It was at this juncture that Nehru, Sir John, Ali, U Nu, and Sastroamidjojo knew that they had trumps to play, cards that the West could not match: the fear of a new war, fear of racial prejudice, fear of poverty…. Get these hurt, frightened, lonely, suffering nations together and put the question to them. Nehru knew that these nations did not fear him or his people, did not fear Indonesia, Pakistan, etc.; the question was: Would they fear Red China? Trying for an alliance along the broadest possible lines, the Colombo Powers asked Chou En-lai to come in and behave. And Chou, being no fool, said yes.
But is there not something missing here? Weren’t all these men deeply religious? Christians? Moslems? Buddhists? Hindus? They were. Would they accept working with Red China? Yes, they would. Why? Were they dupes? No, they were desperate. They felt that they were acting in common defense of themselves. Then, is Christianity, as it was introduced into Asia and Africa, no deterrent to Communism?
A quick examination of some of the delegations at Bandung revealed the solid presence of Christian influence. The five Liberian delegates were all members of the Y.M.C.A. Two members of the Indonesian delegation were Christians. The Philippine delegation was probably all Roman Catholic. The Ethiopian delegation was mostly Christian. The delegation from Lebanon was mostly Christian…. The rest of the delegations was composed mostly of Hindus, Moslems, Buddhists, etc. Obviously, religion, and particularly the Christian religion, was no bulwark against Communism in Asia. Indeed, a high official in the Indonesian government told me:
“In many instances Christianity provides Communism with its justification. Communism is paying the unpaid bills of the Christian church.”
The more I examined the relationship between Communism and Christianity at Bandung, the more complicated I found that relationship to be. In the West one is inclined to feel that the two doctrines of life, Christianity and Communism, are opposed, but, at bottom, they are not as opposed as one would think. There are deep underground, emotional connections. Seen through Asian eyes, the two philosophies share much of the same assumptions of hope. As one writer has put it, Jesus Christ himself was one of the poorest men to claim divinity that the Asians ever heard of. So when a Communist comes into a colonial community, or a community still reacting in terms of the colonial situation (such as exists in Asia today), he can say: “I’ll show you how to implement the Christian vision; I’ll show you how to make Christianity come true, how to make the Kingdom of God real right here on earth….” And the Asian Christian, longing for freedom from his white Christian masters, makes up his mind to follow the Communists.
Says Winburn T. Thomas, a missionary with twenty-two years of Asian experience, writing in the Presbyterian Tribune, February, 1954:
Strange as it may seem to Western observers, many Asians are both Christians and Communists. At one time, six of the seven leaders of the Travancore, India, Communist Party representatives were baptized Christians. There are two Communist Party representatives in the Indonesian parliament who also hold membership in the Batak Church.
The sharp ideological lines and distinctions frequently drawn by Westerners are blurred in Asia. It is not uncommon for a Japanese to say that he is at once a Buddhist, a Confucianist, and a Christian….
The current phenomenon in China, with Christians giving thanks to the Communist Party and to the Peking government for its leadership of the church, goes beyond the traditional blurring of lines. Many Chinese do see basic conflicts between Christianity and Communism, yet are willing to cooperate with Mao Tse-tung in his new policies for the country….
Summarizing, Thomas cites some of the following reasons to account for the situation:
Communist rule in China is Chinese. In this respect it differs from Japanese occupation.
During the period of colonial expansion, China was not taken over by any one Western nation. This was not due to innate strength on the part of the Chinese. The Western nations were unable to agree on how they would carve up the “sleeping giant” which was too large for any of them to take over alone. Yet unequal treaties were forced upon China beginning with the middle of the nineteenth century. Her cities became foreign concessions. White men were in charge of her customs.
The state of being a Christian does not, necessarily, condition an individual’s feelings of nationalism and patriotism….
The Chinese Christian thinks he reads in his Bible that all governments are the gift of God, and that political control has been vested in Mao’s hands….
The Communist government has had to raise to high position such men as Y. T. Wu, a Y.M.C.A. secretary, who is now head of the Protestant movement. He is national chairman of the Oppose-America, Aid Korea Three-fold Self-Reform Movement of the Church of Christ in China. He is editor of the T’ien Feng (Heavenly Wind ), official publication of this body.
The Asian ground upon which the seeds of the Christian doctrine fell was far richer than the devout sowers dreamed…. The Asian mind is tenacious, pragmatic; when you speak of social justice and freedom to an Asian, he takes your words at face value; he does not suspect double talk….
