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Before
The highlands before the wars: who came, what they wanted, and the country we were promised.
Articles
5 articles
Before 1800: free in the highlands
For more than two thousand years before the nineteenth century the Dega governed themselves in the highlands. We farmed, hunted, traded, judged our own disputes and worshipped as we chose. Three neighbouring monarchies dealt with our ritual authorities as with a power worth propitiating. That is the baseline against which everything since should...
The first outsiders: Cham, Annam and the missions
Four arrivals over a thousand years, each of which moved the Dega further from the sea, and a fifth — the missions — which moved nobody but changed everything by writing us down. This is the sequence as our records hold it, with the dates the outside chronicles give.
The French arrive, 1876–1929
We let the French in. Most of our peoples welcomed them, believing they would help us recover the coast the Vietnamese had taken. What we got instead was a colonial administration, a plantation economy, the first Vietnamese settlers — and, entirely by accident, a single political identity that we have used ever since.
A country of our own, 1946
On 27 May 1946 the French High Commissioner created by decree a government for the Montagnard people of southern Indochina, over a territory with defined borders. Within four years the same lands had been handed to a Vietnamese king without our being asked, and within nine they had been absorbed by force into a republic. All three documents stil...
The Kon Tum mission, 1851
On 1 January 1851 a French priest reached a Bahnar village called Kon Phar, having walked in from the coast. The mission that followed produced the first written form of any of our languages, the first dictionary, the first school, and the first outside description of who lived in the highlands and where. It is the beginning of the written recor...
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