"The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessed -- in short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting. Here were class and racial and religious consciousness on a global scale. Who would have thought of organizing such a meeting? And what had these nations in common? Nothing, it seemed to me, but what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel. This meeting of the rejected was in itself a kind of judgment upon the Western world!"
Wright says that the Asia-Africa Conference was the first world summit that gathered former colonized Asian and African nations without interference from any Western force. At the conference, Indonesia’s first President Soekarno proclaimed:
"For long years we Asian and African people have tolerated decisions made in our stead by those countries which placed their own interests above all else. We lived in poverty and humiliation. But tremendous changes have taken place in the past years. Many peoples and countries have awakened from centuries of slumber. Tranquility has given way to struggle and action. This irresistible force is sweeping the two continents."
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