The Third World has grown up to become the Global South; the Bandung Conference is now seventy years old and has acquired an indelible place in the histories and mythologies of postcolonial and decolonial thinking. If we read some of the wishful thinking that Third-Worlders-turned-Global-Southists tell themselves, something very important happened at Bandung; only they don’t know what it is. A crooked line connects the Brussels Congress of Oppressed Peoples and Nations in 1927, the brainchild of the German communist millionaire Willi Münzenberg, with the Bandung Conference of 1955, via the Asian Relations Conference in Delhi in 1947. Bandung, in turn, is a predecessor of Belgrade in 1961, which was the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement. Erased from this triumphalist progression are, for instance, Colombo or Bogor in 1954; but if conferences beget conferences, and principles give rise to principles, what was the Bandung Spirit doing in Brussels or Belgrade, and where was it in Bogor, which should have been so close to home? The telos of Bandung—in the end is the beginning —lives on with or without history. Can we negotiate the demands of history with the need for a past conference to legitimate a future mythology? My paper therefore seeks to juxtapose the banalities of the event’s history against the grandeur of its collective memory.