Bandung and the Future Of Africa’s Pasts

The idea of decolonization that animated the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference continues to power imaginations of an alternative to the world Bandung inhabited. In this essay, we look upon Africa from Bandung, and simultaneously from Africa to Bandung, to recover an “otherwise”—a seeing of the future from Africa’s pasts. In the future envisioned in Bandung and beyond, flag independence was regarded as the first stop in the project of decolonization. 1 The conference was to provide both “guidance to mankind … on the way which it must take to attain safety and peace” and “evidence that Asia and Africa have been reborn, nay, that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born!” 2 As critical accounts have noted, the alternative “otherwise” Bandung offered was far from singular; it was multivocal and divergent, and this diversity is integral to the multiple readings and memories of Bandung. 3 This multivocality made Bandung a successful performance of different visions of the world, including those of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Yet, Bandung was far from an ecumenical platform that offered little more than a cacophony of diverse voices and visions. The remedies may have been varied but the diagnoses of the malaise were unanimous—cultural imperialism and the racialism (i.e., racial and religious subordination) that instantiated and sustained it. Bandung was an opportunity to reimagine a world beyond imperial hierarchies. In what follows, we scrutinize Bandung’s legacy through the lens of Africa’s pasts. We note that for all the decolonial ethos that powered Bandung, its insistence on colonial legal forms inadvertently sustained rather than overturned imperial forms of subordination. We then offer an alternative mode of reimagining the world by drawing on recent recoveries of international legal histories of Africa prior to European colonization.