When his plane touched down at Rabat’s Sale Airport in 1972, 16-year-old Zika Hajji stepped out into the dry heat of Morocco for the first time, toward the outstretched hand of an imposing man in military uniform with high cheekbones and heavy-rimmed sunglasses. Gen. Mohamed Oufkir greeted him in Moroccan dialect, “Kidayer, labass?” (“How are you doing?”). Zika froze. He didn’t speak any Arabic. His father, who himself had not seen his homeland for nearly 20 years, stepped forward, straightened up and said to the general, “Thank our king for bringing us back.” From the tarmac, Zika could make out a figure in the air-conditioned shadows of the terminal beyond, waving at the new arrivals — King Hassan II.
Now 70, Hajji remembers that moment with a smile — his first step onto what was then a foreign land, one he would later call home.
“It’s a story of love and resistance,” he said in Arabic, but with an accent that he still holds from his life before — the life his father built in a small town outside of Hanoi, Vietnam, with other Moroccan defectors from the French army who fought alongside the Vietnamese in the French Indochina War.
Between 1947 and 1954, more than 120,000 North Africans were sent to fight in the brutal and escalating conflict in what was then called French Indochina, which included parts of modern-day Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. For nearly a century, Vietnam had been a prized jewel in France’s colonial empire, valued for its fertile lands and strategic position in Southeast Asia. But as the German-led Axis powers defeated mainland France in Europe at the start of World War II, the Japanese occupied Indochina and France lost control.
The war was devastating. The Imperial Japanese soldiers implemented their “three alls” policy — “kill all, burn all, loot all” — that had ravaged China in the preceding decade. Women were forced into sexual slavery. Some 2 million Vietnamese starved to death in an engineered famine during the Japanese occupation. Yet the horrors of the war created an opportunity for the exiled revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh, to return to Vietnam and lead the Viet Minh, a communist movement determined to expel both the Japanese and the remnants of French rule. When Japan surrendered in 1945, the Viet Minh seized Hanoi and declared independence. But France, determined to keep its colonial empire intact, sent its forces back into the region and a brutal eight-year war ensued that was marked by guerrilla warfare in Vietnam’s dense jungles.
The Viet Minh fought with support from China’s Communist Party, which had recently won its own civil war, and the Soviet Union, enabling France to frame the conflict not as an anti-colonial struggle but as a battle against communism.
In that battle, France conscripted more than 100,000 men from other parts of its colonial empire. The majority of those foreign soldiers came from Morocco.
Though France long maintained that recruitment to fight in the French Indochina War was voluntary, historians and veterans paint a fuzzier picture of persuasion, compulsion and deception that drew young men into service. French recruitment officers traveled across Morocco, often stopping at weekly souks — bustling markets where villagers gathered to buy necessities and exchange news. They made promises: a steady income, a chance to see a lush, faraway land that, in their telling, mirrored the Muslim paradise, and the possibility of a lifelong career in the French military.
“Poverty, the desire to escape social constraints, the pursuit of military prestige and the yearning to flee disillusionment” were the key forces behind enlistment, wrote the historian Michel Bodin in his book “L’Armée d’Afrique.”
Though Morocco, as a protectorate, was technically exempt from France’s compulsory conscription laws, many young men found themselves persuaded — or compelled — into joining, including Zika Hajji’s father.
“My father was a prison guard in Kenitra, in western Morocco, where he secretly freed jailed Moroccan resistance fighters,” Hajji recalled. “When the French discovered his betrayal, they gave him two choices: the guillotine or the battlefields of Vietnam.”
He chose the battlefield, though the guillotine — once a symbol of the French Revolution, now turned into an instrument of colonial terror — had also made its way to Vietnam, where, in Hoa Lo prison outside of Hanoi, thousands of Vietnamese resistance fighters met their demise under its blade.
“My dad was always against French colonization,” Hajji said. “There was no way he would fight for them. The moment he arrived in Vietnam, he looked for a way to join the resistance.” It turned out the resistance was looking for him, too.
