Leaving Vietnam for Africa: the untold story of Senegal’s Vietnamese wives

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A 2 balles (My 2 cents)

5 min readAug 26, 2021

At the end of the Indochina War, Vietnamese women who had married black soldiers in the French army followed them to Africa. Through the testimony of their descendants and rare archives, we trace their journey from Vietnam to Senegal. The quotes featured in this story are from Anne-Marie Niane’s short story, “L’Etrangère”.

A Vietnamese bride with her Black husband. Screenshot from Laurence Gavron’s documentary “Si loin du Vietnam”

The Indochina War (1946–1954) is a very strange period of colonial history. At the end of World War II, a battered France resorts to the African colonial troops to end the armed uprising in the Annam and Tonkin regions, in its Asian territories. Towards the end of what will be known as the Indochina war, Africans (North Africans included) will represent up to 43.5% of the ground forces from the French Far East Expeditionary Corps (1). This episode in colonial history birthed atypical yet very real romances: the union of black soldiers with Vietnamese women.

“I saw Karim for the first time in the fevered atmosphere of a fair, organised by the French army… I couldn’t explain the paradox of the French uniform on the black skin of this tall Senegalese soldier.”

Vietnamese women in the Indochina War

It is essential to remember that Vietnamese women were the tragic targets of gender-based violence during the war. It would be insensitive to list here the many abuses they fell victim of. It is worth reminding that they often served as trading goods, removed from their families to be used as supplies for brothels or facilitate conscription. Michel Bodin, a French specialist of the Indochina War, discusses the relationship between the French army and the “Annamite women” in an article riddled with clichés on Asians and Africans:

Africans were quickly charmed by the beauty of local women, whom they felt protective of due to their frail demeanour of a little sister. (2)

Despite this belief that the African soldiers were perhaps more lenient towards Vietnamese, it would be naïve to believe that they were beyond reproach: the very reason of their presence in Vietnam said otherwise. However, alongside the hurt and pain they caused in Vietnam as French soldiers, there were also happy stories. One of them is the journey of the Vietnamese women who made the daring choice to unite their destiny with their African husbands.

“After a long period of depression and despair, it was time to face the music. To malice and blatant hostility, I opposed an indifference that I was far from feeling. On some nights, I could not get any sleep, fearing that I would be the object of reprisals from the Viêt Minh. That context made Karim’s marriage proposal seem like a deliverance (…) No one would ever call me a “bitch” ever again. ‘Wife of a French’ could be an insult but it also inspired fear and respect.”

Family portraits. Abdoulaye et Thai Thi Lan. Crédits: C.T.

“Home is where the heart is”

After the defeat of the French army at Diên Biên Phu, some Vietnamese women who were in a relationship with the occupant found themselves in dire straits. With the withdrawal of the French forces, many of them were abandoned to their fate, sometimes with child, as the ultimate proof of their alliances with the enemy. In a documentary released in 2011, Beninese director Idrissou Mora-Kpaï tells the story of of these Black Asians born from the war.

Among the Black soldiers of the French army, referred to as “tirailleurs” by the hierarchy, were some men who attempted to recover their offspring. In some cases, the Viêt Minh chiefs expressed disagreement with the departure of these Afro-Vietnamese:

The requests made to the Vietnamese authorities remained unanswered. Some tirailleurs volunteered for a second stay in Vietnam, with the stated purpose of reuniting with their “Indochinese family”. (3)

Some tirailleurs succeeded against all odds. Unfortunately after their arrival in Africa, some children with Asian origins will be confronted by rejection from their broader African family and subsequently abandoned a second time. Many of them will be placed in the care of the catholic Church until they come of age.

A new start

The situation of Vietnamese women who were legally married to African soldiers was somehow different. At the end of the war, dozens of them made the difficult choice to follow their companions who were returning home. It was not uncommon to see Vietnamese older women join their daughter and their black son-in-law on this one-way journey. That was the case of the Lame family, featured in Laurence Gavron’s documentary and also the story of “Alima”, the daughter and granddaughter of Vietnamese women.

Hélène Lame Ndoye (left), a Senegalese-Vietnamese, Screenshot from Laurence Gavron’s documentary “Si loin du Vietnam”

How many Vietnamese brides left for Africa? A few dozens or several hundred? It is hard to tell because the French military archives failed to document the phenomenon:

Eventually, there were real romantic relationships, which caused a lot of problems for the soldiers who wanted to marry an Indochinese woman. At the end of the war, some of those women joined their French husbands in France. There are no such examples for Africans, despite their requests.”(3)

The lively Senegalese-Vietnamese community of Dakar brings contradiction to this statement by Michel Bodin, as well as the rare but vivid testimonies such as the one biographic novel by Anne-Marie Niane:

My in-laws lived in Saint-Louis and the market represented the truest contact with my new Senegalese environment. I was soon nicknamed “the Chinese”. This wrongly attributed moniker followed me as I walked through the streets of the town. I finally understood how Karim must have felt when the people of Saigon called him “Taî denh”, the “Black French”.