Where was the Afro in Afro-Asian Solidarity? Africa's 'Bandung Moment' in 1950s Asia

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. The piece tracks these dynamics through three interlocked arenas of Afro-Asian affinity: journeys of African students to India from the 1940s; African participation in the Asian Socialist Conference in Burma, 1953-1956, and, as the geographies of Afro-Asianism shifted, radicalized and splintered, African activism within the Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organization in Cairo from 1957. It reveals how the overlapping internationalisms of these fora reinforced a dyad of anti-colonial politics and development in the construction of African nationhood and pan-African community. This article breaks new ground in privileging the Afro in Afro-Asian. 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. 2 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 1 Thanks to all members of the 'Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective'

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“…Maoism resonated with African activists and intellectuals due to its emphasis on the peasantry as a vanguard for change. They perceived themselves to be facing similar conditions across the continent [68][69][70].…”