After grueling days fighting for a colonial power that treated them as expendable — Moroccans were assigned the harshest duties and given lower pay than French troops — Hajji’s father and his unit would scan the crackling airwaves with a small transistor until they found Radio Hanoi. The station broadcast Ho’s speeches, urging all colonized peoples — Moroccans included — to break free, and did so in French. The colonizer’s language facilitated the radicalization of troops from half a world away.
The Viet Minh’s attempts to recruit Moroccan defectors were manifold and powerful. Pamphlets and loudspeaker broadcasts called out to Moroccan troops, invoking a name they revered: Abd el-Krim al-Khattabi, the Moroccan resistance leader whose guerrilla tactics had once humbled the French. Pham Ngoc Thach, a minister in Ho Chi Minh’s government, even reached out to Abd el-Krim in exile in Cairo, urging him to rally North African soldiers. He obliged. “The victory of colonialism, even at the other end of the world, is a defeat for us,” he said. “The victory of liberty anywhere is our victory, the sign of our approaching independence.”
His words reportedly became a rallying cry for defection. Moroccan soldiers, given precise instructions on how to surrender safely, began to desert in droves. They were to approach with their rifles slung over their shoulders, a white cloth at the end of the barrel, arms crossed and hands raised at the command of “Arretez!” (“Stop!”).
The final push came when they learned, through Viet Minh propaganda, that France had exiled their own king, Mohammed V, to Madagascar. Enraged, more Moroccans joined the Vietnamese resistance. Though the propaganda was effective, the defections never rose to the level of an organized effort. Most soldiers, including Hajji’s father, slipped away one or two at a time during rest periods or operations.
Others turned their rifles against their French commanders to break free. “Ba Miloud, may God rest his soul, loved acting out how he shot down a French soldier to escape,” Hajji said of another veteran who made it back to Morocco.
Ho Chi Minh, recognizing their defection, reached out to the Moroccan Communist Party leader Mohamed Ben Aomar Lahrech to help integrate them into the Viet Minh cause. That gesture would prove to be crucial. Here, at last, Moroccan veterans found something the French army had never given them — recognition. No longer subjects, they were comrades in a shared resistance against a common enemy: French colonization.
When the Viet Minh finally drove out the French, the Moroccan defectors were barred from returning home by the colonial government, so they began new lives in Vietnam, marrying local women, starting businesses and raising families. Many of them settled in a small village outside Hanoi, called Ba Vi, where they constructed a very unusual village gate — one with three soaring Moorish arches with geometric filigree and an inscription in Arabic hailing it as “The Morocco Gate,” which still greets visitors at the town’s entrance today.
It wasn’t long before Zika Hajji’s father and the other Moroccans who settled in Ba Vi would see war again. The Geneva Accords, which ended the French Indochina War in 1954, split the country in two: a communist north and a Western-aligned south. But the accords only set the stage for an even more catastrophic conflict — the Vietnam War against American forces. Airstrikes rained down in and around Ba Vi. Families hunkered in shelters. Food was scarce.
In 1972, in the midst of the war, King Hassan II, the ruler of the now-independent Morocco, made a decree: The Moroccan veterans of the French Indochina War and their families could return to the kingdom. Many scrambled at the chance to leave — even before the push northward by the Americans, life had been growing harder and hungrier in Vietnam. There was a real longing for Morocco, for a place where they could raise their children away from the chaos of Vietnam’s endless wars and the unrelenting hum of U.S. airstrikes. That summer, 80 families left Vietnam for the long journey westward.
Among them was Hajj Allam, one of the last living veterans of the French Indochina War. He said that when the decree was announced, there was still a lot of uncertainty: “We didn’t know if they would take us back.”
It took days to get from Vietnam to China, then Pakistan, India and Egypt. The soldiers and their families traveled in harsh conditions, enduring brutal weather and the sheer exhaustion of an odyssey at sea before the final flight into Rabat.
