Dusklands (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Colonization of Vietnam

From about 12,000 B.C. until 200 B.C., the indigenous people of what would later be called Vietnam thrived as farmers and fishermen. Then the first of many invasions from other cultures began. The first outsiders to try to seize control of Vietnam were the Chinese. They would continue to try to push their way into Vietnam for many centuries to follow. The Vietnamese won most of the battles with the Chinese. But this did not stop China from wanting to gain control in Vietnam, which they would try again and again through the eighteenth century.

Things did not improve very much for Vietnam's fight for independence during the nineteenth century. It was during this time that French missionary Pierre Pigneau de Behaine, who had come to Vietnam to introduce Christianity, convinced France to provide money and mercenary soldiers to help reunify Vietnam after a peasant rebellion threatened to tear Vietnam apart. Behaine asked for French support, hoping to gain favors for the French government in Vietnam. However, the Vietnamese soon became suspicious of the French and began persecuting French missionaries. Then in 1845, another country, this time the United States, became involved in the politics of Vietnam when they sent a military ship to Vietnam to rescue some French priests the Vietnamese were threatening to kill. This event would mark the first U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and it would not be the last.

Two years later, the French returned to Vietnam in force. They were determined to avenge the murders of their citizens. They bombed Da Nang (a major city in central Vietnam that was called Tourane under French occupation) in an attempt to punish the Vietnamese. The French continued fighting the Vietnamese in the following decades, and in 1861, they defeated the Vietnamese army in the south. As the French tried to expand their hold to include northern Vietnam, the Chinese became involved, and a war between the French and the Chinese ensued. In 1885, the French defeated the Chinese and claimed all of Vietnam as French territory. The French colonization lasted until 1945, when Japanese troops defeated the French and occupied Vietnam. The Japanese were in Vietnam for only a short period of time as they were soon defeated in World War II. This left Vietnam temporarily in a political vacuum.

During the Potsdam Conference in 1945, in which the Allied Forces determined how to relegate power after the war, Vietnam was officially divided in two: South Vietnam and North Vietnam. France was given the right to rule the southern portion. Ho Chi Minh, a Vietnamese military leader in the north wanted to unify Vietnam, and so he fought the French in an attempt to rid his country of European rule. China, which was then under Mao Tse Tung's Communist regime, supported the North Vietnamese. To counter the Chinese collaboration in North Vietnam, President Truman, in 1950, authorized millions of dollars to aid the French effort in South Vietnam. In the following years, the U.S. government sent billions of dollars worth of war weaponry to South Vietnam. The term "domino effect" was used by each newly elected U.S. president after Truman to justify U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Like a stack of dominoes falls one by one, each fall affecting the next one, U.S. officials claimed that if Vietnam was allowed to come under communist rule, so would all the other Asian countries. But despite the U.S. financial aid, the French surrendered in 1954, after a horrific war in which more than 400,000 people perished.

Ho Chi Minh then declared war against South Vietnam as he tried to reunite the country. In 1961, President Kennedy sent a small contingency of marines to South Vietnam to train soldiers and to build fortified camps in the jungles to stop the infiltration of North Vietnamese troops into South Vietnam. U.S. involvement quickly escalated from that point. At the height of the war, in 1968, more than one thousand U.S. soldiers died in battle each month. After fifteen years of battle, the last U.S. soldiers finally left Vietnam in defeat. It was the first war that the United States had ever lost. More than two million American people served in Vietnam. Almost sixty thousand of them died.

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnamese soldiers took control of Saigon, the major city in the south. Vietnam was once again unified, this time under communist rule. Today Vietnam has reestablished diplomatic relationships with the United States, France, and China.

