The people who came together at the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference represented about half the United Nations, and 1.5 billion of the world’s 2.8 billion people. As Sukarno declared in his opening speech, delivered in bursts of accented but perfect English, it was the “first intercontinental conference of colored peoples in the history of mankind!”61 Some of the countries there had recently achieved independence while others were still fighting for it. Brazil, the largest country in Latin America, attended as a friendly “observer” from outside Asia and Africa.
