Twenty-Two

Wright

Paris, Accra & Bandung, 1952–1956

IN JANUARY 1955, Richard Wright was home alone in his Paris apartment. His wife, Ellen, had taken his two daughters out to allow him to focus on his latest project. He had recently returned from a trip to Spain and was working on a book about the country under Franco’s dictatorship. He began distractedly reading the newspaper when a story caught his attention. “I bent forward and read the item a second time,” he wrote. “Twenty-nine free and independent nations of Asia and Africa are meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, to discuss ‘racialism and colonialism’ . . . what is this? I scanned the list of nations involved: China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Burma, Egypt, Turkey, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Gold Coast, etc. My God! I began a rapid calculation of the populations of the nations listed and, when my total topped the billion mark, I stopped, pulled off my glasses and tried to think. . . .”

Wright got up, paced the room, and tried to organize his whirling thoughts. The potential consequences of such a meeting seemed huge; in the Cold War the nations of Africa and Asia were viewed as sites of contestation, to be protected from the ideological spread of rival influence. This conference suggested to Wright that these nations, many of them newly independent, were not going to be passive pawns in the global contest between the United States and the Soviet Union, but that they envisioned themselves as a third, independent force, some 1.5 billion strong. “This smacked of something new,” he thought, “something beyond Left and Right.”¹

The idea of the Bandung Conference resonated with Wright on a profoundly personal level. He was a black American who had grown up in a Jim Crow South that denied his very humanity; having escaped north to Chicago, he had sought solace from the terror of his childhood in the solidarity of Communism. Yet the apparent racial equality of the Communist Party concealed different kinds of restrictions on Wright’s freedom, particularly when it came to his writing. Where was he to turn? The Party seemed only to want to exploit him for their own political ends, while the United States government trumpeted the cause of freedom to the world as it persecuted and oppressed its black citizens at home. Even as his first novel, Native Son, published in 1940, made him the most celebrated and successful African American novelist in the United States, Wright suffered daily abuse and humiliation (refusals of service, whispered slurs) in supposedly liberal New York City. That his wife, Ellen, was white, seemed only to compound the hostility.

This was the reason he was living in Paris in the first place. He had left the United States for France in May 1946 on the SS Brazil, and after the old cargo ship had sailed past the Statue of Liberty, he wrote in a letter to his friend Ralph Ellison that, “[a]lready the harsh race lines of America are fading.”² He was not the first black writer to have sought solace in Paris: the Harlem Renaissance poets Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes had both lived there in the 1920s.

Arriving on the Continent, Wright and his family sailed into the port city of Le Havre past the wrecks of boats sunk during the war and then headed toward the capital. Despite the problems with the supply of heat and electricity, and the rationing of food and clothing, Wright felt liberated in Paris. For all these privations there remained the legacy of literary glamor; the Lost Generation of Fitzgerald and Hemingway might be long gone, but Gertrude Stein was still there hosting literary salons. Indeed, accompanied by two limos from the American embassy, she had met Wright on his arrival in Paris and helped him get established in the city.³

Wright had not come to Paris to hang out with expat Americans, though, and he was soon part of the Left Bank café scene. He had met Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre when they visited the United States at the end of the war, and when Sartre and Beauvoir launched Les Temps Modernes in October 1945, it included Wright’s story “Fire and Cloud.”⁴ At the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, he found allies who shared his discomfort at being trapped in the ideological vise of the Cold War. They were repulsed by American racism and saw the postwar Americanization of Europe as a threat to French culture, but they were also wary of Soviet Communism and its capacity for foreign aggression and domestic suppression. When Sartre formed the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a group that briefly championed a third way out of the bilateral conflict of the Cold War, Wright gladly joined.

Wright had not planned to settle in France, but after returning to the United States in 1947 he decided to make the move permanent. He found his homeland swept up in triumphalist “Americanism,” and he was worried by the easy way people spoke of impending war with the Soviet Union. The Red Scare was entering its stride, and the predatory HUAC was sweeping through American cultural institutions. “Russia has her cultural purges and so do we; only in Russia it is official, and with us it is the force and so-called moral power of the community,” he wrote. “But the results in the end are the same, that is, the suppression of the individual.”⁵

The country had, to his mind, taken a hard turn to the right, away from Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism toward nationalism and anti-Communist intolerance; there was no sign, he thought, that winning a war against a fascist, racist enemy had done much to change attitudes back home. In the South, returning African American GIs were being lynched, while in Chicago there was a race riot designed to prevent black veterans from returning to state housing. Walking through Manhattan, Wright overheard passersby muttering the N-word just loud enough for him to hear. Beauvoir, who stayed with the Wrights in New York at the time, could not believe what she saw and heard. Feeling strangled by the “petty humiliations, daily insults,” he returned to Paris for good.⁶

France, however, had its own problems. The political situation was unstable; the country veered from one end of the political spectrum to another as it sought to find the path to recovery from the war and reckon (or not) with its Vichy past. The conservatism of Charles de Gaulle offered one answer, the Communist Party of France another. The prestige of the nation had been badly damaged by the war, and many felt uncomfortable having to take money from the Americans, via the Marshall Plan, in order to get back on their feet. Such insecurity was one of the reasons that France was determined not to give up control of its colonies in Africa and Asia.

