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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2024
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.
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. 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 participants and on a smaller scale. Willard Hanna, an American observer of the conference, therefore referred to the AASC as ‘The Little Bandung Conference.’
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.’
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