When Jones finally met Presiden Sukarno—as he is called in Indonesian—he was deeply impressed. He wrote: “To meet him was like suddenly coming under a sunlamp, such was the quality of his magnetism.” He quickly noticed, he said, Sukarno’s “enormous brilliant brown eyes, and a flashing smile that conveyed an all-embracing warmth.” He would watch, amazed, as Sukarno spoke eloquently on “the world, the flesh, and the devil: about movie stars and Malthus, Jean Jaures and Jefferson, folklore, and philosophy,” then wolf down a huge meal, and dance for hours. Even more impressive to Jones, who had lived a relatively comfortable life, was that this remarkable man—about the same age as Jones—learned to eat this way, and became so steeped in knowledge, while spending years behind bars for opposing Dutch colonial rule.48 Along the way, he had learned to speak in German, English, French, Arabic, and Japanese, in addition to Bahasa Indonesia, Javanese, Sundanese, Balinese, and Dutch.49
When Sukarno opened his mouth in any of these languages, the whole country stopped to listen, and Jones noticed that this had gone to his head. Sukarno told him once, after surviving yet another assassination attempt, “There is only one thing I can think of after yesterday.… Allah must approve of what I am doing, otherwise I would long ago have been killed.”50
Sukarno was born in 1901 in East Java. His mother was from Bali, and therefore Hindu; and his father, from an upper-middle class of Javanese civil servants, was Muslim, like the vast majority of the island. On Java at the time, Muslims could be roughly divided into two categories. There were the santri, the stricter, orthodox Muslims, more influenced by Arab religious culture. Then there were the abangan, whose Islam existed on top of a deep well of mystical and animistic Javanese traditions. Sukarno grew up in the latter tradition.51 From an early age, he was well steeped in the wisdom of the wayang, the all-night shadow puppet shows that function here in the same kind of way that epic poetry functioned in classical Greece.
Though not from the elite, Sukarno was able to study in good colonial schools. Officially, he studied architecture, but on his own, he studied political philosophy. He began to move in Indonesian nationalist circles, which welcomed a broad range of anticolonial schools of thought. Sarekat Islam, the Islamic Union, was the central nationalist organization at the time; it had conservative Islamic thinkers, as well as many who were loyal to the Communist Party. Then called the Indies Communist Party, the party had often disobeyed directions from Moscow when its leaders saw fit, and saw Muslim unity as a revolutionary, anticolonial force. There were committed Muslim Communists who wanted to create an egalitarian community—inspired to varying degrees both by Marx and the Koran—but felt that foreign infidels were holding them back. And for almost everyone in the country, “socialism” by definition implied opposition to foreign domination and support for an independent Indonesia.52
This brought Indonesians together. At one December 24 PKI convention at Sarekat Islam headquarters, they decorated the walls with red and green (for Christmas Eve), and dyed a hammer-and-sickle design in traditional Javanese batik style.53
Sukarno by nature was a syncretist, always more interested in mixing and matching and inclusion than shrill ideological disputes. In 1926, he penned an article titled “Nationalism, Islam, and Marxism,” in which he asked: “Can these three spirits work together in the colonial situation to become one great spirit, the spirit of unity?” The natural answer for him was yes. Capitalism, he argued, was the enemy of both Islam and Marxism, and he called upon adherents of Marxism—which he said was no unchanging dogma, but rather a dynamic force that adapted to different needs and different situations—to struggle alongside Muslims and nationalists.54
The next year, he founded the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), which sat in the middle of the currents struggling against Dutch imperial rule—with the Communists to his left, and the Muslim groups to his right. Sukarno’s natural predilection toward inclusion was extremely well suited to the historical moment. Indonesia is an archipelago whose islands sprawl across two million square miles of sea and are home to hundreds of distinct nationalities speaking more than seven hundred languages. Nothing brought them together other than the artificial boundaries imposed by a racist foreign power. The young nation needed a shared sense of identity more than anything else.
Sukarno was the prophet of that identity. In 1945, he provided an ingenious, impassioned basis for what it meant to be Indonesian when he put forward the Pancasila, or five principles. They were, and remain: belief in God, justice and civilization, Indonesian unity, democracy, and social justice. In practice, they combine the broad affirmation of religion (that would likely mean Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, or Buddhism), revolutionary independence, and social democracy. They certainly didn’t exclude the communists, either, since the vast majority of them were abangan Muslims like Sukarno, or Balinese Hindus like his mother. Even if a tiny minority of high-level communists might have been without religion, they were happy enough to sign off on Pancasila within a few years. Later the chairman of the PKI would justify this by offering a very novel spin on Marxism, saying that within Indonesia, widespread belief in one God was an “objective fact” and that “communists, as materialists, must accept this objective fact.”55
The Republic of Indonesia adopted a national slogan—Bhinneka Tunngal Ika, meaning “unity in diversity” in Old Javanese, the language spoken by the largest number of people, most of whom live in the middle of that central island. Pancasila, or Pantja Sila, is itself derived from Sanskrit, which was used in the pre-Islam days across the Nusantara archipelago, when much of the islands were strongly influenced by cultural and religious elements originating on the Indian subcontinent. (“Indonesia” itself simply means “Indies islands,” and is derived, like the name “India,” from the Indus River).