In the preceding month, Wright had been reading stories in the French newspapers of a growing insurrection in Algeria, led by the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN); for the preceding year, he had been reading about the defeat of the French colonial forces in their war with the Viet Minh in Indochina. Now the proposed meeting at Bandung seemed to herald a change in the world order. “The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed—in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting,” he wrote.⁷ Wright felt he was as well positioned as anyone to write about this meeting. “I’m an American Negro,” he told Ellen that day, “as such, I have had a burden of race consciousness. So have these people. I worked in my youth as a common laborer and I have a class consciousness. So have these people.” Her response was simple: “If you feel that way, you have to go.”⁸

WRIGHT CERTAINLY UNDERSTOOD what it meant to be an outsider. His childhood, evoked so vividly in his memoir Black Boy, was one scarred by suffering. He was born near Natchez, Mississippi, the grandchild of slaves on both maternal and paternal sides. His father, a sharecropper, deserted the family when Wright was six years old, and his mother, unable to feed Richard and his younger brother, put them into an orphanage for a spell. The family moved to Jackson to stay with Wright’s maternal grandmother and then out to his aunt and uncle’s in Elaine, Arkansas, until they were forced to flee when his uncle, a saloon owner, was murdered by a local white man who wanted his business. The rest of the family fled under cover of night hearing that a lynch mob was coming for them. They continued a peripatetic existence, complicated by Wright’s mother suffering a series of strokes. He was almost always hungry. He did not complete a year of formal schooling until he was twelve. Even though he was an excellent student, he had to drop out after just a few weeks of high school to earn money.

The family joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, trying to escape the terror of the Jim Crow South. Wright took what work he could find. He sat for the exams to be a postal clerk and, in the meantime, worked menial jobs, reading Dostoevsky, Proust, and Stein in the evenings. He began writing and joined an African American literary group on the South Side. With the onset of the Great Depression, Wright was sucked into radical politics. “Some mornings I found leaflets on my steps telling of China, Russia, and Germany,” he wrote in Black Boy, “on some days I witnessed as many as five thousand jobless Negroes, led by Communists, surging through the streets.”⁹ He was skeptical but curious, and he began to frequent the South Side’s Washington Park to listen to the Communist speakers. “I felt that Communists could not possibly have a sincere interest in Negroes,” he wrote. “I was cynical and I would rather have heard a white man say that he hated Negroes, which I could have readily believed, than to have heard him say that he respected Negroes, which would have made me doubt him.”¹⁰

Nevertheless, Abe Aaron, a Jewish friend from the post office and fellow aspiring writer, persuaded Wright to come to a meeting of the John Reed Club, chapters of which were established across the major cities of the United States to support left-wing writers. He took home magazines from his first meeting, read them through the night and, at dawn, in a fever of inspiration wrote “a wild, crude poem in free verse, coining images of black hands playing, working, holding bayonets, stiffening finally in death . . .”¹¹ The John Reed Club and the Communist Party made Wright feel welcome, and they encouraged him to write; for the first time in his life, he felt he belonged somewhere.

The problem Wright ran into was that he was a writer of ambition and talent. While he felt valued by the politics of Communism, when it came to literature it was not socialist realism but the modernist writing of Eliot, Joyce, and Stein that really spoke to him. Comrades questioned why he was reading “bourgeois” books and told him they would only “confuse” him.¹² At this time, he began doing research for a book about black Communists (he wanted to call it Heroes, Red and Black), but local Party officials suspected he might be spying—the paranoia and purges of the 1930s were not confined to Russia.¹³ “I dismissed the warning about the Soviet Union’s trouble with intellectuals,” he wrote. “I felt that it simply did not apply to me.”¹⁴ He was mistaken. When Harry Hayward, a senior Party official depicted as the obnoxious Buddy Nealson in Black Boy, came to Chicago to purge “Trotskyist elements,” Wright was firmly in his sights. Privately Hayward referred to Wright as a “smuggler of reaction” and a “bastard intellectual.”¹⁵

In order to display his loyalty, Wright was asked to travel to Switzerland and the Soviet Union on Party duties. He refused, saying he had writing commitments. At the next meeting, he asked to leave the Party. When, some weeks later, a group of his former comrades implored him to attend another meeting, it turned out to be the show trial of his friend David Poindexter, who was charged with acting against the Party’s interests. After three hours of attacks, Poindexter pleaded guilty. Little wonder Wright wanted to get out of Chicago and move to New York City.

Wright had published some stories and poems in Chicago newspapers and magazines. Having worked at the Illinois Writers Workshop and the Federal Theater Project, which were funded by Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, he hoped to find a similar position in New York. When that took longer than expected, he ended up working for the U.S. Communist Party’s paper, the Daily Worker. War in Spain and the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy caused him to set aside his concerns about the way the Party was being run in the United States and offer his public support. He attended the second meeting of the Communist-backed League of American Writers, at which Hemingway gave his famous anti-fascist speech. There Wright signed a declaration in support of Stalin over the Moscow Show Trials.¹⁶ Even the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which prompted an exodus from the League of American Writers, could not dissuade him: he called it a “great step toward peace.”¹⁷