But religion alone, at Bandung, would not and could not have tipped the scales toward Chou En-lai. Fear was at Bandung. And among all the fears riding the delegates, there were some cardinal fears: fear of the vast and restless populations in their native lands; fear of the future; fear of their neighbors…. The delegates had to act and speak in a manner that assured them that they would be safe no matter what happened. Each address was directed to the voters at home, to the State Department in Washington, to Whitehall in London, to Peking, to Moscow, to their own Asian and African neighbors. An interview with a member of Romulo’s delegation elicited the following attitude:
“We are worried. America is protecting us, but America does not really need us. She has atomic and hydrogen bombs. She can defend herself. Suppose America says that she has to retrench? Where would that leave us? We are a sentimentality for America. One day we will have to face these other Asian nations alone…. And that’s what frightens me….” He paused, scratched his head, and looked off. “Why are we at Bandung? Brother, in the past we have been objects to be moved here and there. We were handled as only those on the outside wanted us handled. We had no say in the matter…. Now, we want to show those people that we can manage our own lives. And this conference is a demonstration of that. We’ll have our difficulties, but at least we want to try. And we are trying and we are not doing too badly….”
Mrs. Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, told me a strange story that buttresses the above confession in a telling manner. She related how the Communist Parties of China and Russia had invited thousands of Indian students to visit Peking and Moscow to see the impressive strides that had been made in industrial development. These trips into Russia and China had been official excursions and the Indian students had been squired around. They had completed their tours by being definitely pro-Communist in sentiment. Upon their return to India, they had begun berating Nehru for not having done things as the Chinese and Russians had done them.
“These young people don’t know that we are doing the same thing. Now we are making sure that our young people know what we are doing in our country. Many of them are surprised when they do see what we are doing….”
She paused, then went on relentlessly:
“The Americans do not understand. The American press attacks us, day in and day out. Look, in India my father is respected. Look at me: I’ve served time in prisons. So has my father. We have suffered. We have lived in exile. These sufferings that we have endured have woven haloes about our heads for our masses…. They look to us. They respect us. They love us. And the love and the respect they have for us we use to keep unity while we build up our country. Yet the Americans attack us. Do they know what they are doing? Don’t they know that if they destroy my father, they will be opening the gates to anarchy, to Communism even? Don’t they know what they are doing, these Americans…?”
And back of Sir John
of Ceylon was also a nest of unrest. One day’s visit in Colombo was enough to disclose dissatisfaction with the coalition government supporting him—a coalition composed of Communists, Trotskyites, and sundry other elements…. And what of Indonesia? There was hardly any government there at all, save for Sukarno’s winged words of idealism, troops, and machine guns….
The Gold Coast was harassed by widespread tribal revolts. And so it went…. I’m no expert regarding these politically turbulent areas of the world, but I’d suspect that the other Asian and African countries too had their millions of restless and demanding people.
Could these new statesmen look toward the West for the kind of help they wanted, help that would pull their debased populations quickly out of the mire of ignorance and poverty? A strange and new religion is in the hearts of these new Asian and African nationals. They feel that if they do not become quickly modern, if they do not measure up to the West almost overnight, they will be swallowed up again in what they feel to be slavery. And Chou En-lai stood there, bland, smiling, more liberal than any liberal ever seen on land or sea, preaching tolerance, assuring one and all that they need feel no shame, no sense of anxiety in the presence of his Communist-led six hundred million poor and backward Chinese…. From both Moscow and Peking the word had gone out: Be nice; no more clenched fists; give them all a glad welcome…. And all over Bandung the Communists were affable, shaking hands with their former enemies, waving aside all references to past hatreds and slanders, doing all in their power to heal old wounds….
And under this vague drift toward collectivism was a powerful substratum of racial emotion….
PART IV
Racial Shame at Bandung
Racial feeling manifested itself at Bandung in a thousand subtle forms. The Sten guns and the hand grenades of the brown Indonesian troops evoked deep fear in many white observers. Said one Englishwoman:
“I’d suggest that we evacuate Australia right now and settle the population in Canada.”
As I watched the dark-faced delegates work at the conference, I saw a strange thing happen. Before Bandung, most of these men had been strangers, and on the first day they were constrained with one another, bristling with charge and countercharge against America and/or Russia. But, as the days passed, they slowly cooled off, and another and different mood set in. What was happening? As they came to know one another better, their fear and distrust evaporated. Living for centuries under Western rule, they had become filled with a deep sense of how greatly they differed from one another. But now, face to face, their ideological defenses dropped. Negative unity, bred by a feeling that they had to stand together against a rapacious West, turned into something that hinted of the positive. They began to sense their combined strength; they began to taste blood…. They could now feel that their white enemy was far, far away…. Day after day dun-colored Trotskyites consorted with dark Moslems, yellow Indo-Chinese hobnobbed with brown Indonesians, black Africans mingled with swarthy Arabs, tan Burmese associated with dark brown Hindus, dusty nationalists palled around with yellow Communists, and Socialists talked to Buddhists. But they all had the same background of colonial experience, of subjection, of color consciousness, and they found that ideology was not needed to define their relations…. I got the notion that ideologies were the instruments that these men had grown used to wielding in their struggles with Western white men and that now, being together and among themselves, they no longer felt the need for them. As the importance of ideology declined, I began to feel that maybe ideology was a weapon that suited only certain hostile conditions of life. Racial realities have a strange logic of their own.
