This public history project is creating a new research agenda about Africa’s entanglements with the American war in Vietnam by convening hitherto siloed American, Africanist and Vietnamese scholars. As one of the twentieth century’s defining geopolitical events, this war shaped a generation and transformed Cold War statecraft, military struggles, protest movements and everyday political ideas across the world. It reshaped politics in ways that were unprecedentedly visual, as the most televised conflict in history (up to that point) when footage of extreme violence was broadcast into people’s homes. Despite these global effects, Africans’ diverse engagements with the conflict have been edited out of academic debates and popular histories – as is the case in much “global” history. But 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. The war also shaped political and social change in African states. It fired the imaginations of protestors, sparking street demonstrations and ideological debates about the meaning of decolonisation and liberation and the direction of global political change. It shaped the military strategies and thinking of anti-colonial armies from Algeria to South Africa, and it inspired right-wing conservative forces – particularly among Southern African white minority regimes – to build new global constellations of Anti-Communist solidarity.

Building off a 2004 international conference that we hosted at the Rothermere American Institute here at Oxford with the generous support of ODID and the Africa-Oxford Initiative (AfOx), the Africans and War in Vietnam is advancing a Digital Humanities agenda to make studying marginalised African histories more collaborative, visual and accessible, particularly within Africa and Vietnam. To do this we are pioneering new visual historical methods and outputs, specifically the creation of an academic film that uses film archives in Senegal, France, and at the BFI here in the UK to explore the social, ideological and political connections and infrastructures that connected these two regions of the world. In line with Dan Hodgkinson’s Radical Visions agenda, this will provide a model for creating new forms of collaborative, historical research that can enable far broader audiences across the world to connect with their heritage.