The king offered the veterans two choices: jobs in their original cities or land in western Morocco. Seven families, including Allam’s, chose the latter, settling in what locals would soon call the “Chinese village” near Sidi Yahya El Gharb, about 40 miles from Rabat.
When they finally arrived, the families, once comrades in arms, were crammed into a single house in the village. “Life was hard here, too,” said Rahma, Allam’s daughter.
Just days after their arrival, Rahma’s brother died suddenly, his small body unable to withstand the toll of the long voyage. “My mother lost her mind,” she said.
Little was done to reintegrate the families. The children, who spoke no Arabic and had been educated in a completely different system, didn’t go to school. The newcomers were gawked at by neighbors, who assumed anyone with Asian features must be Chinese. “I always correct people when they refer to us as Chinese,” said El Ghalia Nakhli, daughter of one of the Moroccan veterans who settled in the village. “They mean no harm but we’re Vietnamese, not Chinese.”
Not every Moroccan-Vietnamese family made the return journey. Le Tuan Binh, whose father, Ben Ali, had been a deserter-turned-freedom fighter, couldn’t prove his nationality after his father’s death in 1968. He remembers coming back to their home after an airstrike to find his father’s grave destroyed, buried under the rubble of American bombs.
In its stead, the family made a stone slab to commemorate him. Below his name and the dates of his birth and death, it bears his nationality: Moroccan. Binh keeps it at his home in Ba Vi — the only relic of his father’s identity. When the decree came down allowing veterans and their families to return, Ben Ali’s family had no official proof of their Moroccan heritage. It took Binh decades to prove his family’s connection to Morocco, a country he never set foot in and knew only through fragments of his father’s stories.
Binh and his younger brother said it was also their choice not to go to Morocco but to remain in the country they knew and loved. “I don’t regret it,” Binh said. “I heard that others struggled a lot when they first arrived in Morocco.”
Binh knows little about the past of his father, who never liked to speak of the war’s horrors. But in 2015, after decades of research, Binh secured Moroccan nationality for himself and his two children, who now bear the name Mekki. He has still never set foot in Morocco. “I left the opportunity for my daughter,” he said with a quiet smile.
Leila, his daughter, now lives in Morocco, managing a beauty salon where her clients rave about her “magic hands.” Like her father, she is a woman of few words. When asked about her life in Morocco, she responded that “it’s a little difficult” navigating a country where everything feels unfamiliar — the tastes, sounds, smells and feeling of everyday life.
“It’s starting to feel like home,” she added in French, before excusing herself to attend to her busy schedule.
Bihn said that his is one of just three families who stayed through the Vietnam War. Whether other descendants of Moroccans still live there remains uncertain.
Morocco’s Vietnamese village is tucked in the countryside, and almost indistinguishable from the thousands of other villages that look just like it. Wheat rustles in the breeze and sheep graze along the roadside. Yet here, life sounds, smells and tastes different.
Hajja Fatima, one of the oldest members of the community, greeted me in Vietnamese: “Ban khoe khong?” (“How are you?”) Though she has spent years in Morocco, she still struggles with Darija, Morocco’s local dialect, and relies on her daughter for translation. Despite the language barrier, she expressed a deep affection for both Morocco and Islam. “I love Morocco. I love Islam. I pray every day,” she said.
Hakima Rochdi, whose father was one of the town’s founding veterans, is the last full-time inhabitant of the village. Married to a man from a nearby village, she stays in her parents’ house, tending to a garden of Vietnamese vegetables and fruits that her mother brought back from a visit to Vietnam in the early 2000s. “This is the secret to a good pho,” she said, gesturing to a green plant in the garden.
