The Awakening of the Afro-Asian Nations

T BELIEVE that a lot of people who cannot sleep spend their time on the lrather fruitless occupation of coullting sheep going through a gap in a waSl. I find in those circumstarlces I pass my time trying to count the international conferences which I have had to cover as a newspaper man ever since the Paris Peace Conterence in 1919, and the more I think about those conferences the more convir3ced I am that the most important of them all was the Afro-Asian Conference in 13andung in Indonesia in April, 1955. At that time the Western Governments awaited that conference with a good deal of disqliiet. It had no prepared agenda, no proper secretariat, almost all the Governments represented there had achieved their independence only since the War. In fact, in the words of President Soekarno of Indonesia, who opened the conference: " This is the first inte.r-continental conference of coloured peoples in the history of mankind." It was therefore probable either that the Conference would end in chaos, which would be very damaging to these new countries in Asia and Africa that were trying to m;ke democracy work, or else that it would do nothing but pass angry resolutions about Colonialism. The second alternative was all the more probable because Communist China was represented at that Bandung Conferenee and no great anti-Commuriist Western power was. India was there, but India was studiously neutral.