Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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The Afro-Asian Peoples' Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO) is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary. This brings to mind the very first conference of the organisation, held in Cairo from 26 December, 1957 to 1 January, 1958. I shall not go into all the pre-conference preparations, about which much has been written. But, as one of the founding members of AAPSO, I have some memories to share.

I shall always remember how we succeeded in bringing to Cairo various leaders of African liberation movements, despite all the colonial restrictions imposed on travel. This was a time when travel from or to Nigeria, for example, had to be first cleared through London.

With the aid of the Soviet Union, we managed to assemble the African leaders in Khartoum, whence a chartered plane brought them to Cairo. As to how they got to Khartoum in the first place, this is the stuff of adventure films. John Kale, I recall, had to walk all the way from Uganda to Khartoum; he eventually became a member of AAPSO's Permanent Secretariat when it was formed.

It was in Cairo that African liberation leaders met for the first time and coordinated their struggles for self-determination. After the conference, they established some 24 offices in Cairo.

President Nasser sent a message of welcome to the conference which was read by Sadat, later to become the president of the movement, though at that time he was the secretary-general of the Islamic Conference.

The AAPSO movement gradually broadened its activities to include different aspects of Afro-Asian cooperation. First, a conference for Afro-Asian writers was convened in Tashkent in October 1958, to be followed by various other conferences for youth, women, journalists, lawyers, and so on.

The 1958 conference opened in the Novoi Theatre, Novoi being the Russian form of Al-Nawawi, a Muslim thinker from Tashkent. The Tashkent conference witnessed the birth of a strong and effective Afro-Asian writers' movement. The decision was made at the time to create a Permanent Bureau in Colombo, the capital of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. In 1962, the second Afro-Asian writers' conference was held in Cairo and it was decided that the Permanent Bureau be transferred to that city.

Prominent Egyptian novelist Youssef El-Sibai was elected secretary-general of both AAPSO and the writers' bureau. I became his deputy in both capacities, which gave me a unique opportunity to contribute to consolidating the two movements.

As part of the activities of the writers' bureau, we began to publish a quarterly magazine, Lotus, in Arabic, English and French. We also created the Lotus Prize, which was awarded to a number of writers from both Africa and Asia. These included Mulk Raj Anand from India, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi from Egypt and Ousmane Sembene from Senegal. But then, the Afro-Asian Writers' Movement deserves an article unto itself, one which I hope to contribute to a future issue. Here, I was commemorating the fifty-year history of AAPSO on the occasion of its anniversary.