Black Power

by Richard Wright

  These men, affable and relaxed, representing some of the world’s biggest and most powerful newsgathering agencies, knew less, perhaps, than even I about what was going on. To them Bandung was a contest of personalities. I soon realized that American newsmen had at least two grave disabilities in trying to grasp what was happening: one, they had no philosophy of history with which to understand Bandung; two, they were trying to understand actions initiated by someone else and they could not quite grasp the nature of the terms in which those actions were being projected….

  In fact, the comments of the world’s press upon the Asian-African Conference had been simply astonishing. From an English daily had come the following tidbit, written by one Sefton Delmer:

  “They are holding a jamboree in the sun-drenched Indonesian hill town of Bandung next month. It is a political jamboree, an anti-Colonial gathering of Asian and African nations. What a pity President Sukarno and the Indonesian Government are being so very exclusive and colour conscious about it!”

  This was the beginning of a press tirade against the conference; the sponsoring powers had not invited any white Western powers, and the above writer seemed to have forgotten that for centuries Asian and African nations had watched in helpless silence while white powers had gathered, discussed and disposed of the destinies of Asian and African peoples—gatherings in which no Asian or African had ever had any say. The writer was protesting that the Asians and Africans were acting as the West had acted, had learned their lessons too well!

  Two eminent Australians, Dr. John W. Burton, former Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, and Prof. Charles Patrick Fitzgerald, holder of the Chair of Far Eastern History at the Australian National University, Canberra, issued a statement that reflected Australia’s dilemma in confronting the reverse of the racial policy she had so long and proudly practiced in the Pacific. In part the statement declared:

  “It is our view that Australia should have been invited to this Conference and should have accepted; and should on all future occasions be invited and attend.”

  Yet most of the men who would attend the Bandung meeting could not have been admitted to Australian soil solely on the basis of their color and race; indeed, the mere presence of Australians and South Africans would have had an inhibiting and perhaps intimidating effect upon many of the Asian and African delegates who, above all, wanted to speak their minds freely and frankly among themselves.

  The Launceston Examiner of Tasmania (Australia), December 30, 1954, gave vent to real fear when it stated:

  Decisions by the “Colombo Premiers” are of deep significance to Australia and the Western world. Their invitation to twenty-five nations, including Communist China, but excluding all Western countries, to a conference in April, could be the beginning of an upsurge of racial hatreds against the West. The decision to support Indonesia in its claim for sovereignty over West New Guinea, though not unexpected, should show Australians where the sympathies of most of their neighbours lie.

  Speculation about the role of Red China was voiced on December 28, 1954, by the Delhi Times of India. It stated:

  …Much will depend on whether Peking considers itself more Asian than Communist or vice versa. If the Asian-African Conference accomplishes nothing more than reveal to what extent the Communist is willing to cooperate with its Asian neighbours and Arab States, it will be a worthy attempt on behalf of Asian solidarity. Peking will then be given an opportunity to establish its bona fides and if possible to confound those sceptics who feel that, by the fact of being Communist, China is nearer to its fellow Communist States in Europe than to its Asian neighbors with which it has racial and cultural ties.

  The Globe and Mail of Toronto, January 1, 1955, observed:

  What can bind these scattered countries together? What is the common interest of Red China and Ethiopia, of the Philippines and Lebanon, to name four of the invited? The answer is plain. These Asian and African states, with few exceptions, recently were or still are dependencies. With no exception whatever, they have a lower standard of living, measuring welfare by the distribution of material goods, than is enjoyed in other countries. This, of course, is obvious. What is significant about the call to Bandung is that the common plight of Asians and Africans has been recognized and proclaimed—in Asia.

  Said Newsweek bluntly, January 1, 1955:

  “Everybody knows what must come to pass between Asia and the West, the yellow and the white. It is imbecile folly for us to close our eyes to the inevitable…. All the world understands that the gravest crisis in the destiny of the earth’s population is at hand….”

  Western statesmen last week unhappily recalled these words of Kaiser Wilhelm II, popularizer of the phrase ‘Yellow Peril.’ They could reflect that the onetime German emperor was right as rain—and wrong as sin. He was right in foreseeing a crisis that now threatens in a more virulent form than he envisaged—an Afro-Asian combination turned by Communists against the West. The problem, according to those who have to deal with it today and tomorrow, is to prevent its formation….

  The Christian Science Monitor of Boston, January 23, 1955, summed up the meaning of the conference in terse phrases:

  …The West is excluded. Emphasis is on the colored nations of the world. And for Asia it means that at last the destiny of Asia is being determined in Asia, and not in Geneva, or Paris, or London or Washington. Colonialism is out. Hands off is the word. Asia is free. This is perhaps the great historic event of our century.

  Reflecting a feeling of long isolation, the Burma Star (London), January 29, 1955, declared:

  The Afro-Asian conference is decidedly of vital necessity from the standpoint of many countries who have agreed to lend their participation. The least value it can have is a true forum of Afro-Asian opinion which does not always find its proper outlet in the United Nations and other world councils where Western political sway is indisputably in evidence.