After years of struggling with rejections, Wright got his big break. At the age of twenty-nine he won a competition held by the prestigious magazine Story, the first prize of which was $500 and a publishing deal with Harper & Brothers. His entry was picked ahead of 500 others and announced in February 1938. His collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, received rave reviews and praise from the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. In Britain, Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, bought the book and asked Paul Robeson to write the introduction. It was swiftly translated into Russian and received high praise from Pravda.¹⁸

His next book was even more explosive. Having earned a place in the creative program of the New York Writers’ Workshop, he was free to focus entirely on his work. Every day he took a legal pad and fountain pen to his favorite bench in Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn and wrote Native Son.¹⁹ He drew on his experience helping out at the South Side Boys Club in Chicago, where he listened to stories of boys who had got into trouble with the law, to create Bigger Thomas, the angry antihero who makes every page of the novel so compelling. Native Son was considered for publication for the Book of the Month Club, which would guarantee terrific sales, but publication would happen only if Wright agreed to tone down certain aspects of his novel. This put him in a very difficult position but, as his biographer Hazel Rowley puts it, he ultimately “gave in to white pressure.”²⁰ It was the beginning of a complicated relationship with the publishing industry, as Wright sought to balance his integrity with the demands of being a professional writer in the American midcentury. He cut explicit references to masturbation but also suppressed passages that showed the desire of Mary Dalton, a white woman, for Thomas.²¹ The changes were accepted, and the book was published by the Book of the Month Club in March 1940. The first print run of 170,000 sold out in only a few days.²²

The final breakdown of Wright’s relationship with the Communist Party came during the war. He and Ellen, a Communist Party organizer from Brooklyn, were married in 1941 and she was five months pregnant with their first daughter, Julia, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.²³ Wright thought the United States should stay out of the war, doggedly following the Party line that the British and the French were imperialists and should not be helped. Furthermore, why should black Americans fight for freedom abroad when they did not have it at home? “They are asking us to die for a freedom we never had!” Wright wrote.²⁴ He did everything he could to avoid the draft, asking contacts to intercede on his behalf, hoping he might get a position at the Office of War Information; he was understandably terrified by the prospect of serving as a private in a segregated army. The family even contemplated moving to Canada.

When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded Soviet territory, Communist policy once again turned 180 degrees overnight. No longer was this a war fought between European imperialists, it was now an existential fight with the forces of fascism in which the Soviet Union and the United States must stand shoulder to shoulder. Wright was disgusted by this cynicism. After a period in which he ceased to perform Party activities, he made a public break with the Communist Party in an article titled “I Tried to Be a Communist,” published in two installments in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944. A version of this essay, itself excerpted from Black Boy, was published, alongside essays by Gide, Koestler, and Spender, in The God That Failed in 1949.²⁵

Wright was stuck between a rock and a hard place. To the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of the USA he was now a “renegade” and a “reactionary.”²⁶ However, the publication of his memoir, Black Boy, in 1945, was clear evidence that his opposition to Soviet Communism did not mean his position on American racism was softening. The book was a visceral rendering of the horror of growing up in the Jim Crow South, and Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi made sure it was banned in his state, demanding that the ban should cover the whole country. The FBI had had him under surveillance since 1942, when a complaint about 12 Million Black Voices, a collection of photographs of African Americans drawn from the Security Farm Administration files annotated by Wright, landed on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk. He sent a memo ordering Wright’s work to be investigated. Little wonder Wright started taking French lessons.

IN PARISIAN EXILE, Wright witnessed the emergence of a whole new set of global relations. The European colonial powers that had dominated the world were on their knees and prevented from total collapse only by American loans. Even then, their empires were beginning to fray and unravel as the populations of Britain and France demanded that the rebuilding of their own countries take precedence over the need to sustain colonies. Exploiting this weakness was a new generation of highly motivated nationalist leaders pushing for independence, such as Sukarno, who declared Indonesian independence from the Netherlands in 1945; Ho Chi Minh, who declared Vietnamese independence two weeks later; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who led India to independence from Britain in 1947.

The Cold War was inextricably bound up with decolonization as it became an increasingly global conflict. In theory, both superpowers were opposed to colonialism; Lenin had famously declared imperialism to be “the highest stage of capitalism” and the Soviet Union supported independence movements around the world; under the leadership of Roosevelt, the United States, itself a nation freed from colonial rule, championed the right of nations to freedom and self-determination. But while the Soviet Union sought to encourage independence, it did so insisting that any new regime follow the Moscow line. And while the United States was opposed to colonialism, this was undercut by the racist belief that Africans and Asians were incapable of governing themselves, and that this made them vulnerable to the malign influence of Moscow. For this reason the United States supported the British in Malaya and deployed their own armed forces in the Philippines, which had gained its independence from the United States in 1946, to help suppress a Communist guerrilla uprising. As was the case in Vietnam, the Europeans were wise to this game and often presented their own struggle for colonial control as a fight to keep out Communists, even when they knew it was not true. For example, Britain falsely claimed Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya was a Communist; the French did the same with Sékou Touré of Guinea.²⁷

Furthermore, the United States’ desire for certain resources meant turning a blind eye to some of the worst colonial abuses. In an example that particularly riled Wright, the Americans entered into a close relationship with Belgium in order to secure access to uranium mined in the Belgian Congo (they also bought uranium from apartheid South Africa).²⁸ There was also the American and British involvement in the coup that replaced the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh with Shah Reza Pahlavi in oil-rich Iran in August 1953. Around the world, the United States set up military bases to protect trade routes and guard access to raw materials; the Soviet Union responded by fomenting disruption and rebellion in ways that would damage American interests.

