Afro-Southeast Asia: Macapagal’s trip to Africa
The years of 1963 and 1964 are exceptional moments in the diplomatic history of Southeast Asia and Africa and in the prospect of lived Afro-Asianism after Bandung. MAPHILINDO, a confederation among then Malaya, the Philippines, and Indonesia based on a pan-Malayan ethnos is crucial in this history. Established in July 1963, Maphilindo played out the promise of regional solidarity imagined in Bandung. Filipino diplomat and Bandung delegate Carlos P. Romulo traced the continuity from Bandung to Maphilindo as one wherein the “effort of the emergent countries of Asia and Africa to come to a formulation of their common cause was eloquently expressed.”¹
While MAPHILINDO optimistically staked Malayan exceptionalism and a Third World politics that attempted to reconfigure Cold War world order, it was faced by diplomatic shortcomings, armed violence and border conflicts, thus proving to be short-lived. While the confederation allowed for regional alignments and the compounding of regional political power, anxieties brought about by the threat of communism on one hand, and neo-colonial implications on the other, rendered the organization especially precarious.
Borneo assumed a crucial role in this milieu as it plays out the limits and excesses of this configuration in relation to how issues of regionality and region-formation are framed. Sabah, in particular, becomes a site of confrontation enmeshed in diplomatic relations and mired in armed antagonisms: in 1962, the Philippines staked its claims to the territory against British colonial power which led to a meeting between the two states in 1963 in London. In 1963, armed conflict was sparked in Sabah led by “freedom fighters” encouraged by Indonesian state propaganda against the establishment of Malaysia, branding it as a British neo-colonial ploy, and with Indonesia empowering their armed offensive via covert military aid. This armed conflict and propaganda was enshrined in Indonesian President Sukarno’s policy of Konfrontasi, which aimed to forestall, if not prevent, the formation of Malaysia.
In December 1963, after attending the wake of US President John F Kennedy, Philippine president Diosdado Macapagal visited a number of states in the African continent. In January 1964, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew visited 17 African states. Both trips were made in relation to questions of regional importance: part of Macapagal’s excursion was to advocate for the Philippines’s claim to Sabah; Lee’s motivation for his trip, on the other hand, was to discuss the implications of the formation of Malaysia to the fate of Afro-Asian solidarity.
These itineraries point to how Africa became a crucial coordinate in the unravelling of the Cold War’s bipolar world order. In November 1963, Macapagal with the First Lady and a five-man staff visited the memorial of John F Kennedy. From Manila, Macapagal and his retinue went to Honolulu on November 24, and from Honolulu they flew to Washington.
This was his first trip to the country during his term. The original plan for Macapagal was to stay in the US for 4 or 5 days. During his time in the US there were rumors that Macapagal would do a side-trip to visit African countries. On December 1, these reports were confirmed. The trip was the first time any Philippine head of state visited the African continent. All the preparations were done within the time of Macapagal’s visit to the US. As one account elaborates: “Washington officials encouraged the trip, probably mainly…because ‘America is proud of the Philippines; the Philippines has something to show for its seventeen years of independence.’”²
The trip was originally planned to travel from West to East: from Liberia to Nigeria to the Republic of Congo to Tanganyika to Malagasy to Zanzibar, all of which had recently declared independence. Boarding a Pan-American Airways jetliner which had been christened Clipper Sampaguita to give it a native touch (and that was also assigned a Filipina flight attendant, Shirley Hart), Macapagal set off to Liberia on December 5 and arrived on the 7th.
Liberia was the most apt choice as the first state to visit in this trip. Although the country had never been a colonial possession, it had for more than a century maintained close relations with the US. As a commentator explains: “Liberia was created through the efforts of the ‘American Colonization Society’ to settle former slaves there and its government is modelled on the American system.”³ This is something that Macapagal recognized in his speech before the Liberian government: “Liberia was among the first experiments in human liberation on the African continent just as the Philippines was the first in Asia.”
