The idea of decolonization that animated the spirit of the 1955 Bandung Conference continues to power imaginations of an alternative to the world Bandung inhabited. In this essay, we look upon Africa from Bandung, and simultaneously from Africa to Bandung, to recover an “otherwise”—a seeing of the future from Africa’s pasts. In the future envisioned in Bandung and beyond, flag independence was regarded as the first stop in the project of decolonization.1 The conference was to provide both “guidance to mankind … [on] the way which it must take to attain safety and peace” and “evidence that Asia and Africa have been reborn, nay, that a New Asia and a New Africa have been born!”2 As critical accounts have noted, the alternative “otherwise” Bandung offered was far from singular; it was multivocal and divergent, and this diversity is integral to the multiple readings and memories of Bandung.3 This multivocality made Bandung a successful performance of different visions of the world, including those of capitalism, communism, and socialism. Yet, Bandung was far from an ecumenical platform that offered little more than a cacophony of diverse voices and visions. The remedies may have been varied but the diagnoses of the malaise were unanimous—cultural imperialism and the racialism (i.e., racial and religious subordination) that instantiated and sustained it. Bandung was an opportunity to reimagine a world beyond imperial hierarchies. In what follows, we scrutinize Bandung’s legacy through the lens of Africa’s pasts. We note that for all the decolonial ethos that powered Bandung, its insistence on colonial legal forms inadvertently sustained rather than overturned imperial forms of subordination. We then offer an alternative mode of reimagining the world by drawing on recent recoveries of international legal histories of Africa prior to European colonization.

There are worlds we name, and worlds we summon into being. The Arab World has long inhabited both roles—invoked in international law as geopolitical reality, yet shaped by repetition, signification, and remembered alignments. It appears over the centuries not as a subject with agency, but as a revenant: referenced for its solidarity and unity, yet rarely allowed either coherence or consequence. What holds the “Arab World” together in international law, this essay argues, is not essence but performance, not institutional substance, but the staging of collectivity. Bandung (1955) made this dynamic briefly visible: nine Arab states, fragmented in voice and agenda, appeared united; Palestine, symbolically central, remained formally absent. The pattern endures, from the choreography of the Arab League to strategic posturing in relation to Gaza’s ongoing genocide by Israel. The “Arab World,” in this light, is not an unfulfilled project, but a legal and political arrangement, summoned, displayed, and sustained in a state of permanent deferral.