The Color Curtain

The Color Curtain by Richard Wright was published in 1956, and records the events that took place during the Afro-Asian Conference, known as the Bandung Conference of April 18-25, 1955. This conference was a gathering of Asian and African countries in Bandung, Indonesia. Assembled were twenty nine leaders of the recently independent African and Asian nations whose aim was to support economic and cultural collaboration and to combat colonialism for their large and destitute populations. Race, religion, colonialism, national sovereignty, and the promotion of world peace were issues addressed at this conference. This meeting was also an important step towards the shaping of the Non-Aligned Movement. The Asian nationalist leadership of Indonesia, Ceylon, Burma, and the Philippines sponsored the Bandung Conference. The foremost figure of these nations was Ahmed Sukarno, president of Indonesia followed by other well-known figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, prime minister of India, Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt, Kwame Nkrumah, prime minister of the Gold Coast, Chou En Lai, premier of China, Congressman Adam Clayton Powell of Harlem, USA, and Ho Chi Minh, prime minister of Vietnam. Less known representatives of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Syria, Lebanon, Japan, the Philippines and others would also make contributions to this conference. "The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who had thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!" (RW pg. 438) Major debates of the conference centered on the question of whether or not Soviet procedure in eastern Europe and Central Asia should be denounced,