volume. The Algerian people’s capacity to resist extreme violence unleashed on them by France inspired people across the Third World. Fanon once noted that the “Vietnamese victory in Dien-Bien-Phu was not anymore, strictly speaking, a Vietnamese victory.”56 In a similar vein, the Algerian struggle also became a symbol of the Third World strife for independence and dignity. People in Asia and Africa identified with the Algerian struggle as their own. Fanon explains how communicative the atmospheric violence of the colonized world was, and how, despite the colonists’ efforts, borders remained porous to the impetus of the uprisings that erupted everywhere, spreading panic in the colonial government.57 It created a specific revolutionary “rhythm” that drove an entire nation and by which no individual could remain untouched.58 Ahmad was captivated by North African revolutionary vibrations. His close connection with revolutionaries, sharing their everyday life, helping them smuggle weapons to Algeria, exposed him to this electric atmosphere. He felt within his bones an urge to stand up against oppressive forces, no matter the risks, something

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that stayed with him throughout his life. When he returned to the US, he felt the need to counter imperialism at the source, producing knowledge that would directly come from Afro-Asian experiences. This is evident from his article titled “Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,” published in the Nation in 1965. Ahmad explains, ten years before the end of the war, why the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) would be victorious against the regime supported by the US in South Vietnam. In this article, Ahmad used his first-hand knowledge of Algeria to draw parallels and enlighten the Vietnamese context by digging into its politics rather than its militaristic frame. Interestingly, as explained by the historian Justin F. Jackson, this article was distributed among the members of the New Left’s most iconic organization: the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).59 Furthermore, this article also caught the attention of US Senators and was used in 1966 during the first Congressional hearings on the Vietnam War demonstrating that even prior to the Harrisburg case, which propelled Ahmad’s notoriety in the US, Ahmad’s work had already been noticed.60 As Jackson rightly states, one of Ahmad’s main contributions was to provide knowledge and analysis from Third World perspectives and to bring Algerian experience to US debates. But Ahmad’s profound need to face oppressive forces and injustice went beyond an intellectual stance, even though he considered such a stance vital to prevent the killing of Third World people. Not only did he oppose those responsible for US foreign policies in Vietnam through writings and public debates – he also wanted to act on it. In 1970, Ahmad suggested to his fellow Catholic activists, the Harrisburg Seven, that they should kidnap Henry Kissinger and organize a public trial to symbolically judge Nixon’s politics. However, the group turned down his suggestion on the basis that it was too risky. When one of its members, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, wrote to her incarcerated husband, Philip Berrigan, also a member of the group, a letter to explain Ahmad’s idea, it was intercepted by an FBI informant. On January 12, 1971, Ahmad was arrested with his six “co-conspirators” and spent a night in prison, a rather short stay thanks to his friends Prexy Nesbit and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod who raised money for his bail.61 The Harrisburg Seven case came to an end in April 1972 when the government failed to sentence them with conspiracy charges (only Philip Berrigan and McAllister were condemned for smuggling mails into prison) after the jury received confirmation that the main witness in the case was a paid informant. Ahmad’s actions in the anti-Vietnam War movement showed that he was willing to take risks and that, in the words of Edward Said, he was “unintimidated by power or authority,”62 a typical revolutionary attitude that resulted from his Algerian experiences. Ahmad knew how transformative resistance and struggle were to the oppressed. As a reader of Fanon, Ahmad explained that the psychiatrist

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learned something important about the human condition from the Algerians: “when the victim stands on his feet and fights back, he is not a victim anymore”.63 By standing up, individuals undergo deep changes that redefine their relationship to themselves and others. Ahmad saw that in the way struggle transformed both Fanon and Malcolm X: “Both discover the universality of mankind through struggle”, before pursuing that “oppressed people discover themselves, their strengths and their humanity, through struggle. If you don’t resist, you don’t struggle, you don’t discover it. You don’t even discover your own humanity, much less that of others.” This idea of “standing” explains the affective and emotional armature of Afro-Asian solidarity, both before and after Bandung. Afro-Asian solidarity came with new sentiments of belonging, linked to shared struggles. It was affective and emotional before it was a rational political project. When the colonized started to stand on their feet and witnessed, across continents, similar movements that shook the colonial order, they felt galvanized. This desire to stand as equals against their oppressors did not disappear after independence. As noted elsewhere in this volume, it continued to express itself in other aspects of life, such as literature, politics, sports or architecture. Among the latter, one might mention the OAU’s construction in Ethiopia of a new headquarters; the Algerian governmental project of hosting the Second Summit of Afro-Asian Heads of State in new luxurious complexes in 1965; or Nkrumah’s similar initiative to host an African summit the same year in costly fresh buildings.64 These architectural projects reflected the same self-image: standing confidently and proudly in the face of the world. The Bandung era inherited another key revolutionary characteristic: the conviction that politics is the most powerful tool to shape the course of history. It was a moment that tried to shape the visceral bodily surge to stand and the new senses of solidarity that emerged during the revolutionary times into political projects that had, this time, the full support of the state. Africa was central to Ahmad’s formation. His emotive self and praxis were forged during his time there. His inner drive to stand came from his African sojourn, and he remained firm in his conviction that “politics and power, more than economics, command the passions of men.”65 Many of Ahmad’s theories and analyses, such as his take on the challenges of revolutionary struggle, refer back to this idea. Indeed, Ahmad used his concept of “out-administering the enemy” to explain that the challenges of revolutionary forces were primarily of a political nature. According to him, revolutionary warfare could not be successful if it focused on outfighting the State. Rather, it had to focus on replacing State prerogatives in the areas that guerilla managed to control. By analyzing the successes of revolutionary warfare, Ahmad noticed that successful revolutionaries have primarily administrative targets: they collect taxes and take

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care of education and social welfare, while carefully maintaining a minimum of economic activity in the local communities they put their hands on.66 Ahmad thought that this argument was particularly well developed in Gillo Pontecorvo’s famous film, The Battle of Algiers (1966), for which he was a consultant. The film quickly became a symbol of the Third World struggle against colonization and imperialism. It soundly displayed the socio-political mechanisms at play between Algerian revolutionaries and French power by adopting the French style of cinéma verité. The Battle of Algiers faced opposition and was banned in France for depicting a pro-Algerian perspective of the Battle of Algiers.67 In a talk given at Hampshire College in 1998, and published in the form of a text, titled “The Making of The Battle of Algiers”68, Ahmad explained what to “out-administer” the government meant to him. During this talk Ahmad provided an in-depth analysis of the film by explaining the means by which the FLN obtains the people’s support. He referred to a passage of the film when the main character Ali La Pointe went to Colonel Mohammed Jafar to demand revenge against the French after they destructed the Casbah (a section of the city of Algiers). Jafar told Ali that it was not the right moment to attack the French because “we must first organize … we must clean up the numbers racket, the gambling racket, the prostitution; we must institute discipline; we must offer services to people”.69 Then Ali kills the man who controls gambling and prostitution in the Casbah after having warned him to stop his activities. This is an attempt to take power in a section of the city by getting rid of the organizations which are a threat to the new administrative structure of the rebels thought Ahmad. Another key moment of the film for Ahmad is when we can see a marriage presided over by an FLN member. This is a crucial moment because it shows that the FLN managed to out-administer the French in the Casbah. The marriage is not meant to be registered with the French but with the FLN; it is illegal in the view of the French. This moment shows that it is now the FLN which is the legitimate authority. Ahmad’s writings, speeches and activism were directed at providing a better understanding of the world in order to make changes, meaning that they were politically driven. But these changes were only possible if they were made collectively at the societal scale. In order to do so Ahmad kept repeating that people had to organize themselves and their resistance. However, this was only possible if people had the sentiments that they shared common struggles and humanity. Ahmad considered that the building of new solidarities was of most importance, but he never set boundaries to the possible alliances. He found great commonalities with people who shared similar struggles wherever they were. Ahmad found such affinity in the work of Antonio Gramsci, a major political theorist of the beginning of the century, who was to him “the only one of the major theoreticians of our time who actually came from a poor background. He was also the only one who was

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engaged in the day-to-day struggle of people, the only one who spent long years and disintegrated in the suffering of prison”.70 Ahmad understood that similar struggles could create new ways of identification and strong senses of solidarity as his attachment to Palestinian struggles shows. He would often say: “I am a Palestinian” and actively engage in supporting them.71 Ahmad thought that Palestinian political leaders failed to raise sympathy in the West, which is essential to obtain international solidarity. In an article published in 1996 titled “PLO and ANC: Painful Contrast”, Ahmad explained how beneficial international solidarity was to the success of the ANC over the apartheid state as they managed to raise international sanctions.72 For Ahmad, the PLO was too far removed from the needs of the people as they were focusing on outfighting Israel rather than out-administering them. This was due to the fact that the PLO had financial support from outside, which rendered the people’s active support unnecessary. He wanted the PLO to understand that armed struggle could not be the primary tool for liberation. They needed to first provide services to people, and secondly to obtain the support of the general population abroad, not only the support of governments. To him, the PLO had to try to respond to the cultural presence of Israel in the West, and strongly support initiatives such as movies, documentaries, books, lectures and exhibitions that would back Palestinian perspectives and interests. Ahmad thought that in order to construct a better world, alliances were to be made across national, social, racial, communal, religious, gender and class boundaries, transcending the North-South and East-West divides. By the end of the Cold War, Ahmad considered that international solidarity had lost a lot of its appeal, opening the way to indifference and inaction towards the injustices and suffering of the world. According to him, the threat of a nuclear war created a general concern about what was going on in other countries worldwide: “Previously every international conflict or crisis had the message built into it of possibly being a trip wire for a nuclear holocaust. That trip wire has [been] removed. But the solidarity shouldn’t be removed as a result”.73 Without this threat, the laws of market have become all-powerful, there is no place for solidarity, only the “Me, me, me. Us, us, us. We, we, we”.74 As Ahmad said, the “Bandung spirit is dead. Now everybody is bowing unthinkingly to Emperor market”.75 Having built considerable networks and friendships across continents, Ahmad’s life trajectory had embodied the Bandung spirit and solidarity. He mourned its loss.

eqbal ahmad: an affective reading of afro-asianism 305

Notes I am thankful to Narendra Packhédé, a Commonwealth fellow, for his critical reading of my text and his input.  1

Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolution in the Third World”, Teach-in movement gathering titled “The Bicentenial Dilemma: Who’s in Control?” at University of Michingan, November 4, 1975.

2

Ahmad’s birth date remains largely unknown. He was most likely to be born in 1930 or 1932 according to Stuart Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 159-60; in 1933 or 1934 according to Justin Jackson and Bengelsdorf et al. see: Justin Jackson, “Kissinger’s Kidnapper: Eqbal Ahmad, the U.S. New Left, and the Transnational Romance of Revolutionary War,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 4:1 (2010): 83; Carollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo, and Yogesh Chandrani, The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).

3

Eqbal Ahmad, “From Potato Sack to Potato Mash: The Contemporary Crisis of the Third World” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 122.

4

Eqbal Ahmad, “From Bandung to Mexico: The Decline of the Third World,” Audio recording (Alternative Radio, March 22, 1995), Alternative Radio Archives.

5

Ahmad.

6

Ahmad, “From Potato Sack to Potato Mash: The Contemporary Crisis of the Third World” 126.

7

Except for the Russian revolution of 1917-23, all the major revolutions of the last century happened in the Third World. For a work that reflects upon these events within the larger context of the twentieth century, understood as a century of revolution, see John Foran, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

8

This formulation has been used by one of the most important theorists of revolution within the field of international relations Fred Halliday who wrote Revolution and World Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Sixth Great Power (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

9

Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt (London: Penguin, 2003), 545-75.

10

Frédéric Lordon, La société des affects: pour un structuralisme des passions, Points 776 (Paris: Éditions Points, 2015).

11

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 11.

12

It is important to note here that Ahmad later adopted Rabindranath Tagore’s more critical view on nationalism.

13

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 29.

14

Schaar, 29.