Over and beyond the waiting throngs that crowded the streets of Bandung, the Conference had a most profound influence upon the color-conscious millions in all the countries of the earth. I cite the case of an American Negro who heard the “call of race” and came to Bandung. In his personality one can catch a glimpse of the befuddled hope that racial issues set in motion.
Mr. Jones was a light brown, short, husky man who, according to American nomenclature, was “colored.” He was a mechanic in Los Angeles. He had never in his life written a line for publication, yet, when he heard that there was going to be a “big conference of all the colored nations on earth,” this obscure man became deeply affected. By hook or crook he persuaded a newspaper to give him credentials, and he took all of his life’s savings and those of his wife and set out for Bandung…. Mr. Jones was “colored,” and being “colored” still means today in America that you can feel that you are in a lower category of the human race, that your hopes for freedom, for a redemption of your marked-off status, must be deferred. True, legislation against segregation was coming to Mr. Jones’s aid, but he had become conditioned to feeling defensive about his complexion. In short, Mr. Jones felt that he belonged to a “colored” nation, that he was out of place in America…. So this brown man came thousands of miles to feel a fleeting sense of identity, of solidarity, a religious oneness with the others who shared his outcast state…. And brown Mr. Jones, watching the wily moves of tan Nehru and yellow Chou En-lai, understood absolutely nothing of what was going on about him….
Do I cite an unusual case? Then I shall submit one from the very top levels of American Negro life.
Adam Clayton Powell is a Negro Congressman from New York; he is the pastor of one of the largest Protestant churches in the United States. Though classed by American standards as a Negro, Congressman Powell is actually a white man, much whiter in terms of skin color than many whites I’ve known. Hence, at Bandung, the Congressman had to explain that he was “colored,” that his grandfather had been a branded slave.
Now, what Indonesia’s President Sukarno had called “the first international conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind” deeply affected Congressman Powell, called to something buried not too far beneath his hard, practical mind; it awakened or reawakened his sense of racial and neonational romanticism…. So Congressman Powell flew to Bandung, coming as far as the Philippines in a United States bombing plane; there he teamed up with the Philippine delegation and, while en route to Bandung, began holding press conferences to “defend the position of the United States in relation to the Negro problem.”
The Congressman gave us Americans a cleaner bill of racial health than we deserve, yet, at the same time, he stressed the colored population of the United States, putting the figure at 23,000,000, which included Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and maybe a few other races. It is to be recalled that, with the exception of Congressman Powell, no delegate or observer at Bandung raised the Negro problem in the United States—a problem which is child’s play compared to the naked racial tensions gripping Asia and Africa….
I’m not critical of Congressman Powell’s efforts, though his activities were not my style, smacking much too much of high-pressure salesmanship and public relations—two hardy, frisky arctic animals utterly unknown in the tropical latitudes of Bandung…. The astounding aspect of Congressman Powell’s appearance at Bandung was that he felt the call, felt its meaning…. At the very moment when the United States was trying to iron out the brutal kinks of its race problem, there came along a world event which reawakened in the hearts of its “23,000,000 colored citizens” the feeling of race, a feeling which the racial mores of American whites had induced deep in their hearts. If a man as sophisticated as Congressman Powell felt this, then one can safely assume that in less schooled and more naive hearts it went profoundly deep.
Just how conscious were the Asian statesmen at Bandung of the racial content of what they were organizing? I discussed this problem with none less than Nehru. That Asian statesman asked me what I thought of the reactions of the West to the Conference and I said:
“Mr. Prime Minister, the West has exploited these people for centuries and such gatherings as this evoke fear deep in their hearts. There are people who ask if this is not racism in reverse—”
“Yes,” Nehru said. “The West feels what yo
u say. But what the West feels can come about. Race feeling is in these people, and if the West keeps pressuring them, they will create racism in them.”
By sheer chance I stumbled upon a little book that gave me great insight into how the Dutch created racial conditioning in Indonesia, just what the nature of Dutch and Indonesian relations were. This booklet was designed to teach the Indonesian language to Dutch officials, housewives, or just wandering tourists, European or otherwise. The first thing that one notices is that there are no Indonesian words in this booklet for polite talk, for civil intercourse; there is not a single sentence that would enable one to inquire of the feelings of another. Whether the author knew it or not, he was writing a book to instruct an army of invaders how to demean, intimidate, and break the spirit of an enemy people in a conquered, occupied country…. All sentences were rendered in terms of flat orders, commands; an exclamation point usually followed each sentence, implying that one actually shouted one’s orders.
This booklet, entitled Bahasa Indonesia, a book of elementary Malay, was compiled by S. van der Molen (adapted for the use of English-speaking students by Harry F. Cemach). It was published by W. van Hoeve, The Hague, in 1949. For example, page 22, lesson 7, gave the following use of the Indonesian language. I cite the English equivalents of the Indonesian words which are printed in the left-hand column of each page:
Gardener, sweep the garden!
That broom is broken!
Make a new broom!
Sweep up in front first!
Washerwoman, here are the dirty clothes!
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