Such neocolonial assertion was clearly perceived as a threat to those African and Asian nations caught in the Cold War crossfire, and leaders like Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Nehru, and Sukarno resolved to do something about it. The result was the “Third World” movement—a term popularized by the Martinique intellectual Frantz Fanon, adapted from the period of the French Revolution, when the clergy was defined as the First Estate, the Second Estate was the nobility, and the Third Estate the common people.²⁹ Fanon’s expression, with its connotation of revolution and power in numbers, put the First World (the United States and Western Europe) and the Second World (the Soviet Union and its allies) on notice. Leaders of nations that had shaken off colonial rule wanted full economic and political sovereignty and sought to achieve it through alliances with each other. That was why they planned to meet at Bandung.

In Paris, Wright became involved in black solidarity movements. He was invited to join the editorial board of a new magazine, Présence Africaine, which was edited by the Senegalese writer Alioune Diop. The magazine was designed to celebrate black culture, embracing the concept of négritude, which rejected European ideas of assimilation and embraced African culture and tradition. Aimé Césaire, a poet from Martinique, who helped coin the concept of négritude, was on the editorial board with Wright while Camus, Gide, and Sartre served as patrons.³⁰ While Wright viewed himself as Western, and believed in racial assimilation, he was determined to be an ally in any fight against racism and colonialism.

He was also disturbed by the way American racism was creeping into Paris. Thanks to the strength of the dollar, American tourists were flocking to Paris, and Wright heard rumors that American visitors were persuading French hotels not to rent rooms to black guests.³¹ In October 1950 he decided to fight back and form an organization called the Franco-American Fellowship to represent black Americans in Paris. He suspected he, like many other black intellectuals, was being watched, so at the first meeting of the group he encouraged members to arrive at the workers’ bistro where it was hosted in ones and twos.³² Wright was right to be suspicious: the State Department suspected the Fellowship to be a Communist Front, sending informers to infiltrate the group and report back to the embassy about what was being said and planned. U.S. Army intelligence also had an informer placed inside it (“a Negro musician from Philadelphia” who had previously informed on Paul Robeson).³³ After running the Franco-American Fellowship for just over a year, Wright resigned, and it fell apart (by then he knew that some members were informing).

The situation for black leftists was worsening in the United States as the authorities cracked down on critics of U.S. race policies, claiming these played into the hands of Soviet propaganda. Wright’s onetime friend and colleague Ben Davis was jailed under the Smith Act, W. E. B. DuBois was arrested because of his association with the World Peace Council, and Paul Robeson had his passport revoked. The spread of American power brought the agents of the Red Scare to Wright’s Parisian doorstep; David Schine, who worked for Senator Joseph McCarthy, came to Paris to question Wright about his past. (Wright’s books were among those that Roy Cohn and Schine were having removed from the libraries of the United States Information Service.) When Wright refused to play ball, Schine told the writer that he and Cohn had recently summoned Langston Hughes to appear before HUAC. The threat was clear.

While he had broken with the Communist Party, he was disgusted with the witch hunt of those on the left. (“There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than there is in the entire United States of America,” he wrote.)³⁴ Having become more interested in ideas of black political solidarity, Wright decided to see what that looked like on the ground. While on a self-imposed writing retreat in London, not far from Greenwich Park (he was working on his existential novel, The Outsider), Wright frequently visited with George Padmore, the Trinidadian novelist and influential figure in anti-colonial liberation movements. Padmore was a confidant of Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister of Gold Coast (present-day Ghana) who was seeking to secure independence from Britain; Padmore encouraged Wright to go and see his friend in action. Wright, who had briefly met Nkrumah in New York years before, had long desired to visit Africa and this seemed the perfect opportunity.

In June 1953 Wright sailed from Liverpool to Takoradi before taking a bus into Accra. Looking out the window at the people, the landscape, and the climate left him disoriented. “There was nothing here that I could predict, anticipate or rely upon,” he wrote.³⁵ While he spent time with Nkrumah as he campaigned for support of a white paper on constitutional reform that was perceived as the final step before a declaration of independence, the leader was totally consumed by his efforts to unite the disparate elements of the country and remained enigmatic to Wright’s eyes. He had been given a $3,000 advance to write a book about his experience in Gold Coast—what became Black Power—but he struggled for material, felt depressed, and began to seek an early passage home.³⁶

Despite his personal travails, Wright was aware that he was witness to a defining moment in history. On July 10, having published his white paper, Nkrumah delivered his call for independence in a rousing speech that became popularly known as the “Motion of Destiny.” In it, Nkrumah made clear that there was more than just the future of an independent Ghana at stake. “The eyes and ears of the world are upon you,” he told the assembled parliament in Accra, “yea, our oppressed brothers throughout this vast continent of Africa and the New World are looking to you with desperate hope, as an inspiration to continue their grim fight against cruelties which we in this corner of Africa have never known—cruelties which are a disgrace to humanity, and to the civilization which the white man has set himself to teach us.”³⁷ Wright congratulated Nkrumah personally and then wrote to Padmore to tell him about the “moving and eloquent words he had just heard.”³⁸