15

Ahmad narrated his march from Delhi to Pakistan in the following documentary: Nazareth, H. O, “Eqbal Ahmad and the Partition of India,” Documentary, Stories My Country Told Me (London: BBC, 1996).

16

On Said’s notion of the exiled intellectual see for example: Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures, 1. Vintage Books ed, The Reith Lectures 1993 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).

17

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 41.

18

Schaar, 48.

19

Eqbal Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia” (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1967).

20

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 46.

21

Schaar, 47.

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22

Schaar, 47.

23

Schaar, 47.

24

Eqbal Ahmad, David Barsamian, and Edward W Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire: Interviews with David Barsamian; Foreword by Edward W. Said, (Chicago, Ill.: Haymarket Books, 2016) p. xiii,, it is mentioned that between 1960 and 1963 Ahmad was in North Africa working primarily in Algeria. According to Schaar, Ahmad arrived in Tunisia directly from France in January 1962 only. See Eqbal Ahmad, 47.

25

Ahmad confirms having worked with Fanon for six months and often came back to that memory, such as in Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 20; and in the BBC documentary ‘Edward Said: The Idea of Empire’, Arena Series (BBC, 1993). However, according to Schaar these are only rumors. According to him, Ahmad arrived in Tunis soon after Fanon’s death. Schaar doesn’t explain why his friend would publicly affirm the opposite, which makes the reader wonder if he was aware that Ahmad was himself publicly spreading the “rumor”. Schaar does confirm that Ahmad was a friend of Josie Fanon, Frantz Fanon’s widow. Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 171.

26

Eqbal Ahmad, “Politics and Labor in Tunisia.”

27

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 48.

28

Ibid., 48.

29

Stuart Schaar, “Ahmad Eqbal et son époque: Le récit d’une vie,” NAQD N° 14-15:1 (2001): 77.

30

Daniel Berrigan was a member of an anti-Vietnam war group of activists primarily composed of Catholic clergy known for raiding US army draft boards and for being one of the most active organization in the antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s. Eqbal Ahmad joined them and they all became known as The Harrisburg Seven.

31

Schaar, “Ahmad Eqbal et son époque,” 81.

32

For more information about the trial that ensue see William O’Rourke, The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, 40th anniversary ed. (Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). This book was first published in 1972 and reports the evolution of the trial of Ahmad and those who were considered his co-conspirators. It is considered a classic work in trial reporting.

33

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 58.

34

Edward Said, “Eqbal Ahmad: he brought wisdom and integrity to the cause of oppressed people”, The Guardian, 14 May 1999.

35 36

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad: Critical Outsider in a Turbulent Age, 59. Ahmad interviewed Ayatollah Khomeini for a special issue of Race & Class that Ahmad was editing, see Schaar, “Ahmad Eqbal et son époque”, 84; Schaar mentions Ahmad meeting bin Laden in Eqbal Ahmad, 3.

37

Nesrine Chahine, “Peter Abrahams and the Bandung Era: Afro-Asian Routes of Connection,” Critical Arts, 2020, 4.

38

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 62.

39

Jan Slaby and Jonas Bens, “Political Affect,” in Affective Societies: Key Concepts, Routledge Studies in Affective Societies (New York: Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 2019), 340, http://janslaby. com/downloads/slaby_bens_askc_politicalaffect_web1.pdf.

40

Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.”

41

John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic, Posthumanities 7 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 13.

42

The example of the room “atmosphere” has been used by Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 1.

43

Slaby and Bens, “Political Affect,” 346.

44

Slaby and Bens, 347.

eqbal ahmad: an affective reading of afro-asianism 307

45

For Fanon this need for action is in direct link to colonialism which coerces indigenous population mentally and physically. Colonizers set boundaries and limits that the colonized endure in their body and it is through actions that the felt tension is released, see Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre, 1. tirage, 9. [Nachdr.], La découverte poche 134 (Paris: La Découverte, 2002), 53.

46

Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 1.

47

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 30.

48

Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 102.

49

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 34-35.

50

Nazareth, H. O, “Eqbal Ahmad and the Partition of India.”

51

On affect and its transmission see Brennan, The Transmission of Affect.

52

Aidi, 13; Hassan Zerrouky, “Abdelkrim et La Guerre Du Rif,” L’Humanité, December 27, 2000, https:// www.humanite.fr/node/239184.

53

Aidi, “Les blessures ouvertes du Rif,” 12; Zerrouky, “Abdelkrim et La Guerre Du Rif”; Mevliyar Er, “Abd-El-Krim al-Khattabi: The Unknown Mentor of Che Guevara,” Terrorism and Political Violence 29:1 (2017): 137-59.

54

The Armée de Libération Nationale, literally means the National Liberation Army, it was the military armed section of the FLN.

55

The Gouvernement Provisoire de la République algérienne, literally the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic was the political and governmental branch of the FLN.

56

Fanon, Les Damnés de la Terre, 69.

57

Fanon, 69.

58

Fanon, 128.

59

Jackson, “Kissinger’s Kidnapper,” 84-85.

60

Jackson, 91.

61

Schaar, Eqbal Ahmad, 14.

62

Said, “Eqbal Ahmad.”

63

“Edward Said: The Idea of Empire.”

64

The Second Afro-Asian summit actually never took place. For more details on the historical context that led Algeria to represent the aspirations of Third World struggle see Jeffrey James Byrne, Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

65

Eqbal Ahmad, “Epilogue: The Lessons of Vietnam,” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (1965;

66

See for example Eqbal Ahmad, “Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won,”

repr., New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 71. in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 13-23. 67

Bignardi, Irene, “The Making of ‘The Battle of Algiers’”, Cinéaste 25:2 (2000): 14-22.

68

Eqbal Ahmad, “The Making of the Battle of Algiers,” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 85-93.

69

Ahmad, 86.

70

Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said, Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 128.

71

Stuart Schaar, “Teaching Global Justice,” Journal of Palestine Studies 37:1 (2007): 116.

72

Eqbal Ahmad, “PLO and ANC: Painful Contrasts,” in The Selected Writings of Eqbal Ahmad (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 76-80.

73

Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said; Eqbal Ahmad, Confronting Empire, 125.

74

Ahmad, Barsamian, and Said, 126.

75

Ahmad, “From Bandung to Mexico: The Decline of the Third World.”

CHAPTER 14

Passports to the Post-colonial World: Space and Mobility in Francisca Fanggidaej’s Afro-Asian Journeys Taomo Zhou

Abstract Francisca Fanggidaej (1925-2013), a left-wing intellectual in the postwar decades and subsequently a member of the Indonesian parliament, was an active participant in Afro-Asian political exchanges. The trajectory of Third World internationalist movements can be mapped onto Fanggidaej’s lifepath through the passports she obtained, destroyed, abandoned, and forged. She was a student activist with a rudimentary passport issued by a new government, an official with a diplomatic passport, a political exile with an annulled passport, and a refugee with a doctored passport. By tracing her journeys in the Bandung era and her later immobility and isolation, this chapter reveals Fanggidaej’s understanding of the international realm as simultaneously personal and political, shaped by reason and diplomacy as well as by sensibility and intimacy.

Keywords: Indonesia, migration, colonialism, national independence, youth movements, international communist movement

On 20 July 1947, at the Maguwo Airfield of Yogyakarta, the temporary capital of the Republic of Indonesia, twenty-two-year-old Francisca Fanggidaej hurriedly boarded an airplane bound for India. She had been waiting for her passport, which was signed by Indonesian Prime Minister Amir Sjarifuddin Harahap (1907–1948) shortly before her plane took off. Made of “rough and yellowish” straw paper and without even the word “passport” on its cover, what Francisca held in her hand was one of the first travel documents issued by the nascent republic. In her late seventies, Francisca would comment in her memoir that this little booklet was not only a legal document that enabled her international travels but also a symbol of her national identity.1 The rudimentary passport opened doors for Francisca, an activist in the Socialist Youth of Indonesia (Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia or Pesindo) who later became a journalist at Indonesia’s Antara News Agency and a member of the Indonesian parliament’s Foreign Affairs Commission (Komisi Luar Negeri, Dewan Perwakilan

310 taomo zhou

Rakyat Gotong Royong or DPR-GR).2 Having campaigned in India and Europe for Indonesia’s national independence during her youth, she actively participated in Afro-Asian political and intellectual exchanges. In the 1950s and early 1960s, she attended important events such as the Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Berlin, the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, and the World Peace Congress in Helsinki. Yet her life, the history of her country, and the trajectory of Afro-Asian movements would all take unexpected turns. In 1965, when visiting Santiago, Chile, for a meeting of the International Journalist Organization’s (IJO) executive committee, Francisca heard shocking news about an abortive coup led by a group calling themselves “the September Thirtieth Movement.” Due to the ensuing military-led oppression of the Indonesian left, Francisca was unable to return home. She traveled from Santiago to Havana to attend the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 and used her international stage to denounce the “fascist acts” of persecution and torture committed by the Indonesian military against the leaders of the Indonesian Women’s Movement (Gerakan Wanita Indonesia or Gerwani). Her public protests invited retribution from the Suharto government, which immediately canceled her passport.3 Suddenly rendered stateless in a foreign land, Francisca accepted an offer of asylum from the Chinese delegation at the Tricontinental Conference. With a temporary Cuban passport, a gift from Fidel Castro, Francisca flew to Beijing to work for the Afro-Asian Journalist Association.4 She spent nineteen years living as a political exile in China and witnessed the leftist extremism that occurred during the Cultural Revolution. In 1985, she arrived in the Netherlands on a forged passport and later obtained legal residence as a political asylum seeker.5 During her movements across a global terrain, Francisca used different passports and developed different identities. She was a student activist with a brand-new passport issued by a newly independent nation, a governmental representative with a diplomatic passport, a political exile with an annulled passport, and a refugee with a doctored passport. As John Torpey explains, the passport was “invented” by modern states to monopolize the “legitimate means of movement” and to tie persons to certain political orders.6 Indonesia, like many participating nations in Third World internationalist movements, “was born into a world where territorial boundaries were charted on maps, constructed on Western cartographical principles and where a universal system of passport control was already in place.”7 Under Sukarno, Indonesia hosted the Bandung Conference and sponsored many of the vibrant Afro-Asian cultural and intellectual exchanges, but it restricted the movement of those who did not align with the state’s stance in international politics by refusing visas.8 For instance, Indonesian socialists hoped to host the Asian Socialist Conference’s third meeting in 1954 in Bandung, but Sukarno’s

passports to the post-colonial world 311

government refused to grant entry visas to socialist leaders from Israel, and the meeting relocated to Burma. After 1965, Indonesia became a compliant partner in the U.S.-led world order. While wiping out members and sympathizers of the Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia or PKI) at home through political genocide, the Suharto government made thousands of left-wing activists living overseas stateless through passport cancellations.9 The stories about Francisca’s passports show that, for Bandung-era internationalists like her, it was impossible to divorce oneself from geography and territory. Despite giving rise to sprawling networks of travel, mobility, and circulation, the Afro-Asian solidarity movements took place amidst turbulent contexts of nation-building.10 The global connections forged during the Bandung era were uneven, affected by the visa regimes, passport controls, and surveillance technologies employed by colonial and post-colonial governments.11 As Su Lin Lewis argues, “The ideas of solidarity that characterised the Bandung era were both propped up and undermined by national interests and the ability of new national governments to control who flowed in and out of its [sic] borders.”12 This chapter analyzes the ways in which one woman activist participating in the Afro-Asian movements navigated the international travel control systems and migration regimes of that time. By doing so, it discusses what Hodder, Legg, and Heffernan call “the spatiality of internationalism,” or “how practices and theories of internationalism, despite their universal assumptions, are rooted in particular geographical and historical contexts and their spatial dimensions.”13 Combining biography and geography, I use a “lifepath” method to analyze Francisca Fanggidaej’s memoir, diary entries, personal letters, and oral history interview recordings.14 By tracing her globetrotting journeys in the Bandung era as well as her later immobility, displacement, and isolation, and by reconstructing her licit and illicit border crossings, I examine Francisca’s evolving understanding of the international realm as a forum for consciousness-raising and political action. The following sections, structured in the format of the information page of a passport, show how her changing visions of the post–World War II world order were inscribed in the sites and places where she lived, worked, and felt she belonged.

