In December 1957, Cairo University played host to an international gathering of unprecedented scale in the colonised world. Representatives from forty-six countries across Asia and Africa spent a week sharing their experiences of colonisation and their aspirations to overcome it. Their closing resolution invoked the Asian- African Conference held two years earlier in Bandung, Indonesia, which they said had ‘set the standard’ with its principles of self-determination, global equality, and peace. Bandung remains preeminent in the lore of Afro-Asianism worldwide, and in historiographies of decolonisation today. Yet the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference and its Cairo Declaration were self-consciously a broadening and deepening of the ‘Bandung Spirit’: Cairo’s delegates represented many more countries, most of them yet to achieve independence, and they were not political elites, but activists, unionists, writers, and artists.

This presents two paradoxes for exploration, reflecting the richness of the extraordinary historical process of decolonisation. Firstly, the Cairo Conference delegates celebrated their struggles for national liberation – many were nationalist activists and organisers – but they also greeted each other as Afro-Asians. How did the national and transnational coexist in this context? Secondly, not only were the Cairo Conference delegates unaffiliated with their states, but many had also taken great risks in travelling to Cairo, evading colonial border controls or the surveillance of hostile regimes. Yet it was the Egyptian state that was sponsoring these proceedings, with a senior cabinet minister appointed conference chair.