This conference seeks to create a new research agenda about Africa’s entanglements with wars in Vietnam by convening hitherto siloed scholars of America, Africa and Vietnam. As one of the twentieth century’s defining geo-political events, the French and American wars in Vietnam shaped a generation and transformed Cold War statecraft, military struggles, protest movements and everyday political ideas across the world. Despite these global effects, Africans’ diverse engagements with the conflict have been written out of academic debates and popular histories, as is true of much “global” history from World War One to the scholarship on “The Sixties”.
Africans were not just a footnote in the history of Vietnam’s struggles against French rule and American intervention. From the over 180,000 African military combatants in French colonial armies to the continent’s iconic post-colonial leaders who attempted to mediate peace in southeast Asia, Africans played a central role in the conflicts in Vietnam that grabbed the world’s attention. These wars were not only shaped by Africans, they also shaped political and social change on the continent. They fired the imaginations of protestors, sparking street demonstrations and ideological debates about the meaning of decolonization and liberation and the direction of global political change; shaped the military strategies and thinking of anti-colonial armies from Algeria to South Africa; and inspired right-wing conservative forces – particularly among southern African white minority regimes – to build new global constellations of anticommunist solidarity.
The conference will be held on the 26th and the 27th of June and people can watch it virtually at the following Zoom links:
Day 1 – https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ZP9FLuVrR26MW2IQqVXhwg
Day 2 – https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PSnC2PMTSWGdMuIxemavcw