  On March 3, 1955, came an undisguised sneer from Portugal. Said Diario Popular of Lisbon:

  …this spectacular conference is actually a kind of a vast whirl of panic, as happens in ant hills on the approach of some collective danger. Let us forget appearances and even the perturbing possibilities for our particular interests and let us face the problem of the West. It consists in calming that immense flock before it delivers itself up to bad shepherds and before it is too late to influence it.

  On the same day, ten thousand miles distant, the Times of Manila, playing possum, said in a voice whose studied naïveté did not ring true:

  With the best will in the world it is difficult to understand what Premier Jawaharlal Nehru expects of the Afrasian conference at Bandung next April.

  Said Walter Lippmann in the Paris Herald Tribune for March 1, 1955:

  The list of the states they did not invite makes it very evident that this is no mere attempt to make a neutral bloc or a third force in between the giant military powers. Red China is no neutral and no third force. What this is, to put it plainly, is the most formidable and ambitious move yet made in this generation to apply the principle of Asia for the Asians.

  The words that cut and hurt the Asian-African delegates most came from no less than the American Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In a radio-television address in Washington on the 8th of March, 1955, he referred to the conference as follows:

  Three of the Asian parties to the Pacific Charter, Pakistan, the Philippines and Thailand, may shortly be meeting with other Asian countries at a so-called Afro-Asian conference.

  (This single phrase, “so-called Afro-Asian conference,” echoed and re-echoed at Bandung as proof of American contempt; and the people who called attention to it were not Communists….)

  On March 13, 1955, the Central African Federation, which is affiliated with the British Commonwealth, decided not to participate in the mammoth conference. Speculation had it that since a white man, Sir Godfrey Higgins, was the Prime Minister, he could not possibly speak in the interests of his African
constituents. His presence at Bandung would have been a curious spectacle, to say the least.

  On March 25, 1955, this announcement came from New Delhi; it was published in the New York Times:

  India will ask the conference of Asian-African nations to put the problem of nuclear weapons on its agenda.

  Then, from an unknown quarter, came sensational news that set off a frenzy of fear and speculation. On March 26, 1955, the New York Times carried the following item:

  A significant change in policy and defense planning is under consideration here in the belief that Red China will begin its campaign to capture Matsu and Quemoy about the middle of April.

  There is as yet no sign that President Eisenhower has decided to intervene militarily to prevent the capture of the islands.

  On such a basis the United States would be committed to the use of precision atomic weapons against purely military targets even in a limited Far Eastern war.

  The pending Asian-African conference began to loom more and more as a war council of the nations attending. The New York Times, March 27, 1955, quoted Senator Walter F. George, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as saying:

  …some credence was being given to the possibility of a Communist attack after the Asian-African conference. He was not prepared to say, Senator George added, whether the United States would become involved.

  Burma’s Buddhist Premier U Nu sought to allay war fears in a New York Times article, March 27, 1955:

  …Communist China was afraid that as soon as the United States bases in Asia were ‘completed’ an attack would be launched against the China mainland.

  Premier U Nu said he had not met many leaders of the United States but those he had talked with had told him of their fears of continued aggression from Peking.

  Premier U Nu said he did not think the forthcoming Asian-African conference was an ‘anti-Western’ meeting. But he made it clear that he thought some Western powers would take a verbal slamming on the issue of colonialism.

  On March 28, 1955, William Humphreys analyzed Nehru’s probable relation to Communism in the Paris Herald Tribune in the following words:

  Mr. Nehru spent ten days in Peking as the guest of Communist party leaders Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou En-lai, and on his return to India, November 2, he extolled his ‘peace and progress’ mission as ‘an historic event certain to influence all of Asia.’ Rumors of the conference then began to circulate.

  Thus, when the idea of the Afro-Asian meeting was formally projected a few weeks later, it appeared to be a reasonable conclusion that Mr. Nehru had set an international stage on which Red China would be presented as a peace-minded nation militarily intent only upon resisting United States’ ‘aggression.’

  Behind all this frenzied speculation was, of course, something else. An American admiral, Carney by name, Chief of Naval Operations, predicted that the Chinese Communists were likely to attack Quemoy and Matsu in mid-April. On April 7, 1955, the Manchester Guardian reported:

  In his opening remarks Admiral Carney said that the Chinese Communist leaders Mao and Chou had made a straightforward pitch on what they intend to do.

  He went on:

  “They have a series of unbroken successes and they are flushed with victory. They should feel safe in continuing to probe and they will probe. The first two things they will go after are the off-shore islands. They can take Matsu and Quemoy from the Chinese Nationalists. It could be expensive for them but they will take the islands by expending enough. They probably will initiate the attack on Matsu in mid-April. The significance of the timing is that it would tie in with the Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indonesia, from April 16 to 24. The all-out attack on Quemoy would be some weeks later than that on Matsu. The build-up around Matsu includes the air near Foochow.

