Nguyễn An Ninh

Nguyen An Ninh was born on September 5, 1900 in Cholon, Saigon, Cochinchina (a direct rule colony incorporated with four protectorates in the French Indochinese Union). His father Nguyen An Khuong, "a middling landowner, who preferred to think of himself as a country scholar",[1] was a supporter of the Duy Tân hội (Association for Modernization, 1904-1912) reform movement.[2] Nguyen An Ninh received a French education. In 1918, this took him to Paris. He graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in Law age 20.  

While in Paris, Nguyen An Ninh joined the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites (The Group of Vietnamese Patriots) that included Phan Chu Trinh, Phan Van Trưong, Nguyen Thế Truyen and the future Ho Chi Minh (then under the name Nguyen Tat Thanh). Together the "Five Dragons" (Ngu Long) indicted French colonial policy in the socialist press (an indictment that, on a return to France in 1923, Nguyen An Ninh developed and published as La France en Indochine)[3] . In 1919 the group tried to present delegates to the Versailles Peace conference with an eight-point programme for colonial self-determination.[4][5]

Within months of a final return from France, Nguyen An Ninh was arrested in a suppression of La Cloche Fêlée. As the editor-in-chief, reporter, type-setter and even street seller, he had been producing the paper intermittently in Saigon since December 1923. Its appeals had drawn thousands of young workers and students to protest debt peonage and deportations, and to demand freedom of press, education and assembly.

Nguyen An Ninh's arrest on March 21, 1926 coincided with the return from France of Bui Quang Chieu, the leader of the moderate-nationalist Constitutionalist Party. Crowds accompanying Chieu through the streets of Saigon chanted "Free Nguyen An Ninh". It was also the day news was received of the death of Phan Chau Trinh. One of the Five Dragons, Phan Chau Trinh was a celebrated political convict. The result. on April 4, was an unprecedented demonstration against the government. Seventy thousand paraded with Phan Chau Trinh's cortege. When Nguyen An Ninh's 18-month sentence was announced on April 24, 1926 students and school children in Saigon and the region deserted their classes en masse. More than a thousand of them were expelled.[6]

In a widely circulated account of their shared experience of Saigon's Maison Centrale, the "Colonial Bastille,"[7],[8] Nguyen An Ninh was eulogised by his friend Phan Van Hum as a man who, forsaking government offers of land and position, had struck "terror into the hearts of corrupt, servile sycophants" and shaken "the corner of the southern sky"[9]

Nguyen An Ninh published La Cloche Fêlée (the title from the poem by Baudelaire, The Cracked Bell) as a "Journal for the Propagation of French Ideas." He exhorted young people to "leave the homes of your fathers." Only then could they hope to share off the "suffocating ignorance" in which they were trapped by obscurantism. "Our oppression comes from France, but so," he assured them, "does the spirit of liberation".[10] Nguyen An Ninh published his own translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract under the title The Ideal of Annamese Youth (Cao-vọng cúa bọn thanh niên An-Nam. Dân uóc).[11]'[12]

Nguyen An Ninh's was not an assimilationist. He published in French only because of the government's print restrictions on Vietnamese, and it was with regular pleas to his readers to translate for their "brothers"[13] Rather, following the path of the poet Rabindranath Tagore and of Congress leader Mohandas Gandhi in India, he saw himself as employing the ideals of the Enlightenment to both reappraise and reawaken the indigenous culture. This was not a task he believed could be entrusted to the narrow urban and literate classes alone.[14][15]

In 1929 more than a hundred peasants and day labourers were convicted in Saigon for membership of "Nguyen An Ninh Secret Society." According the Sûreté it had been an insurrectionist conspiracy that promised the initiated "some kind of agrarian socialism." The Trotskyist militant and later chronicler of the times Ngo Van concluded that the "Society" was a figment of "denunciations and torture-induced confessions."[16] Early in 1928, Nguyen An Ninh, his head shaved like a Buddhist monk, had begun travelling by bicycle from village to village. It is not clear what exactly he intended. Some of this comrades may have tried to organise in his wake. Other underground groups may have used the name of Nguyen An Ninh as a "rallying symbol."[17]

