Andrée Blouin – Africa’s overlooked independence heroine

“I know that you can die twice. The first is physical death… the second is oblivion,” says filmmaker Eve Blouin, in the epilogue at the end of her mother’s biography.

Eve understands this feeling better than most.

In the 1950s and 60s, his mother, the late Andrée Blouin, dedicated herself to the fight for African independence, encouraging the women of the Democratic Republic of Congo not to join the colonialists and becoming a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, the first minister of the DR Congo. a respected independent hero.

He exchanged ideas with famous revolutionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sékou Touré of Guinea and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, but his story is unknown.

In an effort to redress this injustice, Blouin’s memoir, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passionaria, is being re-released, having been out of print for many years.

In the book, Blouin explained that his desire to decolonize was sparked by a tragedy.

He grew up between the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, which at the time were French territories called Ubangi-Shari and French Congo respectively.

In the 1940s, his two-year-old son, René, was being treated in a malaria hospital in the CAR.

René was a mixed race like his mother, and because he was one-quarter African, he was denied medicine. A few weeks later, René died.

“The death of my son made me more political than anything else,” Blouin wrote in his memoirs.

He said that colonialism was “no longer a matter of my own bad fate but a bad practice whose practices reached every aspect of African life”.

Blouin was born in 1921, to a 40-year-old white French father and a 14-year-old black mother from CAR.

The two met when Blouin’s father passed through his mother’s village to sell goods.

“Even today, the story of my father and my mother, although it hurts me a lot, still surprises me,” said Blouin.

When he was only three years old, Blouin’s father placed him in a mixed-race convent girls, which was run by French nuns in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville.

This was it common practice in France and the African regions of Belgium – it is thought that thousands of children born to colonial and African women were sent to orphanages and separated from the rest of the population.

Blouin wrote: “The orphanage was like a cesspool for this black and white group: children of mixed blood who don’t fit anywhere.”

Blouin’s experience at the orphanage was terrible – he wrote that the children were beaten, fed without food and insulted.

But she was headstrong – she ran away from an orphanage at the age of 15 after nuns tried to force her into marriage.

Blouin eventually married of her own free will, twice. After René died, she and her second husband moved to Guinea, a West African country that was also controlled by the French.

At the time, Guinea was in the midst of a “political storm”, he wrote. France promised independence, and demanded that the Guinean people vote in a referendum on whether the country should maintain economic, diplomatic and military ties with France.

The Guinean branch of the pan-African group Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) demanded that the country vote “No”, saying that the country needs complete liberation. In 1958, Blouin joined the campaign, traveling the country to speak at rallies.

A year later, Guinea won independence by voting “No” and Sékou Touré, the leader of the RDA in Guinea, became the country’s first president.

By this time, Blouin had developed a strong interest in post-colonial, African societies. He wrote that after Guinea’s independence, he used this influence to advise the new CAR President Barthélemy Boganda, persuading him to stand in a diplomatic dispute with Congo-Brazzaville’s post-independence leader, Fulbert Youlou.

But advice was not the only thing Blouin had to offer in a rapidly changing Africa.

In a restaurant in the capital of Guinea, Conakry, he met a group of people who fought for the freedom of the country that came to be known as the DR Congo. They asked her to help them mobilize Congolese women against the Belgian colonial rule.

Blouin was drawn in two directions. On the other hand, he had three young children – including Eva – to raise. On the other hand, “he was worried about being angry at the world as it was,” Eve, now 67, told the BBC.

In 1960, encouraged by Nkrumah, Andrée Blouin flew alone to DR Congo. He joined male human rights activists, such as Pierre Mulele and Antoine Gizenga, on the road, campaigning across an area of ​​2.4 million sq km (906,000 sq miles). She cut a stunning figure, walking through the bush with her hair in tousled curls, flowing dresses and bright shades.

In Kahemba, close to the Angolan border, Blouin and his group stopped their work to help build a camp for Angolan freedom fighters who escaped from Portuguese colonial rule.

He also addressed the crowd of women, urging them to promote gender equality and Congolese independence. He also had great planning and strategy skills.

Soon, the colonial authorities and the international press took up Blouin’s work. They accused him of being, in many respects, Nkrumah’s master, Sékou Touré’s assistant and “lawyer of all African officials”.

He was very impressed when he met Lumumba.

In his book, Blouin describes him as “a handsome and beautiful man” whose “name was written in gold letters in the Congo sky”.

When the country gained independence in 1960, Lumumba became the first prime minister. He was only 34 years old.

Lumumba appointed Blouin as “chief of protocol” and voice recorder. The two worked together so much that the media called them “Lumum-Blouin”.

Blouin was described by the US magazine Time as “a handsome 41-year-old” whose “will and quick energy make him a great political contributor”.

But a series of disasters struck the Lumum-Blouin group – and the newly formed government – just a few days later.

First, the soldiers rebelled against their white Belgian superiors, which led to riots throughout the country. Then, Belgium, the UK and the US helped isolate Katanga, an area rich in minerals that all three Western countries were interested in.

Blouin described the situation as a “battle of nerves”, with criminals “preparing everywhere”.

He wrote that Lumumba was “a real hero of the day”, and admitted that he thought he was naive and, at times, too soft.

“It is true that people who have strong faith are often the ones who are most cruelly deceived,” he said.

Less than seven months after Lumumba took office, General Joseph Mobutu seized power.

On January 17, Lumumba was assassinated by an army, supported by Belgium. It turns out that the UK was involvedwhile the US had already plotted to kill Lumumba – fearing that he sympathized with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In his book, Blouin said that the shock and grief caused by Lumumba’s death left him speechless.

He wrote: “I was never left with many things to say.

He was living in Paris at the time of the assassination, having been forced into exile after Mobutu’s coup.

In order to ensure that Blouin could not speak to the international press, the authorities made his family – who had moved to Congo – stay in the country as “prisoners”.

The separation was difficult for Blouin, who, as Eva describes it, was “very protective” and “very motherly”.

Thinking about her mother’s personality, Hava added: “One would not want to anger her because even though she had a big and generous heart, she could be inconsistent.

While Blouin was in captivity, soldiers kidnapped his family and brutally beat his mother with a gun, permanently injuring her back.

Blouin’s family was finally able to reunite with him after months of separation.

He spent some time in Algeria – where he was given sanctuary by the country’s first post-independence President, Ahmed Ben Bella.

He then settled in Paris. Blouin remained involved in pan-Africanism from afar “as writings and almost daily meetings”, Eva wrote in the memoir’s epilogue.

When Blouin began writing his autobiography in the 1970s, he still respected the independent movement to which he had committed himself.

He praised Sékou Touré, who at the time had established a one-party state and was mercilessly suppressing free speech.

Blouin was deeply disappointed that Africa did not become “free”, as he had hoped.

“It is not foreigners who have destroyed Africa, but the interests of the people and the selfishness of our leaders,” he wrote.

He was so saddened by the loss of his dream that he refused to take medicine for the cancer that was destroying his body.

“It was bad to watch. I had no energy at all,” said Eve.

Blouin died in Paris on 9 April 1986, at the age of 65. According to Eva, the death of her mother met the world with “great indifference”.

However, he remains an inspiration in some corners. In the capital of DR Congo, Kinshasa, the cultural center called Blouin offers the likes of education, conferences, and film screenings – all driven by African culture.

And through My Country, Africa, Blouin’s amazing story is being released again, this time to a country that shows great interest in what women have done.

New readers will learn about a girl who left being hidden by the colonial system, fighting for the rights of millions of black Africans.

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passionaria, published by Verso Books, goes on sale on 7 January in the UK.