Macapagal arrived in Tanganyika in time for the first anniversary of their independence on December 9. Zanzibar was originally in the itinerary and also achieved independence during Macapagal’s tour (December 9) but was eventually bypassed because their airfield was too small. Nigeria and the Republic of Congo were bypassed in this itinerary since their head of states were also away in diplomatic visits, which highlights how impromptu Macapagal’s trip was. Plans to visit Kenya also didn’t pan out although the presidential aircraft passed by Nairobi before landing in Tanganyika. Although it would have been an apt gesture to visit Kenya on its eve of independence on December 12, 1963, Macapagal’s group decided against it since Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth, would be there for the ceremonies as well, and such a visit could have only brought on complications on the ongoing negotiations on Sabah.⁵
The last destination of the trip was Madagascar, which in Wenceslao Vinzon’s account of a pan-Malayan ethnos that informed the formation of MAPHILINDO, forms part of “a unified Malaysia extending from the northern extremity of the Malay Peninsula to the shores of New Guinea, from Madagascar to the Philippines and to the remotest islands of Polynesia, will be a powerful factor in the oceanic world.”⁶
After Macapagal’s trip to Africa, Macapagal and his entourage flew to Bangkok to pay respects to Prime Minister Sarit Thanarat who had died on the 8th. On December 16th, Macapagal reached Manila. Upon his return, he delivered a speech addressing the necessity of the largely impromptu trip. Macapagal remarks: “The African continent, like Asia itself, has long been a large fact in the geography of the World, but it is only in more recent times that the human implications of its geographic fact is beginning to be acknowledged as of political significance.”⁷ Furthermore, he explains: “Yet between ours and the societies of the rest of Asia and of Africa are obvious common givens of historical circumstances. This, and the present situation of our political status is compelling enough, on our part, to make common cause and collaborate on general schemes with societies and peoples beyond the national geography.”⁸
Salient in Macapagal’s imagination is a geopoetic urgency that interrogates the factuality of both Africa and Asia — as coherently imagined geographies and fixed entities that share “common givens of historical circumstances.” In nominating this urgency as geopoetic, we take note of how it opens the relationship between Africa and Asia to poetic interventions shaped by places and the travels that bridge them. In Macapagal’s explanation, geography is granted political significance as it is animated by “human implications” and a recognition that in the context of this moment during the Cold War, the present situation of Asia becomes “compelling enough…to make common cause and collaborate on general schemes” with people beyond the ambit of the nation.
We parse this sentiment in order to elaborate an imaginative latitude for reconfiguring the current discourses that shape the history and legacy of Afro-Asian solidarity, formalised in the 1955 Bandung Conference, by way of Southeast Asia regionalism. Macapagal and his travels are crucial in this narrative, a history that troubles the typical tenors that have shaped how we understand ideas of solidarity and sovereign self-determination. In this conceptualisation, Southeast Asia becomes an exceptional coordinate that unravels claims to transregional solidarity and speculates upon the possibilities of a post-imperial world order.
An earlier version of this text has been presented in the panel “Sparse, sporadic, unspectacular: parahistory and Afro-Southeast Asian affinities” as part of the webinar series Afro-Southeast Asia: Pragmatics and Geopoetics of Art during a Cold War.
¹ Carlos P. Romulo, “From Bandung to Maphilindo,” in Mission to Asia: The Dialogue Begins (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1964), 99.
² “President Macapagal’s African Visit,” The Journal of American Commerce (January 1964): 8.
³ Ibid., 5.
⁴ Diosdado Macapagal, “Address of President Macapagal at the state banquet given by President William Tubman,” 8 December 1963, https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1963/12/08/address-of-president-macapagal-at-the-state-banquet-given-by-president-william-tubman/
⁵ “President Macapagal’s African Visit,” 6.
⁶ Wenceslao Q. Vinzons, “Malaysia Irredenta,” in The Philippine Encyclopedia of Eloquence, ed. Andres R. Camasura (Manila: The Philippine Encyclopedia, 1936), 413.
⁷ Diosdado Macapagal, “Report on United States and Africa Trip,” in Fullness of Freedom: Speeches and Statements of President Diosdado Macapagal, vol. IV (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1965), 162.
⁸ Ibid.