When years later, in 1936, he encountered Nguyen An Ninh in Saigon's Maison Central and asked him about his "agrarian programme," Ngo Van recalls that Nguyen An Ninh "raised his eyes [over the prison walls] toward the tamarind trees and began to sing Auprès de ma blonde [a traditional French ballad]: "In my father's garden . . . All the birds in the world come to build their nests."[18]

Between 1930 and the end of 1932 the colonial authorities responded to widespread rural and labour unrest with dragnet arrests. More than 12,000 political were taken, of whom 7,000 were sent to the penal colonies. The French shattered the structure of every anti-colonial faction including (at a time when most their leading cadres were already in prison or, with Ho chi Minh, abroad) the Indochinese Communist Party (PCI). Gathering around the independent figure of Nguyen An Ninh, several of surviving representatives decided to bury their differences and together oppose the government in the Saigon municipal elections of April-May 1933.

The group, which included Nguyen Van Tao of the PCI, the Trotskyist Ta Thu Thau, the anarchist Trinh Hung Ngau, and the independent nationalist Tran Van Thach, put forward a common "Workers's List" (So lao dong) and briefly published the paper La Lutte (The Struggle) to rally support for it. In spite of the restricted franchise, two of this Struggle group were elected (although denied their seats). Ngo Van identifies Nguyen An Ninh as having been "the real linchpin." At the largest of the hustings he was elected to chair by acclaim.[19]

In 1934 Nguyen An Ninh helped revive the La Lutte collaboration. Ninh and the Lutteurs "focused squarely on the plight of the urban poor, the workers and peasant labourers."[20] However, from 1936 the lengthening shadow of the Moscow Trials (obliging the Party loyalists to denounce their Trotskyist colleagues as "twin brothers of fascism"), and the failure of the Communist Party-supported Popular Front government in France to deliver on promises of colonial reform, ensured a split.[21] Ta Thu Thau and Nguyen Van Tao came together for the last time in the April 1937 city council elections, both being elected.

In the wake of renewed labour unrest, with Ta Thu Thau and Nguyen Van Tao, Nguyen An Ninh's was soon back in prison. When released early in 1939, but still under house arrest, he was persuaded to let his name go forward with Nguyen Van Tao, and other Party cadres, as a Democratic Front candidate in the April 1939 Cochinchina Colonial Council elections[22] Together with the Constitutionalist slate, his list was defeated by the now wholly Trotskyist lutteurs. The La Lutte Workers and Peasants platform was revolutionary (radical land redistribution and workers' control) but in a restricted income-tax payer election the key was the Trotskyists' opposition to the French Indochina defence levy that the Communist Party, in the spirit of Franco-Soviet accord, had felt obliged to support.[23]

When on August 23, 1939 Franco-Soviet relations were finally sundered by the Hitler-Stalin Pact and war followed two weeks later, "sedition" of every stripe and faction was repressed. Nguyen An Ninh was sentenced to 5 years in prison and 10 years exile.

Nguyen An Ninh died at the Pulo Condore penal colony on August 14, 1943. It is possible that his jailers had decided his fate. Alarmed by the imminent landing of the Japanese across Indochina, they may have regarded him as a figure the new occupiers would seek to use politically.[24]

Thirty-seven years after his death, on August 1, 1980, the Vietnamese Socialist Republic posthumously conferred upon Nguyen An Ninh the title “Revolutionary Martyr.”[25] In what is now Ho Chi Minh City Nguyen An Ninh is memorialised in the Nguyen An Ninh High school and in Nguyen An Ninh Street, a central thoroughfare familiar to the city's growing number of foreign visitors.

• La Lutte
• Tạ Thu Thâu
• Ngo Van