By the time he left Gold Coast, Wright was less enthused. He had not found the solidarity he expected and was taken aback by how easily he was identified as an outsider. “I was black and they were black but my blackness did not help me,” he wrote. Tribal ritual and religious mysticism left him cold: he was rational, secular, and, as he noted, “western to the bone.”³⁹ This led him to some dubious generalizations about the people he met; he told Nkrumah there was a “kind of sodden vagueness” in the “African mentality” and concluded that the only way he would succeed in ruling the country after independence was through “militarism.”⁴⁰

What he did not disclose in Black Power was how deeply skeptical he was of Nkrumah himself. Wright’s enthusiasm for black solidarity was certainly genuine, as was his fervent opposition to colonialism, but he was also haunted by the familiar specter of Communism. He believed one of the reasons that Nkrumah had kept his distance from him is that he feared that Wright would be able to identify the Communist methods he was using to organize his party.⁴¹ So strongly did he feel that, he took the extraordinary step of volunteering a four-page memorandum to the American consulate. Wright told them that while he did not believe there was any “direct relation” between Nkrumah’s party and any foreign Communist organization, “it is a Communist minded political party, borrowing Marxist concepts and applying them with a great deal of flexibility to local African social and economic conditions.”⁴² He pointed out that Nkrumah slept with a portrait of Lenin in his bedroom—not an encouraging sign to those who feared he might be privately sympathetic to Moscow.

The difficulty of disentangling decolonization from the Cold War that Wright confronted in the Gold Coast was one of the reasons Bandung excited him so much: could such a power bloc help these newly independent nations navigate a third way? If an Iron Curtain had fallen across Europe, could the prospect of a “color curtain” dividing Africa and Asia from the rest of the world reshape the balance of power? His experience with Nkrumah left him with more questions than ever. He hoped to find some answers in Indonesia.

WRIGHT’S JOURNEY TO BANDUNG was a fitting prelude to the conference, a whirlwind tour of North Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. He flew from Madrid to Rome, and from there, as they crossed the Mediterranean, he saw the “far flung lake of shimmering lights” of Cairo. In Egypt the plane picked up its first load of delegates, “red-fezzed North Africans from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia.”⁴³ As the plane headed east to Baghdad, Wright was shown pictures of emaciated Palestinian refugees and was told their plight would be brought up at the conference. Wright struck up a conversation with an Indonesian student returning from his time at the University of Leiden. “You an American?” the student asked. “Yes.” “Negro?” “Yes.” The student relaxed. “I was to get to know that reaction very well,” Wright wrote.⁴⁴ As a victim of racism, he was on the inside at Bandung.

In Karachi, Sikhs boarded—“they had bushy black beards, Oxford accents and they sat together in a knot”—and in Calcutta, Hindus—“they wore Western clothes and seemed urbanized.”⁴⁵ He took a sleeping pill and awoke to Japanese and American reporters boarding the plane in Bangkok. “High over the jungles of Malaya and political discussions raged,” Wright wrote.⁴⁶ As people shouted to make themselves heard over the noise of the engines, those discussions kept coming back to the same subject: what role China was going to play at the conference.

The decision to invite Communist China had prompted much skepticism in the West about whether this was a genuinely neutral meeting in the context of the Cold War. Nehru, who was understood to be the driving force behind the conference, had visited China as a guest of Mao the previous November, and that Chinese Premier Zhou En-lai was now coming to Bandung appeared to be evidence of Communist conspiracy, even though the Indian leader was not a Communist himself. “A group of American newspapermen had made a list of all the delegates going to Bandung and had checked them all off according to their political leanings and had come to the conclusion that the West would emerge victorious from its clash with China’s evil genius Chou En-lai [sic],” Wright wrote. “I was baffled. Were we going to a football game?”⁴⁷ Wright believed the approach of Western governments and the Western press betrayed their fear of what was happening. Claims that the conference, by excluding white nations, was itself racist showed how defensive the Europeans and the Americans were. “There’s gonna be a hot time in old Bandung,” Wright thought.⁴⁸

The fear that the Cold War was also about to turn hot was real. In the American press, stories circulated that the Chinese were preparing an operation to launch an attack to take the islands of Quemoy (Kinmen) and Matsu in the Taiwanese Strait, an act of aggression against U.S.-supported Taiwan (then still known as Formosa). In the American press, there was bullish talk of the use of nuclear weapons. It was precisely this kind of aggressive posturing on the part of the United States, Wright believed, that brought about Bandung in the first place. Ever since the onset of the Cold War, the United States had “launched a campaign, the intensity of which it did not appreciate, to frighten the men of the Kremlin, and month after month that campaign kept up, flooding the world on all levels of communication. And it was successful, too successful; it not only scared and deterred Russian Communists but it also frightened the living daylights out of the human race. It was a campaign so fierce, so deadly, so unrelenting that it created precisely what it sought to defeat, that is, an organization of Asia and Africa around a Communist cell on a global scale: BANDUNG.”⁴⁹ The gathering in Indonesia prompted anxiety in the Imperial West, for whom, Wright argued, “the conference loomed like a long-buried ghost rising from a muddy grave.”⁵⁰

