Introduction
The idea of decolonization that animated the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference continues to power imaginations of an alternative to the world Bandung inhabited. In this essay, we look upon Africa from Bandung, and simultaneously from Africa to Bandung, to recover an “otherwise”—a seeing of the future from Africa’s pasts. In the future envisioned in Bandung and beyond, flag independence was regarded as the first stop in the project of decolonization.Footnote 1 The conference was to provide both “guidance to mankind … [on] the way which it must take to attain safety and peace” and “evidence that Asia and Africa have been reborn, nay, that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born!”Footnote 2 As critical accounts have noted, the alternative “otherwise” Bandung offered was far from singular; it was multivocal and divergent, and this diversity is integral to the multiple readings and memories of Bandung.Footnote 3 This multivocality made Bandung a successful performance of different visions of the world, including those of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Yet, Bandung was far from an ecumenical platform that offered little more than a cacophony of diverse voices and visions. The remedies may have been varied but the diagnoses of the malaise were unanimous—cultural imperialism and the racialism (i.e., racial and religious subordination) that instantiated and sustained it. Bandung was an opportunity to reimagine a world beyond imperial hierarchies. In what follows, we scrutinize Bandung’s legacy through the lens of Africa’s pasts. We note that for all the decolonial ethos that powered Bandung, its insistence on colonial legal forms inadvertently sustained rather than overturned imperial forms of subordination. We then offer an alternative mode of reimagining the world by drawing on recent recoveries of international legal histories of Africa prior to European colonization.
Bandung and Decolonization
From our viewpoint, which attends especially to how Bandung imaginaries have been cultivated by African states, we are interested in how much the economic, cultural, and political present of Africa bears out the Bandungian attempts at prefiguration. If the goal of Bandung was to recreate the world away from the imperialist vision, our task compels us to take a critical eye to contemporary Africa, to examine how far removed the present is from the colonial logics that organized imperialism. It is worth emphasizing that even at Bandung, there was robust articulation of the iterative character of colonial logics, of its ability to put on a “modern dress” that sought to obscure the brutality of “bare-knuckle”Footnote 4 colonialism.Footnote 5 Accordingly, when we look out for how well the vision of decolonization has been secured, we are interested not merely in the breadth of formal decolonization, but in whether colonialism in its many iterative manifestations has been sufficiently pre-empted. Our assessment in this regard offers bleak results.
African states continue to be subordinated, including by states elsewhere in the Global South, and, as in the situation of Congo, including by other African states. Instead of the vision of a new equitable relational order that Bandung proffered, the contemporary status quo mirrors familiar oppressive hegemonic dynamics from the colonial era, with room for formerly excluded states to take on oppressive roles in their own limited spheres of influence—thus further entrenching the top-down dynamic that Bandung seemed to forswear. Former imperial metropoles have continued to secure for themselves the top spot in the hierarchy, but they now make collaborators of the formerly colonized. Empire as understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has given way to a more fluid, but no less insidious, regime of what B.S. Chimni has described as a “Transnational Capitalist Class”Footnote 6 that ensures the localized enforcement of global hierarchies. Local elites continue to hold up European notions of civilization as an indicia of progressive culture. In the sphere of political liberation, many scholars have drawn attention to how the template provided by colonial power remains in effect, guiding even the Third World states in their relationship with their own citizens.Footnote 7 Indeed, in too many former colonies, post-colonial contestations not infrequently invert rather than dismantle colonial-era hierarchies, making “yesterday’s subjugated today’s dominant.”Footnote 8
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to see how the Bandungian vision was vulnerable to continued coloniality. For a movement that set colonialism and imperialism as its antithesis, it welded its vision a little too tightly to the incidents of colonialism. For example, it referred to states rather than peoples, such that the vision of self-determination it provided imagined that colonized peoples would self-determine under the auspices of the colonial form of a state. And if the colonial state was the form, then peoples of varying cultures, especially in the African context, would have to turn to colonial culture to find unifying threads. The colonial form of the state, and the preferential treatment it receives under international law, also preserves the economic impulses of empire.Footnote 9 As with the colonial state, many African states continue to follow an extractivist economic model, relentlessly mining their territories for global markets often at a devastating cost to Indigenous communities, communities that were constituted as part of the nation state only as a result of colonial processes. “Empire,” as Partha Chatterjee reminds us, “is immanent in the modern nation.”Footnote 10
Clearly, the project of imagining otherwise requires more than formal decolonization, a realization that leads to a yearning for renewed inspiration. Africa’s past may offer up some yields in this quest. If taking stock of the relations of power that European imperialism set in motion and envisioning alternative worlds was the task of Bandung, accounting for what preceded European imperialism was indispensable to its project of present and future worldmaking. Decolonization, if it was to birth the radical transformation it promised, demanded that its promoters train their eyes toward both past and future. The communiqué published by the twenty-nine state delegations at the conclusion of the conference (Final Communiqué) reflects this sensibility when it calls attention to the suppression of cultures and cultural civilizations in Asia and Africa.Footnote 11
Bandung and African International Legal History
The Final Communiqué makes clear that its evocation of the past does not seek to counter one civilizational hegemony with another.Footnote 12 But even with its emphasis on developing suppressed cultures “in the larger context of world co-operation,” the communiqué reflects what Ali Mazrui identifies as a yearning for a “romantic gloriana.”Footnote 13 This tendency to reach for indicators of complex civilization from Africa’s history before European colonization, and hold the same out as evidence against the colonial claim of inferiority, was consistent with the dominant historiography of international law in Africa at the time.Footnote 14 Such historiography sought to make space for Africa in the making of international law. By asserting that African polities possessed key international legal features such as statehood, these histories sought to universalize international law, providing it with a history that was not wholly European, and certainly not Westphalian.