Place of Birth: Timor Francisca was born in 1925, at the geographic edge of the Dutch East Indies, to elite creole parents who were at the social core of the colonial administration. Her father, Gottlieb Fanggidaej, was the child of a Christian pastor on Roti Island and studied at STOVIA (School tot Opleiding van Inlandsche Artsen), or “the school for the training of native physicians,” in Jakarta. After graduation, he entered the

312 taomo zhou

ranks of the colonial government and became a manager in the Dutch colonial government’s Public Works Department (Burgerlijke Openbare Werken).15 Her mother, Magda Mael, a village woman from Timor Island, became fluent in Dutch after marrying and was known as an articulate leader among the wives of Dutch colonial bureaucrats.16 Francisca’s mother was said to have given birth to her on horseback in the middle of a forest along the Mina River (Noel Mina) of Timor, as the family was relocating due to her father’s job transfer.17 The family moved to Java around 1932–1933, and Francisca grew up amidst the “colonial cosmopolitan” milieu of an island widely regarded as the jewel in the Dutch Crown.18 Her father’s employment as a high-ranking civil servant in the Dutch East Indies government gave all the Fanggidaej children, including one boy and four girls, access to Western education. Francisca excelled in her studies at the Europesche Lagere School (ELS), where almost all her classmates were Dutch and the history and geography curricula centered on Holland. She knew a lot about the railroad connecting Rotterdam to Maastricht but nothing about the one between Malang and Surabaya.19 The family was simultaneously confined to the small social world of colonial elites in the Indies and exposed to diverse cultures across the Asia-Pacific and Europe via free family vacation trips, which were among the work benefits her father enjoyed. When attending the Dutch elementary school in the central Javanese city of Malang, Francisca once wrote, “Every man has a piece of angel.”20 Seen in the context of both the privileges the family enjoyed and the racial discrimination they endured, this sentence reflects Francisca’s ambivalence towards colonialism. The Fanggidaej family was Dutch linguistically and culturally. Her parents forbade the children to use Malay, which was considered a “foreign language”; the family celebrated Christian holidays such as Easter and Christmas and played bridge, tennis, and bowling; her mother read what Dutch housewives read, from sensational stories to food recipes. Because they were Dutch-speaking and culturally Westernized, Francisca’s parents did not identify themselves as pribumi (indigenous).21 Yet on one of the family trips, Francisca’s father was called “black fatty” by a white Dutch person when he went swimming on a cruise ship from Medan to Penang.22 The humiliating scene left a strong imprint on ten-year-old Francisca, who started to interrogate her identity as “dark Dutch” (Belanda hitam) among her white classmates at school. “Why,” she wondered, “was dark skin color always associated with ‘bad’ and white skin color with ‘good’? Weren’t all Christians good people? Were dark-skinned Christians bad too?”23 On young Francisca’s mental map, the colonial metropole was near but her ancestral homeland was far away. Like “a group without roots,” her parents put their pasts behind them – there were no conversations about Timor and Roti, nor interactions with the extended family members remaining there. Francisca

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speculated that her parents had established themselves by adopting the values of Dutch culture and did not want any interference from their memories or cultural heritages.24 But this vacuum in her family history motivated her to join the Indonesian National Revolution. Born in the same year as Francisca, the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote about his coming-of-age experience under the Japanese occupation as a process through which he shed his ethnic Javaneseness and became a real Indonesian.25 For Pramoedya, his Indonesian affiliation overtook his Javaneseness; for Francisca, her Indonesian-ness was forged through a reidentification with the islands in eastern Indonesia. The closure of Dutch schools by the Japanese drove her to seek companionship and intellectual stimulation from the young intellectual circle of Maluku youth in Surabaya (Kelompok Muda Maluku Surabaya) led by Gerit Siwabessy, a distant relative who later became Minister of Health and director of the National Nuclear Agency (Badan Tenaga Nuklir Nasional or BATAN) under Suharto. Her extended family ties to eastern Indonesia, largely ignored by her parents under Dutch rule, became a crucial source of emotional support and political awakening for Francisca during the Japanese occupation. Influenced by this group of nationalist youths, Francisca began to view the colonial system as a “rat poison” that “gradually entered people’s body until it’s all over the person’s blood and spirits.”26 Shortly after Sukarno and Hatta declared Indonesia’s independence in August 1945, Francisca joined the youth movement Premuda Republik Indonesia (PRI) in Surabaya and was invited to the first Youth Congress (Kongres Permuda) in Yogyakarta. She had kept her political activism secret and was unsure how to persuade her mother to let her leave. Politics was a taboo topic in the Fanggidaej household, which had lost its breadwinner – Francisca’s father – during World War II. As a woman from a humble background, Francisca’s mother achieved remarkable upward social mobility by marrying a civil servant in the Dutch colonial government.27 When the Japanese occupation shattered Dutch power and prestige and the colonial social hierarchy was turned upside down, her mother lost her self-confidence. In Francisca’s understanding, her mother, a Christian Timorese, saw the Indonesian resistance against the Dutch as a struggle only on behalf of the Javanese Muslims. She recalled her mother saying, “As an underdog, the Javanese could be sympathized with, but they should not be given the authority to dream.”28 Yet Francisca’s mother allowed her to join the youth movement in support of the Indonesian national independence, prepared her clothes, kissed her goodbye, and wished her success. Francisca recalled in 1995 that when her mother expressed that desire for “success,” she was signaling her acceptance of Francisca’s political cause. That moment of endorsement meant the world to her and would remain with her until she died. It absolved her from guilt after their separation in 1945 turned out to last forever, as the mother and daughter never saw each other again.29

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Place of Issue: Yogyakarta At the 1945 Youth Congress in Yogyakarta, a “horizontal universe” of people connected by their shared desire for national independence emerged before Francisca’s eyes.30 Although Timorese by birth, Francisca attended the congress as a representative of the Maluku Islands due to her long association with the Maluku youth. To her pleasant surprise, she discovered her sister Delly at the congress, dressed in traditional Timorese costume and representing their native land. Their encounter was like “two ships that pass in the night,” as neither had ever revealed their political orientation despite sharing the same room at home.31 When the bespectacled leader of the youth movement, Amir Sjarifuddin, raised his hand and shouted “merdeka” (independence) on the stage, Francisca felt shaken to her core. When reminiscing about that moment in 1995, Francisca said the feeling had never waned and was still burning after fifty years.32 After the Youth Congress, Francisca’s decision not to return home to Surabaya was, paradoxically, her own type of homecoming. The congress marked her personal “Wilsonian moment,” when she began to imagine a community of young people from across Indonesia and in the wider colonized world all demanding political independence.33 She found her roots and spiritual home while away from her pro-Dutch birth family, rubbing shoulders with other congress attendees from different cultural backgrounds, and using her still rudimentary Bahasa Indonesia language skills to communicate with them. When the congress ended, she was reluctant to leave the alluring “new world” in front of her. It was as if she had “stepped through a door which had opened wide.” She did not want to take a step back and close the door.34 In her new social circle in the Socialist Youth of Indonesia (Pesindo), Francisca inhabited two spaces: the soundscape of Radio Gelora Pemoeda Indonesia and the “barrack-like” physical environment of the Marx House in Madiun. Her lack of proficiency in Bahasa Indonesia, a language she began to study in earnest only during the Indonesian National Revolution, and her complete lack of knowledge of Javanese made it difficult for her to participate in the mobilization of the local masses. Yet her command of European languages made her a perfect candidate for international publicity campaigns. Radio Gelora Pemoeda Indonesia broadcast in three languages – Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, and English; the latter two were tasked to a foreign relations section led by Francisca, who compiled and edited the contents.35 Radio, an important tool that had defined the colonial space, was repurposed by Pesindo for a nationalist agenda with predominantly female voices.36 Francisca worked with Yetty Zain, the younger sister of Ambassador Zairin Zain and a polyglot fluent in Dutch, English, French, and Japanese; Harmini, the wife of PKI leader Ruslan Wijayasastra; and Rusiyati, who later became the vice head of the national news desk at Antara.37

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In 1946, Francisca attended study sessions at the Marx House, a political training camp where young activists listened to lectures on Marxism, Leninism, and the histories of Indonesian nationalist movements delivered by all-male, Westerneducated teachers during the day and slept on the floor at night.38 In contrast to Radio Gelora Pemoeda Indonesia, the Marx House was probably a space where Francisca felt doubly marginalized as a Christian woman, because most of the students were young men from East Java whose family supported the Indonesian National Revolution. The rough physical environment – sleeping on mats without mosquito nets – also caused her to miss the material comfort of her parents’ mansion with its thirteen rooms and seven servants.39 As a “city lady (perempuan kota, nyonya) from a family with a colonial mentality,” Francisca was self-conscious about her parents’ complicity in colonialism.40 But she was “respected” by her colleagues in Pesindo for her educational background, and she became the organization’s face for international exchange.41 In July 1947, as an informal ambassador for a country seeking to establish itself as a diplomatic actor, Francisca embarked on a nine-month journey in Asia and Europe to rally international support for Indonesia’s struggle for independence. Like Ali Sastroamidjojo, who later served as chairman of the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference, Francisca crossed the still-developing national boundary with a “primitive” passport hurriedly prepared by the Indonesian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.42 For this trip, Francisca and her two male colleagues brought along a suitcase with only two changes of clothes, but full of brochures and posters about Indonesia and its independence struggle.43 Their first stop was India, where the country’s leader, Jawaharlal Nehru, warmly supported the fledgling Republic of Indonesia by donating rice, arranging air travel for the Indonesian leaders, and sponsoring Francisca and her colleagues’ trip to Prague to attend the conferences of the International Union of Students and World Federation of Democratic Youths. From Prague, Francisca traveled to Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Britain to raise funds and solicit donations of weapons and medicine for Indonesia from leftist groups in Europe.44 In December 1947, Francisca left London for Calcutta to attend the Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence. The first international communist meeting in the region after World War II, this event was attended by more than 100 representatives from countries such as Vietnam, Malaya, and Burma. With no tables, no chairs, and no guesthouses for accommodation, the young activists held discussions in tents that became their bedrooms at night. The Calcutta conference advocated a “complete rejection of Western imperialism” and encouraged the Southeast Asian youth to continue their “implacable struggle against world imperialism.”45 During the conference, Francisca became anguished upon hearing about the signing of the Renville Agreement, a

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temporary ceasefire between the Dutch and Indonesian Republican forces, which in her view was a huge setback to Indonesia’s struggle for independence. A skinny, eighteen-year-old male leader of a weapons factory in Vietnam “with long hair and sagging clothes” hugged Francisca and invited her to come to Vietnam and escape the war in Indonesia, telling her that Vietnam was her motherland too.46 While at the Calcutta conference, Francisca facilitated clandestine communications between the Communist International (Comintern) and the PKI, an act that contributed to Indonesia’s “inescapable” entanglement in the Cold War.47 At the end of the conference, Francisca and two male delegates from Indonesia faced the problems of how to return home without any money and how to circumvent a blockade imposed by the Dutch against Indonesia during the last stage of the nation’s anti-colonial struggle. They were assisted by Tio Oen Bik, a Peranakan Chinese Indonesian doctor who had volunteered in the international brigade in the Spanish Civil War and supported the Chinese communists during the Second SinoJapanese War.48 Besides arranging her travel, Tio gave Francisca her a document of about four or five pages to take to the PKI leadership and instructed her to “tuck the papers in her kebaya to avoid searches.”49 This document was later described by Indonesian journalist Rosihan Anwar as a “blueprint” for the Madiun Affair. In September 1948, a left-wing coalition force led by the PKI attempted to establish a popular sovereign state free of imperialism and bourgeois rule, but the uprising was ultimately suppressed by the government of the Republic of Indonesia.50 Francisca claimed to have never read the document, but she suspected that it was the text of a speech delivered by Soviet leader Andrew Zhdanov at the Indian Communist congress, which followed the youth conference. She wrote in her memoir: At the time, the ideas of Afro-Asia, Asia–Africa–Latin America and the Third World had not yet been born. If there was a blueprint presented by Zhdanov, it was not a blueprint specifically for the PKI to carry out a “revolt” at Madiun. It was more of a strategy for the communist parties all over the world to fight for independence and against colonialism. According to Zhdanov, there was only one way for the colonized peoples to achieve independence, and that was through armed struggle.51

