Without being intimately familiar with the histories of colonised countries or continents, it seems to me that most of them are today shaped around the influence of their colonial past, which is visible economically, culturally and politically. In which ways did countries try to undo the influences of colonisation after their independence? And in which ways were they successful, even if that success might not be apparent to an outside viewer?
Vietnam has been certainly successful in casting off a good part of its French colonial influence.
On 9 March 1945, the Japanese ousted the French Vichyite administration and replaced it by the "Empire of Vietnam" headed by emperor Bảo Đại. This puppet regime was governed by a cabinet led by scholar Trần Trọng Kim and a group of intellectuals who were (relatively) apolitical professionals, all French-trained and French-speaking, francophile while still rejecting French rule. They immediately started making reforms with the aim of making Vietnam not only whole - its three traditional regions (North, Centre, South) had been turned by French colonial authorities into three different "countries" with their own status - but also as Vietnamese as possible.
Symbolically, the Vietnamese language was adopted as the official national language to be used by the administration and written in Quốc ngữ, the romanized script. The government also started to replace the toponyms (notably street, city and region names) that had been named by the French, and often bore the names of French people, with Vietnamese ones, and with the names of Vietnamese people if necessary. In Hue, the boulevard Jules Ferry was renamed after King Lê Thái Tổ, who had driven out the Ming armies out of Vietnam in 1427, while Paul Bert was replaced by General Trần Hưng Đạo, who had twice checked Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century. As we can see, this symbolic vietnamization was not just anti-French, but also anti-Chinese, and memorial ceremonies were held to honour national heroes who were historical founders or people who had died fighting French colonization. On August 1, the new mayor of Hanoi Trần Văn Lai ordered the destruction of French-erected statues in the city parks as part of his campaign to "Wipe Out Humiliating Remnants", and similar actions were carried out in the South.
The vietnamization process also focused on less symbolical but more practical policies, notably the replacement of French officials by Vietnamese ones, and an ambitious educational reform that sought to create a national system of education that would have Vietnamese (and quốc ngữ) as the main language of instruction. The first primary examinations in Vietnamese were held in June 1945, and more reforms were planned for secondary education.
Due to its limited means and short life - it fell in August 1945 - the Trần Trọng Kim cabinet had no time to carry out the vietnamization process to its end, but it paved the way for the future truly independent governements.
All of this was made possible by a set of circumstances specific to Vietnam.
The Communist-led government of the Democratic Republic of Viet-Nam (DRV), established on 2 September 1945, basically continued the vietnamization process started by the Empire of Vietnam, both during the Indochina war (where it could implement it in the "liberated" zones) and after, once it was securely in power in Hanoi. Then, there were no French administration, French companies, or even French people to contend with, and full vietnamization could proceed unimpeded.
After 1954, the French failed to keep the South in their political orbit, and it was a non-Communist nationalist, Ngô Đình Diệm, who got in power. Relations between Diệm and France were always tense, in great part due to his efforts to outcompete Hồ Chí Minh's DRV in matters of nationalism, with the largely defanged French providing an easy target and occasional scapegoat. France was no longer politically and military active in Vietnam, but there were still French companies and cultural institutions in the South: vietnamization was less easy than in the North, due to the weight of these companies in the economy, and to the presence of francophile and France-supporting elites (including those who had fled to the South after 1954). Nevertheless, Diệm and his successors strived to eliminate what was left of French influence as much as they could, through symbolic (renaming toponyms and odonyms (again!), or forcing the Vietnamese people who had a French first name to have a Vietnamese one) and political actions (limiting the activities of French media, reneging on trade agreements with France, leaving French-led institutions etc.). Some were shocking to the French, for instance when the French-born, French-educated, and French citizen general Trần Văn Đôn presided over a ceremony in which the French-style military rank insignias were burnt and replaced with American-style ones. By the 1960s, American influence was more important than French one anyway, and there was little incentive for the new generation of Vietnamese in the South to keep France in their mind (except for the handful who went to study there). The fall of Saigon put a final nail in the coffin of French Vietnam.
This does not mean, of course, that nothing French remains in Vietnam. Like other colonized people, the Vietnamese were able to appropriate some of the cultural norms and customs of the colonizer and make them their own. The modern áo dài, for instance, which is pretty much the Vietnamese national garment, was created in the 1920s by Vietnamese fashion designers using a traditional Vietnamese dress as a basis and modernizing it using concepts borrowed from French fashion. But then there are as little as 0.7% francophones in Vietnam today, versus 33% in Algeria (OIF, 2019).
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