Critics point to the ways the universalist framework paradoxically undermined the decolonial project that inspired that wave of historiography. With time, that approach to historiography would come to be conceived as “contributionist,”Footnote 15 in the sense that it aspired to universalize international law more than it sought to contest its premises.Footnote 16 Another strand of critique charges these historiographies with mythologizing, and perhaps fictionalizing, Africa’s pasts, arguing that the idea of the “pre-colonial” at once falsely advanced an idea of a homogenous Africa while downplaying internal forms of empire.Footnote 17
But whatever may be the merits or otherwise of such skepticism around this historiographical venture, the pre-colonial past did not cease to be salient. Rather, actors with sometimes widely divergent projects—projects of legitimating the current order and projects of imagining an otherwiseFootnote 18 —have employed African history to enhance their claims. In the latter strand, for example, Mariana Dias Paes has carefully traced Africans participation in the making of alternative legal regimes, challenging assertions of the legitimacy of slavery and of slave trade historically.Footnote 19 Arguments of this sort deploy extensive historiographical evidence of slavery’s illegality in Africa and under “African international law” at the time of the transatlantic slave trade to counteract invocations of the intertemporal doctrine which attempt to bar claims to reparations or any other form of restitution.Footnote 20 The most recent Summit of the African Union centered reparatory justice in its agenda, a move that itself relies on history and historiographies to power legal and policy arguments in the search for justice.
The possibilities generated by critical imaginings of pre-colonial Africa abound. Scholars have challenged the hegemony of sovereignty as a way of organizing the world, and relativized/conceptualized our relationship with “the other.”Footnote 21 They have opened up radical notions of human dignity and human beingness, an ubuntu that is unmoored from the tragic disappointments of contemporary human rights.Footnote 22 They have put forth chronicles of alternative interrelations of gender and governanceFootnote 23 and of environmental regimes.Footnote 24 They have unearthed old networks and trade regimes that offer alternate visions for the global economy.Footnote 25 We may yet discover diplomatic regimes in transoceanic and inland exchanges that offer viable alternatives to contemporary modes of exchanges,Footnote 26 or modes of relationship with things and beings that offer alternatives to ownership, property, environmental conservatism and sustainable development.Footnote 27 These chronicles evidence that alternatives to the modernity of European colonialism can not only exist but have already existed.
Scholars continue the work of recovering these histories with much urgency and with attention to the hard-learned lessons drawn as much from the critique of contributionism as from the paralysis nearly induced by the critical posture.Footnote 28 Notably, in July 2024, scholars writing from and of Africa gathered in Arusha, Tanzania to work with and within pre-colonial African International Legal History. The scholarship produced from this gathering, including some of the chronicles described above,Footnote 29 demonstrates what is possible when we indulge scholarly inquiry rather than discipline by tethering it to assumptions about what is knowable, or the types of norms that have a place in modernity.
Bandung and Universalism
One question to be posed of such an inquiry is whether its offering of the past is of Africa, or of international law (bracketing questions regarding the nature of law, international, and even of Africa.) Another way to pose this question is whether the history is that of law, and more specifically of international law, or whether it is instead the history of a place, and for that matter, a place that remains marginal to the exercise of global power. This is, of course, an age-long question often posed of attempts to generate theory from the global south, and from Africa in particular.Footnote 30 The stakes of the answer to such a question are no doubt high. One might worry that a reading of Africa’s pasts as uniquely African might undermine a universalist project even as it may successfully provincialize Europe.
Yet, a commitment to universalism in the Bandungian/decolonial sense did not inexorably require an embrace of the premises of contemporary international law, especially in the field’s particular and continued centering of statehood and sovereignty. Our decolonial commitment is polyvalent, simultaneously African and universal in its rendering of the world through Africa’s lenses. Although the project of recovery is premised on the search for an “other” world, it nonetheless makes it a point to depart, radically, from the “othering” that is foundational to the Eurocentric origins of contemporary international law.Footnote 31
Of course, to be truly decolonial, the turn to history must be attuned to distribution—the distribution of voice, power, and opportunity. It must unlock the space to imagine alternatives to world organization and global governance. Bandung’s significance lies in its attempt to universalize international law by shifting the imagination of the world from a Westphalian one to a Bandungian one.Footnote 32 But the possibilities constituted by Bandung’s insistence on sovereignty (regardless of the injustices perpetuated in the name of sovereignty) did not herald a seismic shift in world organization. A critical turn to Africa’s pasts can offer such an alternate imagination.
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