Rochdi has known loss — her parents passed away, one brother died of heart failure, another drowned at sea and two other brothers succumbed to COVID-19. “It gets really lonely here,” she said, smiling softly. She finds solace in maintaining the Vietnamese gate at the entrance to her home, a symbol of the connection to the homeland many of the veterans’ children, including Rochdi, have yet to visit, and an echo of the one their fathers and grandfathers built in Ba Vi. The gate, which imitates the Vietnamese style of pagodas, was inaugurated in 2022 with cooperation from the Vietnamese Embassy in Morocco and the Vietnamese-Moroccan community organization.
Though the Vietnamese village has seen its inhabitants pass away or move to the cities, the Vietnamese-Moroccan community has stayed close over the decades, and gathers to celebrate both Lunar New Year and Eid al-Adha together.
At this year’s Lunar New Year celebration at the embassy in Rabat, Hong May, the octogenarian honorary head of the Vietnamese community organization, sat under a blossoming peach tree, while friends and admirers lined up to have their picture taken with her.
She snapped her fingers and gestured for someone to come help her to her feet and steady her as she walked. “The crutches ruin my outfits,” she joked in Darija, her Vietnamese accent unmistakable. Laughing, we made our way to the dinner table, where the wives of veterans and their descendants were gathered, ready to share a slice of banh chưng, the traditional New Year’s cake of sticky rice cooked overnight.
Hong, who was wearing an ornately embroidered ao dai — the national dress of Vietnam — and a pile of Moroccan-style gold jewelry, sat down at the table with portraits of King Mohammed VI and Ho Chi Minh behind her — two figures who might never have shared a room if not for Hong.
With confidence, she took the microphone and began to sing a Vietnamese love song, joined by the wives of Moroccan soldiers, most of them in their 80s. The room filled with a quiet reverence as they swayed and hummed together. The song spoke of a lover who promises to follow their partner, no matter the cost. It’s a sentiment Hong embodied in the 1970s when, at 26 years old, she traveled with her Moroccan husband to a foreign land.
Today, Hong, like most other veterans’ wives, is out of touch with her family back in Vietnam. Letters and telegrams were too expensive, and phone calls too rare. For her, Morocco is home now. “Wherever my kids and my husband are, it is my homeland,” she said. That wasn’t always the case, however. When she arrived, she struggled with the language and culture. She said one of the hardest adjustments was the food: Moroccans’ obsession with paprika and cumin clashed with her craving for a traditional pork pho.
“The first things I looked for were rice and needles,” she joked. A nurse in her village in Vietnam, Hong continued to help people in Morocco with a little Arabic and the medical knowledge she had.
From her perch at the convivial holiday table, Hong was uninterested in recounting her earlier struggles — the poverty, the deep homesickness and the loss of her husband in the late 1990s. “Ah, I’d need a month to tell you everything, my dear,” she said, brushing the past aside with a smile. “It’s all behind me now.”
Instead, she preferred to share the joyous memories, like when her husband taught her to sing and dance to her first Moroccan song, “Ndek f Siniya,” a lively tune involving tea cups and trays.
“Ah, love is beautiful,” she sighed, recalling her late husband fondly. “I write poetry now. I don’t work anymore. I’m too old; I just sing and write poetry,” she said with a chuckle before picking up the microphone to lead another round of karaoke. The room filled with applause as her friends and other descendants of the Moroccan veterans gathered around. They all call her “mother.”
In the backyard of the Vietnamese Embassy, the youngest generation of Vietnamese-Moroccan descendants sat bored, scrolling through their phones. Zika Hajji looked at them, threw his hands up in the air and smiled. “My kids don’t even bother coming to these events,” he said. Like most of the community’s third generation, his children don’t speak Vietnamese. “You can’t force a sense of belonging. But they know their grandparents were heroes. One day, when they’re ready, they’ll feel Vietnam in their hearts. We all carry it.”
The sound of the Vietnamese national anthem, “Tien Quan Ca,” cut our conversation short. Everyone stood, including the bored young ones outside. “March on! Together, march on! Our Vietnamese homeland stands strong,” everyone sang, their voices intertwining, a harmony of Vietnamese and Moroccan accents.
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