In April 1948, Francisca was ultimately “smuggled” back into Indonesia through the joint efforts of Tio Oen Bik and John Lie, the only Chinese Indonesian navy admiral and awardee of the title of National Hero (Pahlawan Nasional).52 Tio helped Francisca and three other Indonesian attendees at the Calcutta conference to stow away in a ship bound for Singapore. On board, they hid with other “black passengers” (penumpang gelap) and destroyed their Indonesian passports for fear of encountering Dutch patrol boats.53 Upon arriving in Singapore, they were cared for by one of Amir Sjarifuddin’s contacts and a young Chinese woman who was likely

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a member of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). While the group was staying in a dark and small hotel room, a letter written in Chinese mysteriously appeared on Francisca’s desk one day. The young MCP woman quickly recognized it as bait planted by the British colonial police. The hotel was soon raided, but fortunately, Francisca and her colleagues had left thanks to the MCP woman’s warning. They went underground for several days until a motorboat arranged by John Lie picked them up in the shallow waters along the shore of Singapore, taking them into Indonesia through Jambi.54 Lie, a Christian, would later tease Francisca when both were members of parliament in the early 1960s: “If I had known I was bringing communists like you back to Indonesia, I wouldn’t do it!” and “You found your way to the hammer and sickle; I found my way toward God.”55

Place of Cancellation: Havana From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, Francisca was a socialist cosmopolite constantly on the move. After the Madiun Affair, the PKI was not banned due to public recognition of its contribution to Indonesia’s anti-colonial struggle. The party rehabilitated itself, although its position was precarious in the early 1950s.56 Having been imprisoned while pregnant and having lost her first husband during the Madiun Affair, Francisca gradually recovered, both personally and politically. In 1950, she was elected as the chairwoman of the Pemuda Rakyat, the youth wing of the PKI reconstituted from Pesindo. When the Bandung Conference was approaching, she retired from the youth movement, became a reporter at the Antara News Agency, and married a coworker, Soepriyo. She also joined three leftist organizations: the Indonesian Women’s Movement, the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization (Organisasi Internasional untuk Setiakawan Rakyat Asia-Afrika), and the World Peace Committee (Komite Perdamaian).57 In 1957, she became a member of the Indonesian parliament and its Foreign Affairs Commission. In these official capacities, Francisca attended the congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation in Berlin, the Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, the preparatory conference for a “second Bandung” in Algiers, and the World Peace Congress in Helsinki. Yet underneath the conviviality of these international gatherings, Francisca perceived simmering discord. At Algiers, she described the conference as an inefficient “big picnic” and considered the large Indonesian delegation a waste of government funding. Moreover, the plans for a second Bandung proved untenable, and Indonesia’s radical anti-imperialist policies proved unpopular among AfroAsian countries.58 At the Bandung Conference of 1955, Indonesia had spearheaded the movement toward autonomy in international politics among the previously

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voiceless Third World countries. But the abortive second Afro-Asian Conference ten years later revealed Indonesia’s increasing isolation. Through konfrontasi, the military campaign in Borneo to block the formation of Malaysia, and projects to replace the Olympic Games with the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) and to replace the UN with the Conference of the New Emerging Forces (CONEFO), Sukarno used militant anti-imperialism to rally domestic support and distract the general public from the deteriorating national economy. In the process, he transformed the Indonesian government from a reasonable campaigner for Afro-Asian solidarity into a fierce rebel against the international system.59 In 1965, in his last Independence Day speech delivered as Indonesia’s president, Sukarno declared, “We are now fostering an anti-imperialist axis – the Jakarta-Phnom Penh-HanoiPeking-Pyongyang axis.”60 “Like lightning in broad daylight,” the September Thirtieth Movement and the subsequent anti-communist mass violence in Indonesia derailed the trajectories of Francisca’s career.61 While she was attending an International Journalist Organization meeting in Santiago, back in Jakarta an armed group abducted and killed six senior anti-communist generals in the wee hours of 1 October 1965. The kidnappers claimed that they had taken this action to prevent a CIA-sponsored intrigue targeting Sukarno. The next day, Major General Suharto initiated an effective counterattack, characterising the event as a coup attempt by the PKI, which had grown to become the third-largest communist party in the world. According to statements by Suharto and his Indonesian Army, half-naked members of the women’s wing of the communist party, Gerwani, had mutilated the lifeless bodies of the generals before their male counterparts dumped the corpses into a dry well called the crocodile hole.62 This extreme propaganda, which defamed women activists and dehumanized all participants in the left-wing movements, was an important step in social mobilization for one of the worst mass murders of the twentieth century. In a little over six months, about half a million people allegedly affiliated with the PKI were killed. Another million or so were detained without charge, some for more than thirty years.63 Francisca was probably the first person to alert the international community regarding the atrocities committed against female left-wing activists during the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966. In January 1966, she left Santiago for Havana to attend the Tricontinental Conference, which for the first time expanded the realm of Afro-Asian solidarity to Latin America. Together with delegates including Isa Ibrahim, Umar Said, and Wijano – who had been Indonesian representatives to the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization, Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association and Afro-Asian Jurists’ Association, respectively – Francisca voiced her strong opposition to Suharto’s new military dictatorship before a global audience.64 As the only female in the group, she decried the Suharto regime’s “brutal oppression” of

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Figure 14.1. Francisca Fanggidaej with Fidel Castro and Isa Ibrahim. Courtesy of Reza Rahadian.

Gerwani’s top leaders as well as the “tortures of the most bestial type” perpetrated against “housewives and other women in Indonesia.” She highlighted gender-based violence: “Besides subjecting the arrested women to constant untold sufferings in the prisons, the reactionaries cut their hair.” She appealed for “support and solidarity” from the women of Asia, Africa, and Latin America on behalf of “all progressive women of Indonesia”: The history of Gerwani has been characterized not only by its consistent fight for full national independence, democracy, and women’s emancipation but also by its staunch fight for the cause of Afro-Asian and Latin American unity and solidarity. The attempts of the Indonesian reactionaries to crush Gerwani and other progressive organizations and to wipe them out of the political life in our country are also aimed at weakening Indonesia’s contribution to the common cause of the three continents. Therefore, these criminal attempts must be foiled.65

The public protests by Francisca and her fellow delegates invited retribution from the Suharto government, which immediately canceled their passports while the group was still in Havana.66 They accepted an offer of asylum from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) delegation at the Tricontinental Conference. On 26 January 1966, Francisca arrived in Beijing and began her nineteen-year exile in the PRC.67

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Immediately after her arrival in Beijing, Francisca busied herself with publishing and translation work at the Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association (AAJA).68 Originating from the 1955 Bandung Conference, the AAJA promoted international collaboration among journalists in newly independent countries. Built on an inclusive foundation of peaceful coexistence, the AAJA contributed to the development of expansive global information networks, lively intellectual traffic, and rich visual arts among Afro-Asian nations. After 1965, the Indonesian Army began searching AAJA headquarters in Jakarta, confiscating documents, cutting off its communications with the outside world, and arresting and harassing its staff members. As a result, the AAJA secretariat relocated to Beijing, and its new headquarters became a magnet for left-leaning Indonesian intellectuals from different parts of the world, including Francisca. However, by the time she arrived in Beijing, the reconstituted AAJA had been transformed from a cosmopolitan alliance of socialist presses into an international branch of the PRC propaganda system, promoting Mao as the universal leader of an embittered Third World’s battle against American imperialism and Soviet revisionism.69 In China, Francisca lost her freedom of movement, and her cosmopolitan identity was also stripped away. Although her Chinese hosts provided her with a privileged life insulated from economic difficulties, they also confined her and her fellow Indonesian exiles to enclaves isolated from the general Chinese population. Francisca was paid a high salary and enjoyed an honorable status as a “foreign guest of the Party.” Nevertheless, worldly comforts did not fully compensate for the emotional stress of living in a stifling atmosphere. Initially housed in the Peking Hotel, Francisca was transferred in 1966 to the Nanjing Military Academy, China’s boot camp for radical groups from Asia, Africa, and Latin America. There, the Indonesian exiles congregated to study Maoist guerrilla warfare strategies. The strain of isolation, combined with the exiles’ dim prospects of returning home and resurrecting the PKI, eventually caused them to turn in upon themselves in bitter acrimony. The community of exiles was subjected to strict internal party discipline and a principle of secrecy during the Cultural Revolution.70 All its members adopted noms de guerre, with Francisca changing her name to “Santi.”71 In volatile campaigns mimicking those of the Cultural Revolution, “Santi” suffered fierce personal attacks, possibly due to her pro-Dutch, bourgeois family origin.72 Francisca was disheartened by the irreversible erosion of the PKI’s internal unity and the painful unraveling of her past friendships. By the mid-1970s, ideological fervor began abating in China. After U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic visit to the PRC in 1972, Beijing started to tone down its propaganda promoting Maoist-style guerrilla insurgencies worldwide. Following Deng Xiaoping’s ascent to power in the late 1970s, economic growth gained priority over ideological campaigns. The PRC looked to the capitalist world for investment,

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managerial knowledge, and technology while cutting back its support of the international communist movement. China’s transformation had a significant impact on Indonesian communist exiles such as Francisca. In 1974, to keep the exiles away from public view, the Chinese Communist Party’s International Liaison Department (ILD) constructed an enclosed compound in the suburbs of Nanchang, the capital of the hinterland province of Jiangxi. Although confined to the compound, the exiles lived in rent-free apartments equipped with expensive, imported household electronics and ate for free at a public canteen. They also enjoyed free medical care, translation services, and annual holiday trips arranged by the ILD. In the mid-1980s, China and Indonesia began negotiations on the resumption of diplomatic ties. Pressured by Suharto to renounce any ties with the PKI, the PRC canceled its comprehensive welfare packages for the exiles. The ILD issued a new rule stipulating that if the exiles would like to remain in China, they would have to become naturalized PRC citizens without any privileges. They needed to be economically independent and make their own financial calculations based on personal income. But due to a lack of Chinese language skills, most of the exiles had few employment opportunities in China and instead migrated to the West. The beginning of Reform and Opening in China signaled new hopes for many Chinese who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. But for Francisca and her fellow exiles, it was a moment of loss and disillusionment. Feeling betrayed by Beijing’s endeavors to reconcile with the Suharto regime at their expense, they fought “tooth and nail” against the PRC’s decision to expel them.73 Francisca ultimately gave in and left China for Holland. Despite her proficiency in Dutch, she experienced downward social mobility. She felt that her pride was “offended” as she “begged” for political asylum at the advanced age of sixty.74 Three weeks after her arrival, she wrote to her friends back in China that she was homesick – using “home” to refer not to Indonesia but to the clandestine compound where she used to live in Nanchang. She compared herself to “an old tree struggling to take root in new soil.”75 During her early days in the Netherlands, Francisca thought Chinese society was more “humane” whereas everything was “cold” and “foreign” in western Europe.76 With assistance from the Indonesian exile community in Holland, she resettled in a “quiet and lovely” flat in Zeist, a small town thirty minutes away by bus from the city of Utrecht.77 After some initial struggles to acquire practical life skills such as cooking, which she had never bothered to learn in thirty years of adulthood, Francisca adapted to her new life and continued her intellectual pursuits and political activism. She filled her schedule with voluntary work in international campaigns for the release of Indonesian political prisoners as well as lectures and studies at Leiden University.78 In 2004, Francisca returned to Indonesia for the first time since 1965. She passed away in the Netherlands in 2013.

