Richard Wright's proto-"postcolonial" book on the Bandung Conference of 1955

The Bandung Conference was one of the key events in the formation of what would become known as the movement of non-aligned nations during the Cold War. The event in Indonesia had attendees from 29 countries, including China, and the five convening countries: Burma (now Myanmar) Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, Pakistan, and Indonesia itself.

Bandung’s history had particular meaning for such a conference (Robert Maisey, The Real Third World Tribune 02/13/2021):

Bandung was a symbolic location: the city had been abandoned and burnt to the ground by the local population in 1946, in protest against British plans to hand it back over to Dutch colonial rule after the defeat of imperial Japan. Rebuilt under the auspices of the anti-imperialist Indonesian regime of Sukarno, it now played host to the first flowering of what would become known as the Third World.

The American writer Richard Wright attended the conference and reported on it The Color Curtain (1956). Amritjit Singh in the Afterword to the 1994 edition refers to The Color Curtain as one of Wright’s three “travel books,” the other two being Black Power (1954) and White Man, Listen! (1957).

Singh describes Wright’s work like that in The Color Curtain as “as a worthy precursor to the work of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said,“ two central figures in the trend of political and historical analysis now called postcolonialism.

Wright doesn’t provide a detailed account of the conference itself. Instead, he uses the conference to refer to problems of the post-colonial situation, race, and religion that it highlighted. He presents the issues in a way that introduces white European and American audiences to the developing post-colonial consciousness in what we currently refer to as the Global South. He also tries to give a sense of the hopes and risks involoved in a unity project between such disparate nations.

I first read this book decades ago and two parts particularly stuck with me.

Race and identity in Asia and Africa

Wright relates an experience he had while obtaining a press pass at the Indonesia Ministry of Information. He was processed through easily, while a white American doing the same thing was meeting seemingly arbitrary difficulties with an Indonesian official:

But the moment that the Indonesian official's dark face turned to me there was another and different attitude. His manner changed at once: I was one of his kind; I'd endured the humiliations that he and his people had endured. So, while the white American waited, I got my press card at once. I was a member of the master race! Well, there it was . ... I'm not proud of it. lt took no intelligence, no courage; in the situation that obtained, it was the easiest thing to do. lt was racism. And I thought of all the times in the American South when I had had to wait until the whites had been served before I could be served . . . . All you have to do in a situation like that is relax and let your base instincts flow. And it's so easy, so natural; you don't have to think; you just push that face that is of an offensive color out of your mind and forget about it.

He returns to this phenomenon in different ways in this book. He doesn’t use the precise phrase “reverse racism,” but he approaches that theme several times. In closing the story of the Ministry of Information official, he wrote:

But the Indonesian official had not instituted this thing; it had been taught to him by faces as white as the American face that he had spurned. That was how the whites had felt about it when they had had all the power; all dark skins were bad and all white skins were good, and now I saw that same process reversed ....

I read what Wright was doing there as confronting whites with a way for them to imagine what the daily experience of people in a discriminated group would look and feel like if it occurred to them. (Conservatives in 2022 complaining about “wokeness” are not likely to get the message.)

He also tries to give the reader at least a feel for the complex nature of racism: how it worked in European colonies, how it shaped the view of race by the majority population in the imperial countries, and also how widespread racial conflict among subjugated peoples can be. On the latter subject, he mentions the intense prejudices in some Asian countries including Indonesia against ethnic Chinese in their countries.

China at Bandung

One was his description of the role of Chinese Premier and Foreign Minister Chou En-Lai at the conference. China today we know as an economic powerhouse and the most important rising power in the world. In 1955, China was widely considered in the West as a large but very junior partner of the Soviet Union. In the Korean War of 1950-53, combined forces of North Korea and China had fought the US and its South Korean allies to a standstill.

The Sino-Soviet split that became a central fact of world politics from the 1960s until the end of the USSR was not yet in evidence. It was in 1956 after Khrushchev’s “secret speech” criticizing Stalin that Mao Zedong’s criticisms of Khrushchev’s de-Statlinization policies and of the USSR’s improvement of relations with Yugoslavia prefigured the later overt split.

But, at the conference in 1955, Wright wrote:

Communism at Bandung was conspicuous for its shyness, its coyness, its bland smile and glad hand for everyone. Chou En-lai, clad in a pale tunic, moved among the delegates with the utmost friendliness and reserve, listening to all arguments with patience, and tuming the other cheek when receiving ideological slaps. In closed committee sessions Russia was attacked time and again and Chou En-lai refused to let himself be baited into answering. Russia had no defenders at Bandung.

In Wright’s reading, this was an attempt by Chou En-lai “to identify himself with those millions with whom not many Western nations wanted or would accept identification.” Wright warned his readers:

BANDUNG WAS THE LAST CALL OF WESTERNIZED ASIANS TO THE MORAL CONSCIENCE OF THE WEST!

If the West spurns this call, what will happen? I don't know . ... But remember that Mr. Chou En-lai stands there, waiting, patient, with no record of racial practices behind him .... He will listen.

Wright in 1956 was providing a much more “realist” reading on China’s diplomacy than was considered respectable in polite diplomatic circles in the West in those days. One of the effects of the McCarthyist Red Scare period was that any diplomats in the State Department who described the “Red Chinese” as anything but fanatically dangerous Communist zealots were vulnerable to suspicion they they were insufficiently patriotic, if not outright subversives. A notable result was that anyone in the US Government with deep expertise on China - and there weren’t that many to begin with! - had very little input on interpreting Chinese actions and statements or on the formation of China policy.

(I’m personally amused that in the United States since 2000, it is the Republican Party that is now referred to as “the Reds.”)

Before something like that situation returns in the current era of US competition with China, it’s worth noting that today it’s generally understood and expressed in factual descriptions of China’s policies that they exert major influence in the countries of the Global South and do not make adoption of Chinese Marxist ideology a condition of economic aid and political support. Wright’s 1956 book provided a glimpse of this even at that time. But respectable opinion among the Very Serious People of that time really didn’t want to hear it.