  “The attack on Matsu may begin on April 15 or later during the conference. A month later, maybe in May or June, they could launch an attack on Quemoy….

  “If the decision is made to participate it should not be on a localized tactical basis. We have to carry the thing to a conclusion and find what will wreck the enemy’s efforts. That involves enlargement far beyond that tactical area of Quemoy and Matsu. We have to engage China in an all-out war. If we go in with the restricted view we will find ourselves about to lose all of Asia.”

  In the Manchester Guardian, April 13, 1955, Adlai Stevenson, leader of the Democratic Party in the United States, speaking in subtle, ironic tones, tried to draw attention to the essential horror involved in the whole discussion by asking a series of pointed questions:

  Are the off-shore islands essential to the security of the United States? Are they, indeed, even essential to the defense of Formosa—which all Americans have been agreed upon since President Truman sent the Seventh Fleet there five years ago? Or is it, as the Secretary of Defense says, that the loss of Quemoy and Matsu would make no significant military difference?

  Can they be defended without resort to nuclear weapons? If not, while I know we now have the means to incinerate, to burn up, much of living China, and quickly, are we prepared to use such weapons to defend islands so tenuously related to American security?

  It should be remembered that these quotations fit into a real, concrete, historical context. These molten words, dealing with the incineration of continents, were related to a process that began directly after World War II when Western Europe, prostrate from Hitlerian domination, was anxious to stem the tide of Stalinist revolutions that were sweeping into Europe. America, leader of the West, then launched a campaign, the intensity of which it did not appreciate, to frighten the men of the Kremlin, and month after month that campaign kept up, flooding the world on all levels of communication. And it was successful, too successful; it not only scared and deterred Russian Communists, but it frightened the living daylights out of the human race. It was a campaign so fierce, so deadly, so unrelenting that it created precisely what it sought to defeat, that is, an organization of Asia and Africa around a Communist cell on a global scale: BANDUNG…. The dialogue of events had reached a pitch that involved the totality of man on earth.

  Such was the atmosphere, brooding, bitter, apprehensive, which greeted the projected conference. Everybody read into it his own fears; the conference loomed like a long-buried ghost rising from a muddy grave….

  On the afternoon of April 12, we landed at Jakarta airfield, which was decorated with the flags of the twenty-nine nations attending the conference. As soon as I became entangled with the bureaucracy of Indonesian customs and immigration, I discovered a great deal of smiling good will but an appalling amount of inefficiency. The brown young men seemed at a loss as they fumbled with papers, searched about for rubber stamps. It was clear to me that these young men had not had much previous experience in administration; under Dutch rule few Indonesians did such work. Ten minutes sufficed to reveal the void left here by the much-vaunted Dutch imperialists.

  The heat was like a Turkish bath; the humidity was higher than in the African jungle. I was met by P.E.N. club officials and Mochtar Lubis, editor of the Indonesia Raya, an independent Socialist daily. Lubis took me in tow, loaded my luggage into his car, and we nosed into the wide streets of a chaotic, Oriental city. Jakarta, like Accra in the Gold Coast of Africa, presents to Western eyes a commercial aspect, naked and immediate, that seems to swallow up the entire population in petty trade—men, women, and children…. The spectator who is acquainted with colonial practice knows at once where this feverish activity comes from: one must sell to earn money to buy products shipped from Europe. Family relations have been replaced by factory and financial relations, and the resulting picture of brutal and direct commercial activity is of a nature unknown even in cities like London, New York, or Paris, where tradition, having survived through gradual transitions of one culture overlapping another, forming a synthesis of stability, is still a force making for regularity and a degree of humanness in daily relations between people.

  I passed those famous ca
nals which the Dutch, for some inexplicable reason, had insisted upon digging here in this hot mudhole of a city. (Indeed, the site of Jakarta itself must have been chosen for its sheer utility as a port and with no thought of the health of the people who had to live in it.) I saw a young man squatting upon the bank of a canal, defecating in broad daylight into the canal’s muddy, swirling water; I saw another, then another…. Children used the canal for their water closet; then I saw a young woman washing clothes only a few yards from them…. A young girl was bathing; she had a cloth around her middle and she was dipping water out of the canal and, holding the cloth out from her body, she poured the water over her covered breasts…. A tiny boy was washing his teeth, dipping his toothbrush into the canal….

  Lubis’ car snaked forward through throngs of strange contraptions that resembled huge tricycles; they had one big wheel behind upon which was perched a native boy who sweated and pumped the pedals; in front were two smaller wheels and a seat large enough for two people.

  “What is that thing?” I asked Lubis.

  “That’s our Indonesian taxicab,” Lubis explained. “There are about forty thousand of them in the city. They are called betjas.”

  “A sort of Indonesian rickshaw, eh?”

  “Yes, and we are ashamed of them,” he confessed. “Many Indonesians refuse to ride in them; it reminds them of imperialism…. You understand? Brown or yellow men hauling white men…” He sighed. “A boy who works on one of those things gets ill after about two years. But we have no money to import taxis.”