Colonization of South Africa

South Africa, for more than 100,000 years, was the land of several different tribes. These included the Xhosa people, the San and Khoekhoe (referred to as the Bushmen and the Hottentots and collectively as the Khoisans), and the people of the Zulu confederation. As maritime trade developed in Europe, it became important for the European nations to establish supply points along the Cape of Good Hope. In 1652, the Dutch East India Company, led by Jan van Riebeeck, established the first European settlement in South Africa. Many of the Dutch who came to South Africa were farmers. They competed with the African tribespeople for land, with such actions often resulting in wars. Over the next century, the Dutch settlements spread east, away from the coast and deeper into the traditional lands of the tribes. To do this, according to some accounts, the Dutch nearly exterminated the San people. To help them work the land, many of the Dutch settlers imported slaves from Indonesia and India. Descendents intermarried with the Dutch, creating what would later be called the "colored" people of South Africa, as opposed to the darker skinned native Africans.

Another group of white Europeans, the Huguenots (Protestants from France) migrated to South Africa in order to escape religious persecution. They too were good farmers and easily intermingled with the Dutch, gradually adapting themselves to the Dutch language and joining the Dutch in their expansion away from the coast. Together they (the Dutch and the French Huguenots) came to be referred to as the Boers.

In 1795, the British took control of the Cape of Good Hope and tried to impose their lifestyles and laws on the Boers. Unwilling to bear British rule, many of the Boers decided to leave their farms and head even farther into the eastern wilderness. However, as the Boers settled the new land, the British were never far behind, claiming the land for the British crown. The British actions accelerated when gold and diamonds were discovered in Boer land. In 1880 and again in 1899, this led to the so-called Boer Wars, fought between formal British troops and the more renegade Boers. The Boers were able to prohibit the British advances in the first war. But additional forces from Britain were sent to supplement the British soldiers, who were then successful in subduing the Boers in the second war. Many Boers, as well as Africans who worked for them, were placed in concentration camps. (Coetzee's Booker Prize – winning novel Life and Times of Michael K is a fictionalized account of this second war.) Outbreaks of fighting continued between the Boers and the British until 1902 when the Boers signed a peace treaty with Britain.

In 1910, the Union of South Africa was created with the most influential political power in the hands of the white minority, both of British and Dutch descent. In 1948, the National Party came into power and the system referred to as apartheid was put in place. Blacks were denied the power to vote; interracial marriages were banned; and Africans were deprived of equal education. Black Africans could only attend agricultural or trade schools. Apartheid would continue for more than forty years. After the release of the political prisoner Nelson Mandela, the first, multiracial democratic elections were held. In 1994, Mandela became the country's first black African president.

Compare & Contrast

• 1800s: Napoleon III orders French troops into Vietnam to begin occupation of that country.

  1900s: The French leave Vietnam defeated by the communist Viet Minh after more than 400,000 soldiers, both French and Vietnamese, have lost their lives in continual battles.

  2000s: France and Vietnam enter a period of economic cooperation as exemplified by a code-sharing plan between Air France and Vietnam Airlines, a plan to increase tourism in both countries.

• 1800s: Chief Shaka of the Zulu people in South Africa rules over the largest tribe of black Africans in South Africa and defeats the British in the Anglo-Zulu War of 1879.

  1900s: Chief Bambatha of the Zulu people fights one of the last battles against the imperial conquest of South Africa. Bambatha becomes an icon in the fight for civil rights against apartheid in South Africa.

  2000s: Zulu music, which is said to raise the spirit through tight harmonic phrasings and was therefore once outlawed by apartheid, is now popularized internationally by the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo.

• 1800s: Dutch is the prominent language among whites in Africa. When French Huguenots arrive, they are encouraged to forsake their native language in favor of Dutch, which causes both languages to merge and evolve into a language specific to South Africa, now known as Afrikaans.

  1900s: The British government in South Africa at first recognizes only English and Dutch as the official languages. In the 1900s, Dutch is finally replaced with Afrikaans as the official language.

  2000s: There are eleven official languages of South Africa. These include not only English and Afrikaans but also Zulu, Xhosa, and several Bantu languages.