On landing in Jakarta on April 12, Wright found the airport decorated with the flags of the twenty-nine participating nations. Just as in the Gold Coast, the climate took him by surprise. “The heat was like a Turkish bath; the humidity was higher than in the African jungle,” he wrote. Jakarta was like Accra, he found: hectic, squalid, and overwhelming. There was everywhere a “naked and immediate” preoccupation with making money, although few people seemed to actually have any. The marks of colonialism and poverty were evident: he saw a man squatting over the edge of one of the Dutch-built canals “defecating in broad daylight into the canal’s muddy, swirling water; I saw another, then another”; farther down he saw women washing their clothes, children bathing, and one child brushing their teeth, all in the same water.⁵¹

Mochtar Lubis, an Indonesian novelist, provided the new arrival with a tour of the city. Wright gave talks to writers’ groups, the local chapter of PEN, and met members of the local elite but found himself in disagreement with them over the future of the country.⁵² He argued that they needed to industrialize to free themselves from their dependency on the West; they claimed that this was too Western a perspective and that they needed to focus more on preserving their own values. Wright the secular materialist found this attitude frustrating. Just as in the Gold Coast, his verdict was harsher in his journal. “The Negro problem is as nothing compared to this boiling cauldron of racial hatred,” he wrote.⁵³

They set off for Bandung and the conference itself. “My friend Lubis was behind the wheel of the car,” Wright wrote, “and the temperature dropped as we climbed into the mountains where the volcanic craters could be seen crowned by haloes of white, fluffy clouds.”⁵⁴ They rolled into the city, which was decorated with “a forest of banners proclaiming Asian and African solidarity.”⁵⁵ There were high-security measures at the conference, with guards armed with machine guns and grenades lining the streets and checkpoints set up at regular intervals. Crowds were already gathered in the street, and wherever Wright went he was badgered for an autograph.

On April 18 the conference began. “I’d no sooner climbed into the press gallery and looked down upon the vast assembly of delegates, many of them clad in their exotic national costumes, than I could sense an important juncture of history in the making.”⁵⁶ Wright took diligent notes as the luminaries of the emergent Third World movement took their turns at the podium: Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, U Nu (Burma), John Kotelawala (Sri Lanka), Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Pakistan), and Sukarno and Ali Sastroamidjojo (Indonesia). What struck Wright was the emotional intensity with which almost all of these speakers addressed the damage of colonialism, even those leaders who were notionally sympathetic to the West.

In his opening address, Sukarno argued that this experience of colonialism gave the assembled countries a moral authority. The perspective of the two superpowers was distorted by their conflict with each other, and so it was up to those who had been exploited and ignored to take responsibility for the “well-being of mankind.”⁵⁷ Above all, this meant avoiding atomic war, and as a result denuclearization was one of the key themes of the conference. But nonalignment itself was deemed essential to securing peace. Nehru, in a closed session, said, “If all the world were to be divided up between these two big blocs, what would be the result? The inevitable result would be war. Therefore, every step that takes place in reducing that area in the world which may be called the ‘unaligned area’ is a dangerous step and leads to war.”⁵⁸

There were some specific areas of agreement: the meeting called on France to recognize the right to independence of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, on South Africa to end its policy of apartheid, and on the United Nations to implement its resolutions on Palestine. Otherwise, the final communiqué, with its ten basic principles, stressed more general economic and cultural cooperation, as well as respect for human rights, opposition to racism, and nonintervention in the affairs of other countries.

After the conference ended, Wright spent an hour in a private meeting with Nehru, who expressed his frustration as to why the United States had been so afraid that Communists would infiltrate the conference. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, a future ruler of India, asked Wright why the Americans did not realize that attacking her father might well end up bringing about the very thing they feared. “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?” she said.⁵⁹

But Wright believed the Communist threat to be real, just that it was not as immediate as the American State Department and media made out. “Russia had no defenders at Bandung,” he wrote. China, however, was another matter. In Zhou En-lai he saw someone playing his cards close to his chest. The premier did not seek to gain support from the other delegates in China’s conflict with the United States over Taiwan, and he did not make the ideological case for Maoism. “He knew that the time for that was not ripe,” Wright wrote, “that the distance that separated Red China from the religious nations of Asia and Africa was great indeed.”⁶⁰ Zhou instead positioned China as a country that had suffered at the hands of colonial powers and that saw the value of future Third World solidarity.

His suspicions about Zhou’s true motivations, however, could not detract from the historic nature of the conference for Wright.⁶¹ In The Color Curtain, the book he wrote about Bandung, he reached for hyperbolic language when trying to communicate the importance of what he had seen:

Bandung was no simple exercise in Left and Right politics; it was no mere minor episode in the Cold War; it was no Communist Front meeting. The seizure of power was not on the agenda; Bandung was not concerned with how to take power. ALL THE MEN THERE REPRESENTED GOVERNMENTS THAT HAD ALREADY SEIZED POWER AND THEY DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH IT. Bandung was a decisive moment in the consciousness of 65 percent of the human race, and that moment meant: HOW SHALL THE HUMAN RACE BE ORGANIZED? The decisions or lack of them flowing from Bandung will condition the totality of human life on earth.⁶²

In terms of the way forward, Wright was more candid in his journal than he was in The Color Curtain. He privately dismissed the way some nativist speakers stressed the need to revive religious practices and traditions as “pathetic exultations of past and dead cultures.”⁶³ In The Color Curtain, he phrased this more diplomatically, insisting that the only way forward for these nations was to adopt the “rational and secular” approach of the Western-educated elite. For that to happen, the West must also “meet the challenge of the miraculous unity of Bandung openly and selflessly.” Otherwise, Wright warned, the people of Africa and Asia might see their only passage to freedom being lit by the Communist lamp of Zhou En-Lai.⁶⁴