It was under Sukarno’s watch that the young country chose to make Bahasa Indonesia the official Indonesian language. A leader of less wisdom might have been inclined to make his native Javanese into the official tongue, but this is a hard language to learn and easily could have been seen as a kind of chauvinistic or even colonial imposition from the strongest island. Instead, Indonesia picked an easy, seemingly neutral language, and most of the country learned it within a generation or two. This was a significant achievement; nearby countries in Southeast Asia still have not established truly national languages.56
Sukarno was a left-leaning Third World nationalist, and he was more of a visionary than a nuts-and-bolts administrator, as Howard Jones and the rest of the Americans would learn soon enough. True to his conciliatory nature, he was committed to maintaining a friendship with both the United States and Moscow, and he certainly was not trying to aggravate the leadership in Washington.
Jones struck up a kind of friendship with Sukarno, despite the fact that many of his American colleagues thought they were “losing” Indonesia to communism. Indeed, he surprised many of the locals, including those on the more radical left, by simply calling them up for a chat. By now, the left automatically viewed the US with suspicion—the days of Ho Chi Minh’s overtures to Washington were over. Jones quickly came to the conclusion that in order to be effective, the aid programs he was managing could not in any way appear to be paternalistic or offend Indonesians’ fierce pride in their independence. As for the point of that aid in the first place, he was quite open with the Indonesians—Washington didn’t want Indonesia to enter the “Communist bloc.”57
Sukarno was unquestionably president, but ruling required constant maneuvering within an unwieldy parliamentary system. He led a coalition government, and though the PKI supported the arrangement, there were several other parties that were much more influential, and the PKI had no representatives in his cabinet.58 As was his wont, Jones continued to correct other American officials who didn’t comprehend Asia on its own terms. He understood when the Indonesian president told him, “I am a nationalist, but no Communist.” Smiling Jones was proud—and dismayed—that he was “the one American who was conv
inced Sukarno was not a Communist.”59
As leader of such a large Third World country, Sukarno was relatively well known back in Washington. But a year after Jones landed, Sukarno would put on an event that would launch him onto the global stage, and change the meaning of the Indonesian revolution forever.
Bandung
That term, “Third World,” was born in 1951 in France, but it really only came into its own in 1955, in Indonesia.
As historian Christopher J. Lee has written, it was the Konferensi Asia-Afrika, held in Bandung in April, that really solidified the idea of the Third World.60 This remarkable gathering brought the peoples of the colonized world into a movement, one that was opposed to European imperialism and independent from the power of the US and the Soviet Union.
It didn’t happen automatically; it was the result of concerted efforts by a few of the world’s new leaders. In 1954, Indonesia got together with Burma (Myanmar), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Pakistan, and India, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, the same leader who gave the Kennedy brothers a lecture over dinner. They formed the Colombo Group, named after the Sri Lankan capital, where they met, and began planning a bigger meeting. Indonesia’s prime minister initially proposed a 1955 conference as a response to the founding of SEATO, the US-sponsored copy of NATO in Southeast Asia. But the invitation list soon expanded rapidly, as Nehru invited China (this necessarily excluded Taiwan), while apartheid South Africa and both Koreas (technically still at war) as well as Israel (whose presence might have upset Arab nations) weren’t invited.
The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening speech, delivered in bursts of accented but perfect English, it was the “first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”61 Some of the countries there had recently achieved independence while others were still fighting for it. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, attended as a friendly “observer” from outside Asia and Africa.
The very existence of the conference elevated Sukarno and Nehru to the status of global leaders. It was also a catapult to worldwide relevance for Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had taken over in Egypt, the world’s largest Arab country, just three years earlier. Like Nehru, Nasser was secular and left-leaning, and insisted on his right to make alliances with every country, including the Soviet Union. By attending, Mao’s foreign minister, Zhou Enlai, sought to legitimate the communist People’s Republic of China among its neighbors and take the side of the Third World.62
The content of the meeting led to a flowering of global organizations, some of which are active to this day. They were inspired by the “Spirit of Bandung,” which Sukarno put forward very clearly in the rest of that powerful opening speech:
We are gathered here today as a result of sacrifices. Sacrifices made by our forefathers and by the people of our own and younger generations. For me, this hall is filled not only by the leaders of the nations of Asia and Africa; it also contains within its walls the undying, the indomitable, the invincible spirit of those who went before us. Their struggle and sacrifice paved the way for this meeting of the highest representatives of independent and sovereign nations from two of the biggest continents of the globe.…
All of us, I am certain, are united by more important things than those which superficially divide us. We are united, for instance, by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilize peace in the world.…
Sukarno wore a tailored white suit, glasses, and small peci hat, and as he spoke, world leaders sitting around the small chambers clapped, and leaned in to take in more. He had their attention as he turned his legendary rhetorical skills against Western imperialism:
How is it possible to be disinterested about colonialism? For us, colonialism is not something far and distant. We have known it in all its ruthlessness. We have seen the immense human wastage it causes, the poverty it causes, and the heritage it leaves behind when, eventually and reluctantly, it is driven out by the inevitable march of history. My people, and the peoples of many nations of Asia and Africa, know these things, for we have experienced them.…
Yes, some parts of our nations are not yet free. That is why all of us cannot yet feel that journey’s end has been reached. No people can feel themselves free, so long as part of their motherland is unfree. Like peace, freedom is indivisible. There is no such thing as being half free, as there is no such thing as being half alive.…
Almost everyone in the room knew exactly what he meant. The people in the room that day would spend the rest of their lives describing the energy he had summoned in the crowd. He went on:
And, I beg of you, do not think of colonialism only in the classic form which we of Indonesia, and our brothers in different parts of Asia and Africa, knew. Colonialism has also its modern dress, in the form of economic control, intellectual control, actual physical control by a small but alien community within a nation. It is a skillful and determined enemy, and it appears in many guises. It does not give up its loot easily. Wherever, whenever, and however it appears, colonialism is an evil thing, and one which must be eradicated from the earth.
