Jean-Bédel Bokassa’s rise from soldier to sovereign is one the strangest tales of the 20th century. Stranger still are the connections between the African emperor and far-flung Vietnam.

Just the Basics

• In the service of France, Jean-Bédel Bokassa fights in Vietnam, eventually marrying and fathering a daughter with a local Vietnamese woman
• Back in Africa, Bokassa leads a coup, names himself emperor and begins a search for his Vietnamese family
• His Vietnamese daughter (twice) joins Bokassa’s giant family, yet this fairy tale does not have a happy ending

November 1970: A young girl sells cigarettes on the streets of Saigon. Living in the capital of South Vietnam during the country’s bloody civil war is full of uncertainty for everyone, but life is especially hard for the destitute, 17 year-old Martine. She lives in a shack made of flattened beer cans with her mother, who regales her with stories about the father from a foreign land she doesn’t remember. Martine is half-black, but her age rules out any American GI as her father. Instead, her father was a member of another foreign army, the French to be precise, which fought an earlier war against the Viet Minh from 1946 to 1954. Tiếp tục đọc “The Vietnamese daughters of an African emperor – 2 Vietnamese Daughters Of African President Wed” →