“Comrades,” “Trouble-Makers” and “French Ressortissants”: The Repatriation of Tonkinese Indentured Labourers from the New Hebrides (Vanuatu) to North Vietnam

• In Event: 22. Forging Power and Space: Vietnamese Workers’ Acts of Resistance in an Evolving Political Landscape

Abstract

Tonkinese indentured labourers revived a faltering French plantation economy in the New Hebrides from the 1920s until WWII. The South Pacific archipelago of New Hebrides, now known as Vanuatu, was uneasily co-governed by the French and English between 1906-1980. The repatriation of Tonkinese workers, interrupted by war and politics for more than two decades, was a contentious process. This is illustrated by the various ways in which the Tonkinese were considered comrades by some New Hebrideans, denigrated by French officials as communist troublemakers, and often dismissed by the British as French Ressortissants. The Tonkinese thereby occupied the shifting ground of displacement and deferral and, as analyzed here, this shifting ground was made more complicated by their own stories and agency. The years preceding repatriation in 1963 remained conflictual for there was opposition to repatriation to a communist North Vietnam. In spite of this, most Tonkinese participated in demonstrations and marches on the French colonial offices seeking their passage home. In this paper, I draw on archival work (Western Pacific Archive, University of Auckland) and interviews with Tonkinese who stayed as well as some who returned to Vietnam. Their narratives of events preceding and following the repatriation process suggest that colonial pasts are always more fragmentary and conflicted than they appear in official accounts. They illustrate the tangled strands of colonizing projects and decolonizing mandates as experienced by these workers.

Author

• Jean Mitchell, University of Prince Edward Island