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Conclusions Francisca Fanggidaej represented Indonesia at three conferences that marked inflection points in the Afro-Asian movements: the Conference of Youth and Students of Southeast Asia Fighting for Freedom and Independence of 1948 in Calcutta; the preparatory meeting for a second Afro-Asian Conference in 1964 in Algiers; and the Tricontinental Conference of 1966 in Havana. If the Calcutta conference marked the embryonic stage of Afro-Asian solidarity, the Algiers meeting exposed its latent fissures and the Havana conference signaled the ultimate separation between countries demanding militant, revolutionary change and those that prioritized peaceful accommodation of the two superpowers.79 Francisca’s travels reflect the complexity of the worldwide anti-imperialist coalitions, give us a glimpse into the extensive networks generated by internationalist movements, and showcase various states’ efforts to facilitate as well as to constrain and surveil Afro-Asian activists’ movements across borders. Francisca’s identity was made and remade through her Afro-Asian journeys.80 In Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Mute’s Soliloquy, the renowned Indonesian writer narrated a story of how a Javanese young man’s migration from rural central Java to Jakarta made him into a genuine Indonesian with an Indonesian sensibility.81 Francisca was a contemporary of Pramoedya, and her own migration from her comfortable birth home to the spartan environment of the Marxist study camp gave rise to nationalist sentiments as well as internationalist ideals. For her, the Indonesian National Revolution represented not an act of revenge against the Dutch but a journey of homecoming (seperti pulang ke rumah sendiri), of self-discovery, of locating her own place in the world.82 When the nation achieved its independence, she felt that she had gained her individual independence as well.83 Yet having grown up in the port city of Surabaya, Francisca, like many cosmopolitan urban elites across the trading ports of maritime Asia, had a sense of “double consciousness of both global processes and local pluralism.”84 Committed to an equitable and inclusive vision of humanity that crossed national lines, Francisca had been an outward-looking Indonesian nationalist with a socialist cosmopolitan identity connected to the Third World. Since her attendance at the Calcutta conference, she had been envisioning a “family” of people of color all across the world united by their shared feelings (persaan) and aspirations for national independence (merdeka).85 “Where is the international?”86 For Francisca, the international realm was simultaneously personal and political. The trajectory of Third World internationalist movements can be mapped onto Francisca’s lifepath and is embodied in the passports she obtained, destroyed, abandoned, and forged. In her early years, Afro-Asianism provided her with a home in her search for belonging. During the liveliest phase of the Afro-Asian solidarity movement, she could be simultaneously

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an Indonesian nationalist and an internationalist, a revolutionary and a Westerneducated cosmopolitan. For the young Francisca, who was constantly on the move, the international was embedded in the soundscape dominated by young women at Radio Gelora Pemoeda Indonesia, inscribed in the physical spaces of gatherings in Prague, Berlin, Cairo, and Helsinki and the emotional space of relationships with fellow activists. Yet in the second half of her life, trapped in China during the Cultural Revolution, she saw her physical mobility constrained and her socialist cosmopolitanism called into question. The demise of the communist movement in Indonesia and the decline of Afro-Asianism deprived Francisca of the strongest iterations of her identity. In her memoir, Francisca wrote that the political freedom she pursued had been more emotional than rational.87 Along with the other feminist scholarship in this volume, this chapter shows how “the emotive expression of solidarity and calls for social justice among ordinary people” was a crucial component of Afro-Asian movements.88 Francisca’s spatial imaginaries of internationalism were shaped by reason and diplomacy as well as by sensibility and intimacy.

Notes 1

Hersi Setiawan and Francisca Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner (Yogyakarta: Percetakan Galangpress, 2006), 106.

2

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 106.

3

“Peristiwa Havana Sepenuhnya Mendapatkan Perhatian DPR-GR; DPR-GR menyatakan protes,” 1 February 1966, Antara, Jakarta, in Francisca Fanggidaej Papers, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam.

4

Isa Ibrahim, Kabar dari Negeri Seberang (Jakarta: Historia Publisher, 2013), 104.

5

Francisca Fanggidaej diary entry, 17 October 1985, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

6

John Torpey, The Invention of Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xi.

7

Jean Gelman Taylor, Global Indonesia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 125.

8

Su Lin Lewis, “Skies That Bind: Air Travel in the Bandung Era,” in Mike Heffernan et al. (eds), Placing Internationalism: International Conferences and the Making of the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 239; Su Lin Lewis and Carolien Stolte, “Other Bandungs: Afro-Asian Internationalism in the Early Cold War,” Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019), 12-13.

9

John Roosa, Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965–1966 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), 24; David T. Hill, “Indonesia’s Exiled Left as the Cold War Thaws,” Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 44:1 (2010), 21-51; David T. Hill, “Indonesian Political Exiles in the USSR,” Critical Asian Studies 46:4 (2014), 621-48.

10

Jake Hodder, Stephen Legg, and Mike Heffernan, “Introduction: Historical Geographies of Internationalism, 1900–1950,” Political Geography 49 (2015), 4-5.

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11

See, for example, Carolien Stolte, “Grounded. On Not Travelling in the Bandung Era,” Afro-Asian Networks, 26 March 2019, https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/grounded-on-not-travelling-inthe-bandung-era-83b3031ed809.

12

Lewis, “Skies That Bind,” 241.

13

Hodder, Legg, and Heffernan, “Introduction,” 4-5.

14

Stephen Daniels and Catherine Nash, “Lifepaths: Geography and Biography,” Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004), 449-58.

15

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 207.

16

Ibid., 41.

17

Ibid., 22.

18

Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, “Colonial Cosmopolitanism,” in Zawawi Ibrahim (ed), Social Science and Knowledge in a Globalising World (Kajang, Selangor, Malaysia: Malaysian Social Science Association, 2012), 371-87.

19

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 24-25; 36.

20

Ibid., 37.

21

Ibid., 17, 20.

22

Ibid., 22.

23

Ibid., 37.

24

Ibid., 32, 44.

25

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy (New York: Hyperion East, 1999), 153-91.

26

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 54-57; 80.

27

Ibid., 55.

28

Ibid., 64.

29

Hersi Setiawan, interview with Francisca Fanggidaej, 15 June 1995, “In Search of Silenced Voices” oral history collection, Institute of International Social History, Amsterdam.

30

Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 31; Setiawan, interview with Fanggidaej, 15 June 1995.

31

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 76-79.

32

Setiawan, interview with Francisca Fanggidaej, June 15, 1995.

33

Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 134.

34

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 134-35.

35

Ibid., 85.

36

Rudolf Mrázek, Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 168.

37

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 83, 85; on Rusiyati, see Roosa, Buried Histories, 52.

38

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 98.

39

Setiawan, interview with Francisca Fanggidaej, 15 June 1995.

40

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 92.

41

Ibid., 94.

42

Lewis, “Skies That Bind,” 241; Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 103.

43

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 105.

44

Ibid., 118.

45

Ruth McVey, The Calcutta Conference and the Southeast Asian Uprisings (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1958), 17-18.

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46

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 122.

47

Ann Swift, The Road of Madiun: The Indonesian Communist Uprising of 1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1989), 1.

48

Leo Suryadinata, Prominent Indonesian Chinese: Biographical Sketches (Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2015), 328-29; Gregor Benton, Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 70; Nancy Tsou and Len Tsou, “The Asian Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: A Report,” Science & Society, 68:3 (2004), 342-50.

49

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 163.

50

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 159; Akiko Sugiyama, “Remembering and Forgetting Indonesia’s Madiun Affair: Personal Narratives, Political Transitions, and Historiography, 1948–2008,” Indonesia 92 (2011), 21.

51

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 160.

52

Suryadinata, Prominent Indonesian Chinese: Biographical Sketches, 142-43.

53

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 167.

54

Ibid., 168.

55

Ibid., 170.

56

Swift, The Road of Madiun, 90.

57

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 174.

58

Ibid., 191.

59

U.S. Embassy in Jakarta to the Department of State, “British Borneo Possibly Next Target,” 13 July 1962, National Archives (United States). Archives Unbound, link.gale.com/apps/doc/ SC5109679669/GDSC?u=univbri&sid=bookmark-GDSC&xid=ab58a702&pg=1 (I thank Su Lin Lewis for sharing this piece of document with me); Taomo Zhou, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 132-51.

60

Marshal Green, Indonesia: Crisis and Transformation, 1965–1968 (Washington, DC: Compass Press, 1990), 36.

61

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 191.

62

Saskia Wieringa, Sexual Politics in Indonesia (London: Palgrave MacMillan: 2002), 17.

63

Geoffrey Robinson, The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965–1966 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 1-2.

64

Katharine McGregor, “The World Is Silent? Global Communities of Resistance to the 1965 Repression in the Cold War Era,” in Aidan Russell (ed), Truth, Silence, and Violence in Emerging States: Histories of the Unspoken (Abingdon: Routledge, 2019), 151.

65

Francisca Fanggidaej, speech at the Tricontinental Conference, January 1966, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

66

“Peristiwa Havana Sepenuhnya Mendapatkan Perhatian DPR-GR; DPR-GR menyatakan protes,” 1 February 1966, Antara, Jakarta, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

67

“Gerombolan Ibrahim Isa Disinjalir di Peking Hong Kong 26/1/1966 Antara,” Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

68

Francisca Fanggidaej, diary entry, 19 February 1966, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

69

Taomo Zhou, “Global Reporting from the Third World: The Afro-Asian Journalists’ Association, 1963–1974,” Critical Asian Studies 51:2 (2019), 166-97.

70

David T. Hill, “Cold War Polarization, Delegated Party Authority, and Diminishing Exilic Options: The Dilemma of Indonesian Exilic Options,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 176 (2020), 338-72.

71

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to Nila, 13 March 1986, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

326 taomo zhou

72

Francisca Fanggidaej, diary entries, 14 and 15 August, 15 September, 22 November, and 6 and 7 December 1966 and 17 January 1967, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers; Hill, “Cold War Polarization.”

73

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to “Endro,” undated, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

74

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to Agam Wispi, 30 August 1985, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

75

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to “Sum,” 11 November 1985, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

76

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to an unnamed “Zus,” 21 November 1985, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

77

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to “Beno,” 20 December 1985, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

78

Francisca Fanggidaej, letter to “Sasya,” 15 December 1987, Francisca Fanggidaej Papers.

79

Mark T. Berger, “After the Third World? History, Destiny and the Fate of Third Worldism,” Third World Quarterly 25:1 (2004), 20-21.

80

On the different identities of activists in the global anti-imperialist movements, see, for example, Tim Harper, Underground Asia: Global Revolutionaries and the Assault on Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021); Oliver Crawford, “The Many Names of Tan Malaka,” 21 May 2019, Afro-Asian Networks, https://medium.com/afro-asian-visions/the-many-names-of-tan-malaka163a6f2e0bc8.

81

Toer, The Mute’s Soliloquy.

82

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 54-57, 80.

83

Ibid., 44.

84

Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 11.

85

Hersi Setiawan interview with Francisca Fanggidaej, June 22, 1995, Oral History Collection In Search of Silenced Voices, Institute of International Social History, Amsterdam.

86

Stephen S. Legg, “An International Anomaly? Sovereignty, the League of Nations, and India’s Princely Geographies,” Journal of Historical Geography 43 (2014), 96-110.

87

Setiawan and Fanggidaej, Memoar Perempuan Revolusioner, 80.

88

Rachel Leow, “A Missing Peace: The Asia-Pacific Peace Conference in Beijing, 1952 and the Emotional Making of Third World Internationalism,” Journal of World History 30:1-2 (2019), 25.

EPILOGUE

Afro-Asianism Revisited Naoko Shimazu

Figure 1. From left, President Hu Jintao, President Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Asia-Africa Road, in front of Savoy Homann Hotel, Bandung, April 2005.

To celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the 1955 Asian-African Conference, the Indonesian government invited 106 states, representing some 4.5 billion people to attend the Asian-African Summit in Bandung and Jakarta in April 2005. Those present celebrated the Dasa Sila Bandung, known in English as the Ten Principles of Bandung. Some eighty-nine countries were represented by Heads of States or ministers. Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan was there, too, with his wife Nane whose dress was monochromatic in the signature light blue of the UN flag, as evidenced in the many photographs of the dignitaries re-enacting the famous walk on Jalan Asia-Afrika (Asia-Africa Road) in Bandung in front of Gedung Merdeka (Freedom Building). On the front row of the ‘walk,’1 we see President of PRC Hu Jintao, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yodhoyono, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, with their wives also sharing the moment (see Figure 1 above). Ten years later in 2015, on President Joko Widodo’s invitation to the Second

328 naoko shimazu

Asian-African Summit, the leaders of the seventy-seven states gathered in Bandung yet again to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Asian-African Conference.2 Thirty-four states were represented by heads of states and governments, with the Indonesian president, Jokowi, walking side by side with Xi Jinping and Malaysia’s Najib Razak, all with their wives, on the front row. In the twenty-first century, the Global South seems to trace back its collective genesis to that one week in April 1955 when the Asian-African Conference was held in Bandung.3 This volume is a critique of the Bandung narrative and the monopolistic position it is seen to occupy in global diplomacy, epitomised by what has been described above. In general, it is critical of the heavily state-centric bias that the Bandung narrative tends to espouse. At the bottom line, the volume positions itself as offering an alternative narrative in the form of ‘Afro-Asianism’, because ‘Bandung’ should not be the only lens through which to conceptualise and understand the highly dynamic and volatile period of decolonisation in the post-war years. The impetus felt by this Collective to challenge the centrality of the Bandung narrative is a welcome development, mostly telling of the changing times, reflecting a major shift in the literature of the last two decades. It was the end of the Cold War that emancipated the chronology of the post-war, and this was followed by an outburst of intellectual activities to rethink the Bandung Conference of 1955: what it had come to mean after fifty years, and its relevance to the newly post-Cold War world of the mid-2000s.4 As the Global South leaders gathered in Bandung under the orchestration of Indonesia in 2005, scholars too gathered and reassessed Bandung. This momentum led to the recovery of Bandung from a near historical oblivion and turned it into a significant ‘moment’ in postwar global history – an empowering experience to say the least. It is nearly twenty years hence, and now, this volume seeks to push out further the historiographical frontiers, to diversify and to complexify the field in which to situate our studies. ‘Afro-Asianism’ bears the epistemological burden of having two major ‘isms’ – of Asianism on the one hand, and of Africanism on the other. Is it a movement, is it a philosophy, is it a loose collective of ideas and practices that appealed to some contemporaries? For Asians other than the Japanese,5 the rapid decolonisation of Asian territories in the few decades after the end of World War II, meant that the resurgence of the idea of Asia in the form of ‘Asianism’ was a positive ‘new’ force, which enabled different peoples to coalesce under a new form of regionalism and of internationalism. As this volume rightly argues, Bandung was one ‘site’ of the emerging new ‘sites’ of internationalism in that unfolding of a landscape in global diplomacy. The Asian Socialist Conference of 1953 and the Asian Relations Conference of 1947 offered alternative ‘sites’ of ‘Asianism’ in Rangoon and Delhi respectively. Whilst on the other, Cairo emerged as a hub of Afro-Asian connections by exploring how ‘Infrastructures of Solidarity’ were established through a

afro-asianism revisited 329

mapping of the key ‘sites’ in the urban space. To this end, we begin to identify a handful of competing ‘sites’ of Afro-Asianism, having different functions from how Bandung and ‘Bandung’ came to be represented. As Stolte aptly notes, what we are seeing is ‘polyphonic internationalism’. In this polyphonic social reality, we begin to identify alternative narratives of Afro-Asianism, some independent of the monolithic ‘Bandung’ narrative, yet others a part of it. This unearthing of valuable ‘hidden’ narratives – a time consuming effort at best – is most effectively done as a collective effort, and hence, this Collective of scholars adopted shared archival research as their research method. What this volume celebrates is individual narratives as a much-needed corrective to the state-centric narratives. Individuals take the lead in the retelling of their own stories, and act as agency of movement in a historical space. Nasser explores how his Indian economist Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa conceptualised ‘Asia’ as a ‘third way’ in his thinking on post-war development and traces his journey, including his enthralment with the ‘New China’ that emerged from the 1949 Chinese Revolution. From what we can tell, Kumaruppa’s interests focused on Asia but does this make him an ‘Afro-Asian’? Whilst in another thought-provoking essay, we observe the strength of a socialist vision in an exploration of the diplomacy within UNESCO’s on ‘Afro-Asian’ activism as conducted by the Central Asian (e.g. Uzbek) representatives who saw themselves as proponents of a progressive Soviet model of decolonisation in the 1950s.6 This leads us to the question of who the ‘Afro-Asians’ were, and how they might be defined. McCann’s essay on James Markham and his voyage of ‘rediscovery’ of Rangoon as a place of Afro-Asian connectivity is remarkable, because Markham offers the lived experience of an ideal-type ‘Afro-Asian,’ if one can call him as such. McCann’s outcry of ‘where is “Afro” in “Afro-Asia”’ is so poignant, and yet it is Africa that made the ‘Bandung’ configuration into a truly global new post-colonial geography, giving credence to the claim of a larger geopolitical ‘Afro-Asian’ space. Africa was the critical nodal region that connected ‘Afro-Asia’ with the African-American diaspora in the Americas. The question remains, though, how to bring Africa more centrally into the narrative of ‘Afro-Asia’, as there is clearly much scope for further research on this connection. Tycho van der Hoog’s intriguing essay on the cultural diplomacy of North Koreans to export and spread the ‘Juche movement’ in Africa is a big nod in the right direction. As we have seen in many of the essays in this volume, socialism provided a critical alternative thread which brought Asians and Africans together in global networks. A fascinating triangulation takes place in Broussan’s essay, through the agency of Vietnamese women connecting with their counterparts in Algeria and France. Similarly, Armstrong’s intrepid Gita Bandyopadhyay would leave Kolkata for Budapest in 1948, and did not return to India until 1951, after she had travelled

330 naoko shimazu

extensively through socialist networks in Europe. Indeed, one of the strengths of this collection is the female agency in the making of the connections between Asia and Africa, and with the rest of the world. In Broussan’s words, ‘it is crucial to reclaim these women’s narratives globally resisting and dismantling the colonial order as early as 1945.’ Armstrong and Broussan’s works contribute to the increasingly rich field of female transregional internationalism and cosmopolitanism, which charts alternative geographies of this fertile period.7 As the ‘Bandung’ narrative and its politicised rhetoric gradually shifts away from the Asian-African centred geopolitical configuration to that of the Global South more generically, the problematising of ‘Afro-Asianism’ in this volume does push us to rethink ‘Afro-Asia’ as an analytical geography in our empirical studies, by providing us with a geospatial terrain to probe the richness of the manifold narratives of Afro-Asian networks in twentieth-century global history. To that end, this collection of essays is a critical celebration of the myriad ways in which Afro-Asianism had been understood, experienced, and processed by the historical personages who grace these pages. By bringing ‘Afro-Asianism’ to the fore moreover, it challenges us to think about what it meant then, and what it means now. As many essays in the volume demonstrate, the cosmopolitan lives of ‘Afro-Asians’ were complex because their lives were translocal, not only connecting parts of Asia with Africa, but also transregionally with Europe, North America and Latin America. To this end, ‘Afro-Asianism’ was a ‘polyphonic internationalism’ that was global in its implications, hence, an important narrative best situated in global history.

Notes 1

The original ‘walk’ at the Asian-African Conference of 1955 was not choreographed like this commemorative walk, but spontaneous. See Naoko Shimazu, ‘‘Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955’, Modern Asian Studies 48:1 (2014), 225-252.

2

For an Indonesian press write-up on this, confer, ‘77 countries, 34 leaders to attend the AsianAfrican Conference Commemoration’, Jakarta Post, 16 April 2015.

3

See the South Centre, an intergovernmental organisation for developing countries established in Geneva, and its perspective on the Bandung Conference of 1955. https://www.southcentre.int/ question/south-centre-statement-at-asian-african-summit-2015/, accessed 20 August 2022.

4

One of the earliest to revisit Bandung was Glenda Gayle Plummer’s work connecting the American civil rights movement with Bandung in the mid-1990s.

5

In Japanese scholarship, ‘Asianism’ was left untouched for most of the postwar era, save for a series of thought-provoking interventions made by Takeuchi Yoshimi, a well-known Japanese China scholar, published in the early 1960s. In 2011, Sven Saaler and Christopher W. A. Szpilman published their two-volume Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History in 2011, a massive collective undertaking of seventy-four chapters in all, which finally laid to rest at least for the time being

afro-asianism revisited 331

one problematic ‘ism’ that had plagued post-war scholars of Japan because of its identification as a pre-war and wartime ideology. Takeuchi Yoshimi’s works are helpfully treated in Sven Saaler and Christopher Szpilman (eds.), Pan-Asianism: A Documentary History, Volume 2: 1920-Present (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), 281. Richard F. Calichman has published some works including translations of Takeuchi Yoshimi, for example, Takeuchi’s article ‘Asia as Method’ in Calichman’s edited volume on What is Modernity? Writings of Takeuchi Yoshimi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 149-65. The use of the phrase ‘Asia as Method’ predates by five decades Kuan-Hsin Cheng’s recent title, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperiliazation (Chapel Hill: Duke University Press, 2010). 6

This may not come as too surprising if we bear in mind that the 1947 Asian Relations Conference held in Delhi was notable for the representations made by the Soviet Socialist Republics in Central Asia. See Carolien Stolte, “‘The Asiatic hour’: New perspectives on the Asian Relations Conference, New Delhi, 1947”, in Natasa Miskovic, Harald Fischer-Tine and Nada Boskovska (eds.) The NonAligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade (London: Routledge, 2014), 57-75.

7

For instance, Suzy Kim, Qyunh N. Pham, and Michelle Chase.

About the Authors

Reem Abou-El-Fadl is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics of the Middle East at SOAS University of London. She is the author of Foreign Policy as Nation Making: Turkey and Egypt in the Cold War (Cambridge, 2019), editor of Revolutionary Egypt: Connecting Domestic and International Struggles (Routledge, 2015), and co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Egypt page. Amza Adam is a PhD candidate in History and lecturer in International Studies at Leiden University. Interested in Global Intellectual History, specifically the History of Third World revolutionary thought, Adam is writing a thesis on the intellectual thought and praxis of Eqbal Ahmad. Elisabeth Armstrong is Professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender, Smith College, Massachusetts. She is the author of Burying the Corpse of Colonialism is Just the Beginning: the Asian Women’s Conference, 1949 (University of California Press, 2023), and Gender and Neoliberalism: the All India Democratic Women’s Association and Its Strategies of Resistance (Leftword, 2021). Adeline Broussan graduated with a PhD in History from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her research explores transnational networks of women’s activism against imperialism and more specifically how pro-independence Vietnamese women reached out to and collaborated with radical women in France and the United States after World War Two. Gerard McCann is a Senior Lecturer in African and Global History in the History Department and Director of the Centre for Modern Studies (CModS) in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of York, UK. Tycho van der Hoog is a PhD student at the African Studies Centre of Leiden University. His book Monuments of Power: The North Korean Origin of Nationalist Monuments in Namibia and Zimbabwe was published in 2019. Hanna Jansen is a research fellow in East European Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research traces the development of academic orientology in the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

334 about the authors

Su Lin Lewis is Associate Professor in Modern Global History at the University of Bristol. Her monograph, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia 1920-1940 was published by Cambridge in 2016. She co-led, with Carolien Stolte, the AHRC Research Network “Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War”. Yasser Ali Nasser is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Chicago. He is currently writing a dissertation on Sino-Indian friendship in the early 1950s and related discourses of an “Asian” corrective to Cold War international order. Ali Raza is an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He is the author of Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Naoko Shimazu is Professor of Humanities (History) at Yale-NUS College, and the Research Cluster Leader of Inter-Asia Engagements at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her work on the cultural history of global diplomacy includes the monograph Diplomacy as Theatre: The Bandung Conference of 1955 (under completion). Carolien Stolte is Senior Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the international history of South Asia. She co-led, with Su-Lin Lewis, the AHRC Research Network “Afro-Asian Networks in the Early Cold War”. Wildan Sena Utama is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Bristol and a lecturer in the Department of History at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia, researching Indonesia’s participation in Afro-Asian solidarity movements. His book Konferensi Asia-Afrika 1955 is currently being translated into English by LeftWord Books. Taomo Zhou teaches modern Asian history at Nanyang Technological University. Her book, Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War, won a Foreign Affairs “Best Books of 2020” award and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.

