My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria|Andree Blouin

One of the most striking and saddening observations regarding stories of the birth of nations, struggles for independence and the fight for civil rights is the near erasure of women’s involvement as agents of change.

As though threatened by the sheer force of the formidable intellect and significant contributions of women, national mythologies reserve the most prominent spaces on the mantelpiece of history for their founding fathers and male revolutionaries. And on those rare occasions when room is made for their female counterparts, their trials and triumphs are relegated to footnotes, secondary and incidental to the cause.

Fumilayo Ransome-Kuti, for instance, one of Nigeria’s foremost nationalists, toppled a king with her protest against usurious taxes on petty traders and advocated for the enfranchisement of women in the north of the country. Yet, in the annals of history, she is mainly remembered as either the first woman to drive a car in Nigeria or as the mother of the Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti; her participation in nation-building unceremoniously cast aside.

For women revolutionaries who are fortunate enough to be remembered, there is a tendency to either tie their legacy to that of their husband—as with South Africa’s Winnie Mandela—or to the famous men who inhabited the same political circles. This was the case with Andrée Blouin, a Pan-African nationalist, orator and astute political strategist, who advised the Belgian Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and played an instrumental role in securing Guinea’s independence from France.

With luck, the recent republication of Blouin’s autobiography, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, will help to elevate her story and life’s work to the position it deserves alongside other towering figures in Pan-Africanism and the anticolonial movement in Africa, such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Guinea-Bissau’s Amilcar Cabral.

My Country, Africa bridges the gap between politics and the personal. The first half illustrates the intrusion of colonial policies into Blouin’s life, while the second half covers her attempts to overturn the social, cultural and economic structures that underpin them. Born in 1921 in the French colony of Oubangui-Chari (now Central African Republic) to the daughter of a local chief and a French entrepreneur, Blouin lives with her mother until the age of three, when her father deposits her in an orphanage for mixed-race girls in Congo-Brazzaville. There, hunger becomes a constant companion and racist nuns mete out whippings with gleeful depravity, while convincing the children that they will have to forever live in atonement for their mothers’ ‘primitive nature’ and their fathers’ ‘sinfulness’:

At the orphanage, where we lived behind windows with thick bars, my companions and I were taught an abiding sense of shame and guilt for our parentage. All of us had been born out of wedlock, but that was not the worst of it. We were the issue of a white man’s weakness for a black woman, and that was unpardonable. Because of this ‘sin’, as the nuns who ran the orphanage called it, we, the product of this sin, were in need of great purification. This the nuns were willing to supply.

Visits from her mother, which have to be authorised by Blouin’s father, who married a white woman shortly after her birth, are rare. Her father only visits twice before she escapes from the orphanage at the age of 17. In fact, her father remains a gaping hole for most of her life, a painful absence she tries to reconcile and understand in juxtaposition with her mother’s abiding love but frustrating lack of interest in capsizing the colonial infrastructure that subjects Africans to unrelenting humiliations and material deprivations in their homeland. Even Africans with French citizenship are not spared the horrors of colonial rule, a bitter fate that befalls Blouin when she is refused medication to treat her son by her first white husband. His death from malaria radicalises her, and she successfully campaigns to change the quinine card law, which restricted the medication to ‘whites only’.

Fiercely independent, Blouin initially earns her living from sewing, for white clients ever ready to remind her of her place in their racially stratified society. Later, while her husband is in South Africa receiving medical treatment, she manages his plantation and transportation businesses. During World War II, she starts a successful parcel business, buying, packaging and mailing food items to Nazi-occupied France, demonstrating the subtle ways in which Africa propped up a floundering Europe, as it continues to do with its vast mineral wealth.

Later, Blouin makes her way to Guinea with her second husband, a French engineer who, unlike her two previous white partners, seems to truly love her. He also supports her anticolonial activism. Having come from Oubangui-Chari, where demands for independence are nonexistent, her new home reveals another version of reality:

In Guinea, their leader was Sékou Touré, and he was campaigning to have Guinea cut free, to have no ties with France at all, after independence. This, of course, infuriated the French, both in Guinea and in the metropole. I had never heard anyone speak for the rights of Africans as he did.

With her revolutionary spirit ignited, Blouin begins campaigning across the country with Toure’s Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, a political group rousing the masses for independence in the French colonies. Twice she is nearly killed, but neither incidents dampen her political activities. For her troubles, her husband loses his job as director of a diamond mine, and not long afterwards she and her family are expelled from the country. It is not the last time Blouin is deported because of her activism. Nor is it the last time she and her family experience financial precarity. Still, despite this personal upheaval, she continues to push for the end of colonial rule in Guinea, her birth country of Oubangui-Chari, and the two Congos. In addition to advising politicians, Blouin also writes political speeches for revolutionary figures and anticolonial editorials for the radio.

Blouin’s excitement in the lead-up to independence is palpable in her writing, even if it waxes and wanes to the rhythm of hard-cold pragmatism and doubt. As a go-between for rival African leaders, she confronts the cussed selfishness, raging incompetence and chronic myopia present among the continent’s ruling class. On one occasion, an African politician compliments her on her beauty before dismissing her.

Similarly, Blouin’s interactions with high-profile male nationalists provide her enemies with ammunition with which to discredit her influence and work in organising women in the Belgian Congo. A Belgian secret police report describes her as a ‘courtesan’ and the ‘mistress of Sékou Touré […] Nkrumah, Tubman, Modibo Keïta, and other well-known African leaders’. However, the same report later pronounces that she is ‘all the more dangerous because she scorns money and sex’, calling her ‘sincere and tireless,’ and ‘a fanatic’. The false accusations, alongside later attempts to label her a communist, leave her unfazed.

As chief of protocol in Lumumba’s newly formed government, Blouin occupies the office that had belonged to her first lover, in a building that she could not have entered twenty years previously, and she marvels at the twists and turns of events that brought her to that point. ‘What could I pretend to, I, of mixed blood and a woman at that!’ The euphoria of the moment is short-lived, however, as the Belgian colonial administration wreaks havoc on the nascent independent nation, igniting a secessionist revolt in resource-rich Katanga as a means to regain control and further bankrupt Congo.

Ever clear-eyed about politics, Blouin cautions Lumumba about duplicitous figures she fears are sabotaging his premiership, characterising him in her writings as naive and hopelessly optimistic. Ultimately, her premonitions come to pass with his assassination. Even then, she continues her activism, taking refuge in Algeria.

My Country, Africa dazzles with insightful social commentary, nostalgic anecdotes and deliciously unvarnished eviscerations of parasitic African politicians who ‘serve neocolonialism for their own interests, and [...] sell out their black brothers and sisters to do so’. But the book is a product of its time. Its broad generalisations flatten African cultures into an undifferentiated monolith, and it earnestly over-explains Africa for a non-African audience, a fact that Blouin readily admits to at the end of the book.

Nonetheless, as a true Pan-Africanist, Blouin transcends the confines of colonial borders, ethnicity, race and political creeds in her fight for Africa’s independence, thereby validating her place among the pantheon of African revolutionaries.

This review originally appeared on The Johannesburg Review of Books.