In October 1958, over two hundred writers from Asia and the emerging African nations descended

onto Tashkent, the capital of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan. Among the participants was W. E.
B. Du Bois, who at age 90 had just flown in from Moscow (where he persuaded Nikita Khrushchev
to found an Institute for the Study of Africa). Alongside leading Soviet writers and cultural
bureaucrats,  some of the major figures of the 1930s literary left outside of Europe or the Americas
were in attendance: the Turkish modernist poet Nazim Hikmet and his Pakistani counterpart Faiz
Ahmad Faiz, the Chinese novelist Mao Dun and Mulk Raj Anand. Though poorly known at the time,
some of the younger delegates at that meeting would go on to become the leading literary figures of
their countries: the Senegalese novelist-cum-filmmaker Sembene Ousmane, the Indonesian writer
Pramoedya Toer, the poet and founder of Angola’s Communist Party Mario Pinto de Andrade, and
the Mozambican poet and FRELIMO politician Marcelino dos Santos. By all accounts, Tashkent
impressed visitors with its mixture of Western modernity and familiar “eastern-ness,”—an effect
carefully curated by the Soviet hosts who sought to make it a showcase city for Third-World
delegations.
The gathering that brought all these writers together—the inaugural congress of what would later
become known as the Afro-Asian Writers Association—represented the literary front of the Soviet
Union’s return to the colonial question after a two-decade-long lapse. The Stalinist state’s
geopolitical zigzags and the rumors, confirmed in Khrushchev’s 1956 Secret Speech, of oppressive
practices at home had considerably dimmed the flame of the Russian Revolution by the mid-1950s.
African and Asian intellectuals’ doubts over the Soviet state’s emancipatory promises were now
partly made up by the resources of a world super-power, which interwar Soviet anti-imperialism had
lacked. These resources exercised a powerful, if ambiguous, effect on black political life worldwide,
resulting, on the one hand, in devastating proxy wars in Angola and Mozambique and, on the other,
fueling emancipatory struggles against apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crowe in the US. 1
This article will be particularly interested in the cultural consequences of the Soviet engagement with
the postcolonial world, namely, in its effect on African letters. As a heir to the literature-centrism of
the revolutionary Russian intelligentsia of the late nineteenth century, the Soviet state, down to its
very bureaucracy, believed in the capacity of literature to transform society and invested heavily in
literary engagements even with societies very different from its own. By the reciprocal logic of the
Cold War, the U.S. State Department and CIA, institutions not known as patrons of literature before
or after the Cold War had to match those investments. The real beneficiaries of this competition were
African writers, interest in whose work significantly increased, as well as readers in the first, second,
and third worlds, who were given greater access to those writers.
W. E. B. Du Bois speaking with Chinese delegates at Afro-Asian Writers Conference, Tashkent,
October 1958. W. E. B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
The Afro-Asian Writers Association was the main organizational vehicle of the Soviet engagement
with postcolonial literatures. Although it fashioned itself as the literary equivalent of the Non-
Aligned Movement, the Association was heavily aligned: thanks to Soviet Central Asian writers and
readers, the Soviet cultural bureaucracies were able to claim a place on the Afro-Asian table. The
Association’s main goal was to forge an international alliance among the literatures of the two
continents aimed at consolidating their forces and achieving independence from the publishing
centers of Paris, London, and New York. To be sure, there were other, competing literary
internationalisms that had set themselves similar goals and sought to command the loyalties of
African writers and readers: pan-Africanism, francophonie, literary Maoism, among others. None of
them, however, could match the sheer scope of the Association or the symbolic and material
resources of the Soviet state. Relying on their experience of literary internationalism in the first two
decades after the 1917 Russian Revolution, in their efforts to forge an Afro-Asian literary field,
Soviet cultural bureaucracies helped develop four main institutions: international writers congresses,
a co-ordinating bureau, a multi-lingual literary quarterly, and an international literary prize.
Ever since the Proletarian Writers’ Conference in Moscow on the Tenth Anniversary of the October
Revolution (1927), international writers congresses such as the Popular-Front-era Paris Conference
of Writers for the Defense of Culture (1935) or the early Cold-War Wroclaw Congress of
Intellectuals for Peace (1948) served as sites for constituting international literary fields and
deploying literature as a force for political engagement. Following in that tradition, the 1958
Tashkent Congress of Afro-Asian Writers was only the first of eight Congresses in this history of the
Association, the others being hosted by Cairo (1962), Beirut (1967), New Delhi (1970), Alma Ata
(1973), Luanda (1979), Tashkent (1983), and Tunis (1988).
As in previous Soviet-aligned international literary organizations, the Afro-Asian Writers
Association had a Coordinating Bureau, which was initially located in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Its
takeover by Maoists during the Sino-Soviet split of the early 1960s plunged the movement into its
first of several crises and resulted for some time in two parallel and competing associations: one
dominated by China, which withered during the Cultural Revolution, and another, Soviet-aligned
one, headquartered until 1978 in Cairo. The (Soviet-aligned) Bureau’s last head and General
Secretary of the whole Association was the South African writer Alex La Guma, who was living for
most of that time (1979-1985) in Cuba, doubling as a representative of the ANC. In general, the
bureau sought to serve as a depot for literature produced in different parts of the literary Third World
and maintain the day-day connections among different national writers’ associations and sometimes
government bureaucracies situated at the interface of each particular national culture.