Index Accra 13-4, 96, 101, 108, 111-2, 114 Ahmad, Eqbal 11, 16, 291-307, 333 African Affairs Bureau (Cairo) 171, 181-3 African Association (Cairo) 167-8, 170-3, 178, 180-5

Asian Socialist Conference 13, 17, 67-88, 93, 96, 101, 178, 310, 328 Socialist Asia 17, 69, 74, 82, 101, 103, 105, 113 Anti-Colonial Bureau 17, 69, 81, 93, 102-4, 109 Asian Writers Conference 160, 174, 194

Afro-Asian Institute for Labour Studies 106, 114

Atlee, Clement 74, 76

Afro-Asian Journalist Association 214, 233, 310,

Azad, Maulana 196, 197, 204

318, 320 Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) 7-8, 11, 17, 111-4, 145-7, 168, 170, 176, 179-186, 203, 270 Afro-Asian Students’ Conference 13, 213-6, 219-37, 300 Afro-Asian Women’s Conference 17, 155, 310, 317 Afro-Asian Writers’ Conference 8, 11, 14, 17, 65, 143, 150, 200, 202-4, 233, 241, 244 Afro-Asian Youth Conference 111, 232 Air Travel 15, 67, 70-1, 294, 309, 315

Ba Swe, U 67-8, 73-4, 76, 78, 81-2, 84-8 Baghdad Pact 176, 214 Bandung 8-13, 16-7, 68-70, 77-9, 83-5, 93-6, 100, 106-8, 112-4, 136, 145-8, 152, 155-162, 167-8, 170, 174-8, 183, 193, 196, 213-6, 218-228, 230, 233-5, 243, 245, 269, 291-3, 297, 299, 302, 304, 309-11, 317, 320, 327-330, 334 Bandung Spirit 13, 95, 114, 145, 162, 167, 213, 220, 227, 234, 291, 304 Gedung Merdeka 221, 327 Savoy Homann Hotel 221, 327

Algadri, Ali 67, 68

Bandyopadhyay, Gita 11, 15, 21-37, 329

Algadri, Hamid 76, 77, 232

Beijing 8, 13, 14, 16-7, 27, 29, 32, 128, 155, 157,

Algeria 11-2, 29, 39, 41-58, 74, 80, 102-3, 111-2,

310, 319-321

160, 169, 172, 176-8, 182-4, 213-5, 221-2,

Bengal 11, 21-2, 24, 30-1, 36-7, 100, 148-9, 154, 162

224-8, 230-2, 234-5, 244-6, 255, 294-5, 300-3,

Berlin 12, 21, 26, 30, 37, 72, 225, 251-2, 310,

329

317, 323

Algerian Communist Party (PCA) 50, 56, 61

Bhashani, Maulana, 158, 162

Algiers 17, 44, 50, 57, 112, 303, 317, 322

Bombay (Mumbai) 70, 85-6, 88, 97, 99, 108-110,

All-Africa Peoples’ Conference 11, 14, 111, 178

113, 127, 131-2, 154, 159

All-Burma Students’ Union 217-8

Botswana 270, 281, 283

All-India Peace Council (AIPC) 127, 133, 149,

Bourguiba, Habib 217, 295

151, 154, 156

Brahimi, Lakhdar 11, 225-6, 231-2, 234

All-Union Communist Party 194, 202

Brazzaville 43

Anand, Mulk Raj 150-1, 156, 249

British Labour Party 71, 104, 110

Angola 246, 248, 265, 270

Budapest 23, 25, 27, 29, 32, 49-50, 329

Anti-fascism 26, 29-30, 46, 49, 53, 73, 249, 256, 310

Burma (Myanmar) 23-4, 51, 68, 71, 73-4, 76, 78,

Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) [Burma] 73, 85-6

80-8, 93, 101-6, 170, 194, 202, 215, 217-8, 220-1, 225, 230-1, 311, 315

Anwar, Rosihan 86, 232, 316

Burmese Commnist Party 73

Arab League 176, 216

Burmese Socialist Party 67-8, 71, 73-4, 81, 87,

Ashram 121, 134, 137-9, 141-2 Asia-Pacific Peace Conference 8, 13, 157, 160 Asian Relations Conference 12-3, 70-1, 75, 152-5, 192, 197, 201, 328

102 Cairo 7-8, 10-1, 13, 16-7, 20, 74, 88, 96, 108-13, 145-7, 155, 159-62, 167-86, 193, 203, 213, 227, 231-2, 234, 270, 310, 317, 323, 328

336 index

Calcutta (Kolkata) 10, 22, 99, 128, 148-50, 215, 228, 315-6, 322 Cambodia 85, 255 Cameroon 171-2, 176, 221, 227, 230 Castro, Fidel 14, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255, 258-9, 300, 310, 319 Central Asia 14, 139, 191, 193, 200-1 Chad 180, 288

Du Bois, W.E.B. 96, 114, 147, 246 Duong The Hauh 41-2, 48, 54 Egypt 7, 16, 51, 74-5, 77, 82-3, 85, 102, 104-5, 107, 109-11, 145, 159, 167-86, 220-1, 227, 230-1, 333 Ehrenburg, Ilya 157-8 Emotion 16, 86, 99, 109, 113, 158, 161, 291-3, 296-9, 302, 313, 320, 323

Chandra, Perin 7-8, 160

Eritrea 171

Chandra, Romesh 8, 154-7, 160

Ethiopia 51, 99, 107, 285, 302

China 9, 11, 13-7, 25, 29-30, 45, 47, 50, 80, 83,

Faiz, Faiz Ahmad 16, 244, 248, 250, 257, 296

121-3, 125, 127-37, 148, 153-4, 157, 170,

Fanggidaej, Francisca 11, 14, 16, 309-23

179, 181-2, 194, 203, 205, 215, 218-21, 226,

Fanon, Frantz 246, 295, 297, 300-2, 307

230-1, 253, 256, 267, 269, 285, 310, 319-21,

Fayiq, Muhammad 171, 182-3, 185

323, 329, 334

Feminism 21, 27-8, 42, 77, 155, 323

Chinese Communist Party 24, 129, 131, 141

Fodil, Abassia 50, 56-7

Citizenship 14, 16, 96, 195, 198

France 22, 26, 30, 41, 43-47, 50, 52-8, 78, 85, 171,

Colombo 83, 152, 155-6, 220 Committee for Solidarity with African and Asian Countries (SKSSAA) 191-5, 199, 201 Communist International 316 Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) 29 Communist Party of India (CPI) 21- 24, 34, 149, 163 Communist Party of Pakistan 250

177, 180, 219, 225, 300, 303, 329, 333 French Communist Party (PCF) 26, 45, 300 Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) 58, 225, 231-2, 234, 295, 300, 303 Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO) 318 Gandhi, Gandhian 11, 13, 72, 77, 96, 98-9, 102, 121-4, 126-30, 134-5, 137, 154-5, 293, 299

Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) 26

Ganguly, Prathiba 25, 36

Conference of Asian Countries on the

Gaulle, Charles de 44-5

Relaxation of International Tension (CRIT)

Geneva 7, 33, 86, 177, 230

8, 145-6, 151-7, 160, 192-4, 206

Germany 15, 26, 30-1, 33, 44, 50, 53

Congo 102, 255, 285, 288

Gerwani 310, 318-9

Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) 251-4, 263

Ghana (Gold Coast) 13, 51, 74, 82, 93-6, 99,

Congress of Peoples Against Imperialism 75-6, 102

101-8, 111, 113-4, 178 Goa 97, 100, 109, 177, 226

Congress Party of India 24-5, 84, 121, 205

Gokhale, Madhav 81, 104

Cotton, Eugénie 26, 47-8, 53

Governement Provisoire de la République

Cuba 14, 28, 33, 243-6, 248-9, 255-60, 310

Algérienne (GPRA) 234, 295, 300

Dar Es Salaam 11, 185, 265, 270

Guangzhou 52, 127-8

Denmark 37, 80

Guber, Alexander 194-5, 199

Development 13, 51, 71-3, 76-7, 80-1, 93-4, 97,

Guo Moruo 8, 157-8

98, 100, 102, 106, 109, 114, 121-6, 129-132,

Guomindang (Kuomintang) 102, 125, 129

134, 137-8, 153, 170, 176, 182, 184, 204, 206,

Hatanaka Masaharu 8, 160, 174

213-4, 217, 230, 243-4, 259-60, 267, 270, 278,

Havana 8, 14, 16, 243-9, 254-61, 310, 317-9, 322

282, 285, 292, 298, 320, 328, 329

Hla Aung, U 81-2, 86, 102-3, 105, 113

Diplomacy 8, 11-2, 14, 16, 26, 41-2, 47, 49-51, 55,

Ho Chi Minh 44-5, 47, 52-3, 80, 112, 246, 251, 300

58, 70-1, 101, 145, 192-3, 231-2, 256, 265-6,

Hong Kong 127, 131

270, 276, 280-1, 284-5, 309, 323, 328-9, 334

Hungary 23, 25, 29, 32, 33, 70, 85, 108

Djumblatt, Kamal 83

Hussein, Taha 175, 179

index 337

Huxley, Julian 195, 197, 204-5 India 7-9, 13, 15, 17, 21-5, 28-31, 34-5, 51, 67,

Kenya 68, 74, 80, 84-5, 96-100, 102-3, 105, 109, 111-2, 171, 173, 178, 180, 230

70-81, 83-5, 95-102, 104-14, 121-38, 145-62,

Kenyatta, Jomo 96-8, 100

170, 174, 176-7, 182, 192, 194-205, 215,

Khan, Ayub 16, 244

217-21, 224, 226-7, 230, 2450, 257, 293-5,

Kitchlew, Saifuddin 151, 157

296, 298-9, 309-10, 315-6, 327, 329

Korea 14, 15, 27-8, 30, 32-4, 37, 56, 73, 87, 153,

India-China Friendship Association 137, 153, 157 Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) 99-100, 205 Indian Council of World Affairs (ICWA) 197-8, 204-5

155, 194, 221, 225-6, 247 Kumarappa, Joseph Cornelius 11, 13, 15, 121-38, 329 Kumasi 103, 108, 113 Kyaw Nyein, U 67-8, 73,-4, 80, 84, 87 Lebanon 74-5, 83, 102, 107, 218-9, 220-1, 226

Indo-China see Vietnam

Libya 179, 189

Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) 52

Lahore 10, 155, 294

Indonesia 10-11, 13-14, 17, 23, 50-1, 65, 67-8,

Latin America 13-4, 37, 72, 244, 256-7, 316,

70-88, 93, 101-4, 107, 143, 156, 167, 176-7, 200, 215-35, 241, 309-323, 327-8 Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) 13, 72, 85, 88, 301, 314, 316- 318, 320-321 Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI) 71-2, 75, 83, 85-6, 232 Industrialization 114, 121-2, 125, 129-30, 133-4, 137, 258, 292 Intelligence gathering 53, 57, 68, 104, 215, 218, 278, 280 International Union of Socialist Youth (IUSY) 80, 102, 109-11, 113-4 International Union of Students 215-8, 315