Sukarno and the organizers had gone to great trouble to avoid antagonizing or frightening the most powerful country on earth with their openly anti-imperialist rhetoric. So they scoured their American history books, and asked the Americans they knew, looking for a way to connect the date of the conference to the United States.63 They found one. The president continued:
The battle against colonialism has been a long one, and do you know that today is a famous anniversary in that battle? On the eighteenth day of April, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, just one hundred and eighty years ago, Paul Revere rode at midnight through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops and of the opening of the American War of Independence, the first successful anticolonial war in history. About this midnight ride the poet Longfellow wrote: “A cry of defiance and not of fear, A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door, and a word that shall echo for evermore. Yes, it shall echo for evermore.”
As Howard Jones understood, the Bandung Conference put forward an entirely different type of nationalism from the type that existed in Europe. For leaders like Sukarno and Nehru, the idea of the “nation” was not based on race or language—it indeed could not be in territories as diverse as theirs—but is constructed by the anticolonial struggle and the drive for social justice. With Bandung, the Third World could be united by its own common purposes, such as antiracism and economic sovereignty, Sukarno believed. They could also come together and organize collectively for better terms within the global economic system, forcing rich countries to lower their tariffs on Third World goods, while the newly independent countries could use tariffs to foster their own development.64 After centuries of exploitation, these nations were far, far behind the rich world, and were going to force that to change.
There were twenty-nine countries officially participating, plus states attending as observers. Both Vietnamese states took part, because at this point they were still officially in peaceful coexistence until the 1956 referendum to reunite them. Cambodia’s Norodom Sihanouk, like Sukarno a strong supporter of independence from both Washington and Moscow, was there. The Syrian Republic, Libya, Iran (now under the Shah), and Iraq (still a kingdom) sent representatives, and Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Ali came along. Momolu Dukuly took a seat for Liberia, the country founded by former American slaves in the nineteenth century.
Sukarno himself often linked the anticolonial struggle to the fight against global capitalism. But the Bandung Conference was also a small blow to his supporters in the PKI, since Indonesia’s Communist Party favored a direct alliance with the Soviet Union. Because of his language skills, Francisca’s husband, Zain, was one of the
Indonesian journalists lucky enough to cover the conference. He wrote it up for The People’s Daily, which showered praise on the event, despite this small slight.
“Long live the friendship and cooperation between the peoples of Africa and Asia!” the paper exclaimed on opening day, featuring a cover illustration of a man, his muscular frame held together by the flags of the Third World, turning the wheel of history. The next day, after Sukarno’s opening speech, The People’s Daily printed caricatures of figures representing Britain, the USA, the Netherlands, and France in a daze, suffering from a bad headache, with a slightly forced little pun underneath. The “Afro-Asian” (AA) conference, Zain’s paper joked, made the imperialist powers desperate for Aspirin-Aspro (AA), because watching the unity of the independent young nations made their heads pound.65
From the United States, the keenest observer of the conference was Richard Wright, the black novelist and journalist. The former communist and author of Native Son wrote an entire book on his experience there, which went on to influence much anticolonial and antiracist thought. Once he found out about “a meeting of almost all of the human race living in the main geopolitical center of gravity of the Earth,” a conference of “the despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race,” he wrote, he had to go and document it.66
Before leaving for Bandung, Wright spoke to North Americans and Europeans aghast at the idea of the conference, certain that a meeting of those nations could only amount to “racism in reverse,” hatred of whites inspired by the Communists, or a global antiwhite alliance.67 Even Wright himself was skeptical of the Bandung mission until he saw the legacy of colonialism and heard the speeches. He realized quickly that locals would speak to him entirely differently when there were no white people in the room. Wright met an Indonesian who had worked as an engineer for three months in New York, but barely left his apartment—he was too afraid of racist confrontations on the street.68 Then Wright came across a 1949 book designed to teach Indonesian to colonial officials and tourists—except it didn’t contain any words allowing conversation. It was mostly a list of orders, all punctuated with exclamation marks.
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