THE BANDUNG CONFERENCE took place at a felicitous moment for the Third World movement. India was independent, Ghana was soon to follow, and in Indochina, Ho Chi-Minh’s forces had defeated the French. Algeria was in revolt. As historian Odd Arne Westad puts it, the conference “caught the moment of greatest hope and expectation in the anti-colonial struggle.”⁶⁵ The following year, Nasser and Nehru broadened the scope of their movement by meeting with Yugoslav leader Tito on an island in the Adriatic (Yugoslavia was Communist but had broken with Moscow). In 1961, Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, and Yugoslavia met in Belgrade to form the Non-Aligned Movement.⁶⁶

If Nehru’s goal at Bandung was to prevent the world being divided into two power blocs by the United States and the Soviet Union, it enjoyed a measure of success and, while its leadership changed, the Non-Aligned Movement remained influential until, decades later, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan fractured relationships beyond repair. Long before then, the pan-Asian solidarity of Bandung disintegrated as India fought border wars with both China (in the Himalayas) and Pakistan (in Kashmir) in the early sixties. Ultimately, the movement could not prevent the Cold War coming to Africa and Asia, as it did to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Congo, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, to name but a few.⁶⁷

There were also systemic problems that the conference had avoided confronting. For all the talk of economic cooperation, in reality it was almost impossible for Third World nations to compete in a global system that was designed to benefit the West.⁶⁸ When these countries hit what became known as the “development barrier,” some leaders turned to authoritarian methods as means to accelerate reform but also to shore up their own power. Heroes of independence, like Nkrumah and Sukarno, started to look more and more like dictators as their policies took an autocratic turn. At Bandung the issue of political rights and democracy went unspoken, largely because Nehru placed a priority on achieving solidarity ahead of raising issues that could alienate those leaders whose political legitimacy was, by democratic standards, questionable. It was, Westad argues, “a move that would return to haunt the non-aligned movement throughout its existence.”⁶⁹

For Wright, back in Paris, any optimism he had felt in Indonesia soon soured. Being opposed to both sides in the Cold War came at a cost, and he felt more of an outsider than ever. In 1956 he found himself opposing both the Franco-British-Israeli invasion of Suez and the Soviet invasion of Hungary at the same time, refusing to sign petitions condemning the latter unless signatories also condemned the former. The atmosphere in Paris, with the Algerian War raging, was becoming increasingly tense. With the city a hub for Communist-sympathizing intellectuals, anti-colonial activists, and African American exiles, informers and spies were everywhere. One of the hubs of expat intellectual life in the city was The Paris Review, a magazine that was, as William Styron explained in an editorial in the first issue, supposed to be a haven for “non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders.”⁷⁰ Yet one of the founders of the magazine, Peter Matthiessen, was in fact a CIA agent using The Paris Review as cover. The magazine was partially funded by some of the same CIA fronts as the CCF.⁷¹ Nothing was as it seemed, and Wright felt nobody could be trusted. Personal suspicions and political tensions opened fissures in the black expat community. In Island of Hallucination, a novel Wright wrote in the years after Bandung (and which remains unpublished), the protagonist says of Paris: “Goddam! This town crawls with serpents.”⁷²

Increasingly, the rattles of those serpents were audible. Publicly, his critics accused him of having “poisoned the mind of Europe” on the United States because of the way he spoke about American racism, and covertly, the intelligence agencies were keeping a close eye on him. According to his biographer, Addison Gayle, the surveillance of Wright amounted to “a pattern of harassment” on the part of U.S. intelligence agencies that at times resembled “a personal vendetta,” and it left him stressed and paranoid.⁷³ His FBI file was novel-length, having begun in 1935 and tracking his associations with the Communist Party until 1942.⁷⁴ Since Wright had moved to France, the Bureau believed him to be serving Communist interests through his work, even if he had broken with them publicly; the Franco-American Fellowship aroused particular concerns. Sources and informants accused him of being a secret Communist, and he was listed as a “possible subversive among US personnel in France.”⁷⁵ According to his FBI file, Wright was also spied on by Navy intelligence, the U.S. Information Service, and the Foreign Liaison service.

The story became even more complicated after Bandung, however. On his return he learned that his colleagues on Présence Africaine were planning a follow-up conference to be held in Paris in September (Les Congrès des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs), to feature prominent black leaders and intellectuals from around the world. Wright was on the executive committee and given responsibility for helping shape the American delegation. He was concerned, however, that the Communists were looking to infiltrate and dominate the conference, and he went to the American Embassy to raise the issue. In a report sent back to the State Department in Washington, the embassy said Wright had warned them that “there was a distinct danger that the Communists might exploit the Congress to their own ends.”⁷⁶ Wright asked for assistance in ensuring African American delegates who were less sympathetic to Moscow, such as Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and Langston Hughes, were invited ahead of Soviet apologists, who would be denied visas. It was the first of several visits to the embassy about the conference. He also called on the help of Michael Josselson, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to support his position. What was Wright’s motivation? Undoubtedly, he genuinely disliked the idea of Communist infiltration of a cause he valued highly, but with the potential withdrawal of his passport held over him, self-preservation was another possible impetus. How successful Wright’s intervention was is hard to judge; none of the three writers he suggested attended and the two African American delegates who were denied visas—W. E. B. DuBois and Paul Robeson—had long been on the State Department’s radar.