318-20, 330 League Against Imperialism 12, 43 Lenin Peace Prize 16, 244 Lohia, Ram Manohar 67, 72-4, 78-9, 84, 96, 102-4 London 16, 67, 74, 96, 101, 105, 109-10, 113, 150, 169, 214, 244, 249, 257, 315 Lu Cui 24-5 Lumumba, Patrice 143, 245-6, 251 Luxemburg, Rosa 26, 29 Madagascar 51, 179, 214-5, 221-2, 227, 276, 283-4 Madras 99, 127, 137, 148-9 Malaysia (Malaya) 22, 50-1, 74, 80-2, 102-4, 113, 221, 224, 228, 315, 317-8, 328

Interwar 12-3, 71, 151, 192, 198-9

Mali 275, 288

Iran 217-8, 221, 224, 227, 237

Malik, Abdullah 16, 243-5, 247-9, 254-61

Islamic Student Association (HMI) 216-8

Malviya, C.N. 157, 160

Israel 17, 69, 74-5, 80, 82-3, 102-4, 106, 110,

Mapai Party 69, 74, 104

113-4, 171, 174, 178, 182, 185, 255, 304, 311 Institute for Oriental Studies (IVAN) [Soviet Union] 194, 199 Jakarta 10, 13, 17, 72, 215, 217-8, 221, 231-5, 311, 318, 320, 322, 327

Markham, James (Jim) 13, 82, 93, 95-6, 101-110, 113-4, 329 Mahila Atmarakdha Samiti (MARS) 23-5, 28, 35-6 Marxism 8, 22-3, 29, 71-4, 86-7, 87, 162, 175, 179, 182, 273, 284, 292, 298, 314-5, 322

Jansen, Godfrey H. 95, 160, 162

Maternalism 29, 33, 43, 57

Japan 8, 28, 45, 52, 68, 70-1, 73-7, 79, 81, 85,

Mau Mau 93, 97-9, 102, 105, 109, 111, 172, 180

102-4, 106, 114, 121-3, 125, 130-33, 152-3,

Mboya, Tom 100, 111

158, 160, 174, 176, 192, 218-21, 224-5, 266-7,

Mehta, Asoka 67, 72, 78, 83

273, 279, 313-4, 316, 328

Millard, Betty 26, 31, 33-4, 36

Japanese Communist Party 77 Juche 265-8, 273-85, 329 Kalaw 69, 84, 87, 93 Kaunda, Kenneth 103, 109-10, 272, 279 Kente 94, 106, 114

Morocco 51, 76, 80, 176, 215, 221-2, 224-7, 231, 295, 300 Moscow 16, 32, 68, 73, 147, 151, 157, 168, 192, 194, 199-200, 202, 215 Moumié, Felix 171-2, 181

338 index

Mozambique 265, 269-70

Outer Mongolia 153

Mugabe, Robert 271-2, 279-80

Padmore, George 96, 101, 103, 105, 107-8, 113

Murumbi, Joseph 85, 96, 100, 103, 109-10, 112-4

Pan-Africanism 14, 95, 114-5, 178

Music 24, 68, 148-150, 154, 161-2, 230-1, 245-6,

Pan-Arabism 168, 176, 179

256 Nairobi 10, 96-100, 105, 111 Namibia 265, 270, 272-3, 275-6, 281-2, 333 Nasser, Gamel Abdel 7, 13-7, 69, 80, 109, 111, 114, 146, 156, 160, 167-8, 170-1, 174-6, 182, 185, 329 National Liberation Movements (NLM) 14, 108, 171, 246, 248-9, 255, 265-6, 268-71, 284-5 Nehru, Jawaharlal 9, 71, 121, 155, 157, 194, 196-7, 221, 315 Nehru, Rameshwari 7-9, 153-6, 160-1 Neo-colonialism 84, 247, 260 Nepal 74, 194, 221 Netherlands, The 23, 50, 71, 79, 81, 217, 310, 312-3, 316, 321-2 Networks 7-8, 10-4, 21, 36, 6870, 75, 81-2, 95-6,

Pak Chong-ae 32, 155 Pakistan 14, 16, 74, 82, 84, 102, 104-5, 108, 116, 150, 158, 220-1, 224-5, 227, 230-1, 243-5, 248-54, 257, 259-61, 291-2, 294, 296, 299 Palestine 111, 169, 176-8, 184, 226, 230, 255, 296, 304 Pant, Apa 96-7 Paris 12, 21-2, 24-30, 41, 48-9, 52-5, 215, 222, 225, 295-6 Partition 24, 121, 154, 250, 294 Passports 14-6, 37, 98-9, 110, 309-11, 315-6, 319, 322 Pemuda Sosialis Indonesia (Pesindo) 309, 314-5, 317 Perserikatan Perhimpunan Mahasiswa Indonesia (PPMI) 216-8, 220, 232, 236

100, 108-14, 137, 146, 148, 150, 152, 155,

Philippines 68, 218-21, 224, 227

167, 169, 171-4, 180, 184-5, 199, 215-6, 229,

Picasso, Pablo 150-1

231, 231, 233-5, 254, 261, 291, 304, 311, 320,

Pinto, Pio Gama 97-8, 100, 113

322, 329-30, 333-4

Poland 30, 33, 41, 74, 85

New Delhi 8-10, 12-3, 18, 71, 93, 96, 98-100,

Prague 52, 110-11, 215, 217-8, 248, 315, 323

109-11, 113, 128, 145-7, 151-62, 174, 192-4,

Praja Socialist Party 72, 75, 81, 83-4, 102

196-7, 204-5, 215, 220, 231, 299, 328

Prasad, Rajendra 126, 134

New York 27, 102, 113 Nguyen Ai Quoc, see Ho Chi Minh

Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) 149-50, 243, 249-50

Nigeria 10, 51, 74, 103, 171, 278, 285

Pyongyang 56, 265-6, 271-3, 281-4, 318

Nkruma, Kwame 14, 16-7, 69, 93-5, 99, 101,

Race 29, 30-1, 43, 49, 56, 95, 184, 225, 234, 246,

103-9, 111-2, 178, 245, 302

258, 294

Nkomo, Joshua 172, 175, 178

Rangka 77, 81

Non-alignment 72, 94, 101, 112, 123, 156, 159,

Rangoon 13, 67-70, 73-5, 81-3, 87, 93, 96, 100-4,

260, 266-7, 269, 271, 273, 283-4, 292

106, 108-10, 113-4, 220, 231, 328-9

Non-Violence 98, 124, 129-30, 134-5,

Rhee, Syngman 27-8, 39

North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

Sadat, Anwar 109, 146, 175, 178, 185

27-8, 32-3, 57

Salim, Emil 224-5, 230

Northern Rhodesia see Zambia

Salim, Taieb 76, 217

Nu, U 73-4, 78, 83, 86-8, 202

Santoso, Maria Ulfah 79

Nuclear Warfare and Disarmament 8, 12, 136,

Sastroamidjojo, Ali 83, 222, 315

145, 162, 176, 225, 230, 304

Sen, Hannah 154-5

Nyerere, Julius 112, 245, 251, 270

Sharawy, Helmi 171-2, 178, 180-3, 185

Odinga, Oginga 99-100, 171

Sierra Leone 276-7, 288

Odon, Fotso 213, 227

Silber, Irwin 245-6, 260-1

Oneko, Achieng 97

Singapore 22, 24, 88-9, 105, 316-7

Organization of African Unity (OAU) 265-6, 302

Singh, Anup 8, 160, 162, 174

index 339

Sjahrir, Sutan 67-8, 71-3, 76, 78-9, 85-6, 221

Tursunzoda, Mirzo 14, 158, 193-4, 197, 200

Socialist International 73-7, 80, 82, 102, 104

Uganda 74, 80, 93, 100, 102-3, 109-11, 113, 172-3,

Soedjatmoko 77, 81, 88

180, 285

Sofronov, Anatoly 8, 200

UNESCO 16, 191-3, 195-9, 202-6, 329

Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO)

Union Générale des Étudiants Musulmans

148, 152, 214 South Africa 51, 80, 96, 98, 101-2, 111, 178, 246, 265, 268, 270, 276, 282, 285 Southwest Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) 270-2, 276, 281 Soviet Union (USSR) 10, 14, 16, 33, 47, 71, 74, 78, 111, 121, 123, 129, 133, 135, 137, 192-5, 198-200, 202-3, 248, 251-3, 256, 267-9, 276, 296, 333 Stockholm 8, 82 Sudan 101, 105, 107, 110-11, 171-2, 176, 180, 183, 221, 226-7 Suez 7, 70, 80, 83, 85, 108-10, 171-6, 178-9, 183 Sukarno 12, 67, 69, 71, 83, 85-6, 156, 216, 218, 220-3, 231, 234, 310, 313, 318 Sundarlal, Pandit 127, 135

Algériens (UGEMA) 225, 300 United Arab Republic 101, 111, 176, 232, 255 United Nations 27, 30, 33, 42-3, 45, 51, 56, 67, 70, 76, 79, 81-2, 84-5, 87-8, 101-2, 111, 113, 148, 152, 176, 230-1, 234, 266-7, 272-3, 318, 327 United States 10, 26-7, 33, 82, 121, 123, 132, 134-5, 155, 174, 215, 218, 223, 243, 248, 253, 257-8, 267-9, 291, 294-6, 333 Universalism 50, 159, 171, 191-2, 194-9, 204-5, 292, 302 Universities 7, 73, 98-100, 105, 113, 132, 149, 153, 167, 170-1, 177-8, 180, 183, 215-9, 223-5, 227, 230-2, 234, 252, 273, 278-9, 284, 294-6, 321 Uzbekistan 200-2, 329 Vega, Guillermo De 224, 226-7 Vietnam 11-2, 17, 19, 23, 26, 29, 41-3, 45-58, 81,

Swadeshi 135, 150

87, 104, 153-4, 156, 158, 194, 219, 221, 226,

Swahili 172, 266, 282-3

230-1, 243-6, 254-6, 268, 295-6, 300-1, 315-6,

Syria 34, 74, 157, 176, 179, 196, 221, 226-7, 234

329, 333

Tajik Communist Party 201

Warsaw 30, 37, 215, 217

Tajikistan 158, 193, 197, 199-201

Watanabe, Roo 81-2, 103-4

Tanganyika see Tanzania

Wijono 72, 81-2, 86, 104

Tanzania 93, 99, 102-3, 105, 112, 173, 270, 276,

Women’s International Democratic Federation

281-5

(WIDF) 11-3, 15, 21-33, 41-58, 155, 310, 317

Tashkent 14, 192, 200, 202-4

World Federation of Democratic Youth 23, 215

Tebhaga 24-6, 34, 36

World Peace Council 26-7, 133, 146-7, 150-3,

Thein Pe Myint, U 8 Third Force 70-4, 83, 88, 292 Third Way 67, 88, 121, 123, 329

156-7, 162, 168, 181 World War Two 22, 43-4, 55, 97, 109150, 246, 267, 333

Tibet 153

Worldmaking 9-10, 12, 292

Tito, Josip Broz 69, 74

Wright, Peter 98, 100, 110

Togo 221, 225, 227, 288

Wright, Richard 93-4

Tokyo 15, 67, 69, 74, 88, 106, 131-2, 195, 220,

Yangon see Rangoon

244, 273 Totalitarianism 16, 67, 70, 73-4, 78, 81, 101, 134, 251, 253 Train and rail travel 15, 30-2, 37, 48, 55, 154, 294, 312 Tricontinental Conference 8, 11, 14, 244, 310, 318-9, 322 Tunisia 51, 56, 68, 74, 76, 80, 102, 109, 176, 215, 217, 221-2, 226-7, 231, 288, 294-5, 300

Yemen 176 Yugoslavia 68-9, 74-6, 102, 315 Zaheer, Sajjad 149-50, 249 Zamalek 170, 172, 182, 185 Zambia 68, 102-3, 110, 113, 173, 178, 265-6, 270, 272-3, 275, 279, 284 Zhou, Enlai 69, 151-2 Zimbabwe 112, 265, 270-1, 275-6, 278-80, 292, 284