At the conference itself, hosted at the Sorbonne’s Amphitheatre Descartes, Wright was torn between the American and African delegations, feeling allegiances to both (this manifested in the delegates debating whether Black Boy was fundamentally an American or African memoir). It had started well enough, with Diop, in his opening remarks, reminding the delegates that they were meeting in solidarity, and that the conference was a kind of second Bandung. James Baldwin, who was in attendance and would write up his experiences for Encounter, recalled that while Diop’s speech was roundly applauded, the “atmosphere was strange.” “Everyone was tense with the question of which direction the conference would take,” Baldwin wrote. “Hanging in the air . . . were the great specters of America and Russia, of the battle going on between them for the domination of the world.”⁷⁷

Wright, sitting at the top table, was disconcerted when a speech by DuBois was read out in the opening session, in which he stated that the United States had blocked him from being there “because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with Communist States like the Soviet Union.”⁷⁸ To make matters worse, DuBois went on to say that “any Negro-American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe.”⁷⁹ The French audience cheered; the American delegates, Wright, included, felt outflanked.⁸⁰ In his own speech, Wright reiterated his secular, Western values, alienating those delegates that championed black nationalism and négritude. He even made the argument that colonialism had had the beneficial effect of destroying old myths and traditions. It was not a popular opinion; Baldwin called it a “tactless way of expressing a debatable idea.”⁸¹

After the conference, to Wright’s horror, the American novelist Kay Boyle wrote to him to tell him that a rumor was going around that he was working with the State Department or the FBI in order to be able to keep his passport.⁸² That someone from the embassy was clearly talking about him only deepened Wright’s paranoia; he was sure that American intelligence was trying to smear him. When Time magazine attributed a quotation to him in which he claimed that “the Negro problem in the United States has not changed in 300 years,” he believed that the CIA had planted it to undermine him.⁸³

By then, though, it was too late: the CIA had undermined him—but in a manner he had not anticipated. Somehow, six years before it became public, Wright discovered that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was being funded by the CIA.⁸⁴ Not only had the magazines belonging to the CCF, including Encounter, Preuves, and Cuadernos, published excerpts from Black Power and The Color Curtain but, worst of all, the CCF had paid his passage to Bandung, including $500 for expenses.⁸⁵ It is not clear whether Wright also knew that another organization with which he was involved, the American Society for African Culture, and through which he had sought stronger connections with French-speaking black nationalists, was also a CIA front.⁸⁶ Wright had been used, and it was not hard to figure out why. As James Baldwin put it when he discovered who was behind the CCF years later, “I’d have been a fool to think they were subsidizing me—they were not doing that; they were proving to themselves how liberal they were.”⁸⁷

Wright had suspected the CCF were associated in some way with the State Department and had sought assurances of his authorial independence before traveling to Indonesia, but the involvement of the CIA was a different order of complicity. It was a devastating revelation.⁸⁸ When Richard Crossman, the British politician, asked if he wanted to write something for the forthcoming ten-year anniversary reissue of The God That Failed, Wright responded furiously, claiming that with what he now knew, he could see it for the Cold War propaganda it was.⁸⁹ Wright could not win; as the CIA sought to exploit his status for their cultural propaganda, the FBI was intensifying its surveillance of him and other influential black figures. In 1956, the year after Bandung, Hoover launched COINTELPRO, a covert program targeting American political organizations that were seen as counter to the government interest. Given Hoover’s racism, civil rights and black nationalist parties were high on that list. Martin Luther King Jr., who visited Wright in Paris, was a particular target.

THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED the Bandung Conference were not happy ones for Wright, as he suffered a number of professional and personal setbacks. In June 1959, he fell ill with amoebic dysentery and was treated with bismuth, which was legal at the time but later banned because of the disastrous side effects of heavy metal poisoning. As his condition got worse, Wright got increasingly paranoid and warned friends of plots against him.⁹⁰ He claimed to have received a letter from Sartre attacking him, only to later explain that the letter—never found—was a forgery.⁹¹ On November 26, 1960, he was admitted to the Eugene Gibez clinic in Paris. Two days later, he was found dead. The doctor recorded the cause as a heart attack. He was fifty-two.

Wright’s premature death immediately became the subject of conjecture. Who was the mystery woman who had apparently visited him the day of his death? Why was Wright convinced the FBI and CIA, along with French intelligence, were out to get him? Some, like his friend the political cartoonist Ollie Harrington, were convinced he was murdered.⁹² Wright’s daughter, Julia, felt the CIA had deliberately sought to isolate him “in order to make him more vulnerable.”⁹³ Other friends pointed the finger at his Russian doctor, Vladimir Schwarzmann, for prescribing too many drugs (in addition to bismuth: emetine, penicillin, sulpha, tranquilizers, and small doses of arsenic).⁹⁴ Wright’s body was cremated without an autopsy, however, so there was no proof that he had been poisoned, nor has any documentary evidence emerged to prove that he was killed by any agency. His death became another insoluble mystery in the intrigue of the Cold War.