Andrée Blouin was born to a French father and a mother from the Central African Republic
“I know that you can die twice. First comes physical death… to be forgotten is a second death,” notes screenwriter Eve Blouin, in an epilogue at the end of her mother’s autobiography.
Eve understands this sentiment more than most.
In the 1950s and 60s, her mother, the late Andrée Blouin, threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, mobilising the Democratic Republic of Congo’s women against colonialism and rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, DR Congo’s first prime minister and a revered independence hero.
She traded ideas with famed revolutionaries like Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sékou Touré and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella, yet her story is hardly known.
Going some way towards remedying this injustice, Blouin’s journey featured in last year’s Oscar-shortlisted documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.
What’s more, Blouin’s memoir, titled My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, is being re-released, having spent decades out of print.
In the book, Blouin explained that her yearning for decolonisation was sparked by a personal tragedy.
She grew up between Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, which at the time were French colonies named Ubangi-Shari and the French Congo respectively.
In the 1940s, her two-year-old son, René, was being treated in hospital for malaria in the CAR.
René was mixed-race like his mother, and because he was one-quarter African, he was denied medication. Weeks later, René was dead.
“The death of my son politicised me as nothing else could,” Blouin wrote in her memoir.
She added that colonialism “was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life”.
Blouin was born in 1921, to a 40-year-old white French father and a 14-year-old black mother from the CAR.
The two met when Blouin’s father passed through her mother’s village to sell goods.
“Even today, the story of my father and my mother, while giving me much pain, astonishes me still,” Blouin said.
When she was just three, Blouin’s father placed her in a convent for mixed-race girls, which was run by French nuns in the neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville.
This was common practice in France and Belgium’s African colonies – it is thought that thousands of children born to colonialists and African women were sent to orphanages and separated from the rest of society.
Blouin wrote: “The orphanage served as a kind of waste bin for the waste products of this black-and-white society: the children of mixed blood who fit nowhere.”
Blouin’s experience in the orphanage was extremely negative – she wrote that the children at the institution were whipped, underfed and verbally abused.
But she was headstrong – she escaped from the orphanage aged 15 after the nuns attempted to force her into marriage.
Blouin eventually married by her own will, twice. After René’s death, she moved with her second husband to Guinea, a West African country which was also governed by the French.
At the time, Guinea was in the midst of a “political tempest”, she wrote. France had promised the country independence, but also required Guineans to vote in a referendum on whether or not the country should maintain economic, diplomatic and military ties with France.
The Guinean branch of the pan-African movement the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) wanted the country to vote “No”, arguing that the country needed total liberation. In 1958, Blouin joined the campaign, driving throughout the country to speak at rallies.
A year later, Guinea secured its independence by voting “No” and Sékou Touré, Guinea’s RDA leader, became the nation’s first president.
By this point, Blouin had begun to develop considerable clout in post-colonial, pan-African circles. She wrote that after Guinea became independent, she used this influence to advise the CAR’s new President Barthélemy Boganda, persuading him stand down in a diplomatic row with Congo-Brazzaville’s post-independence leader, Fulbert Youlou.
But counselling was not all Blouin had to offer this fast-changing Africa.
In a restaurant in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, she met a group of liberation activists from what would later become DR Congo. They urged her to help them mobilise Congolese women in the fight against Belgian colonial rule.
Blouin was pulled in two directions. On one hand, she had three young children – including Eve – to raise. On the other, “she had the restlessness of an idealist with a certain anger at the world as it was”, Eve, now 67, told the BBC.
In 1960, with Nkrumah’s encouragement, Andrée Blouin flew alone to DR Congo. She joined prominent male liberation activists, such as Pierre Mulele and Antoine Gizenga, on the road, campaigning across the country’s 2.4 million sq km (906,000 sq miles) expanse. She cut a striking figure, travelling through the bush with her coiffed hair, form-fitting dresses and chic, translucent shades.
In Kahemba, near the border with Angola, Blouin and her team paused their campaign to help build a base for Angolan independence fighters who had fled from the Portuguese colonial authorities.
She addressed crowds of women, encouraging them to push for gender equality as well as Congo’s independence. She also had a knack for organising and strategy.
Soon, the colonial powers and international press caught wind of Blouin’s work. They accused her of being, among many things, Nkrumah’s mistress, Sékou Touré’s agent and “the courtesan of all the African chiefs of state”.
She attracted even more attention when she met Lumumba.
In her book, Blouin describes him as a “lithe and elegant” man whose “name was written in letters of gold in the Congo skies”.
When the country clinched its independence in 1960, Lumumba became its first prime minister. He was just 34 years old.
Lumumba selected Blouin as his “chief of protocol” and speechwriter. The pair worked together so closely that the press dubbed them “Lumum-Blouin”.
Blouin was described by the US’s Time magazine as a “handsome 41-year-old” whose “steel will and quick energy make her an invaluable political aide”.
But a slew of disasters struck team Lumum-Blouin – and the newly formed government – just a few days into their tenure.
Firstly, the army revolted against their white Belgium commanders, sparking violence across the nation. Then, Belgium, the UK and US backed secession in Katanga, a mineral-rich region that all three Western nations had interests in. Belgian paratroopers swooped back into the country, supposedly to restore security.
Blouin described the events as a “war of nerves”, with traitors “organising everywhere”.
She wrote that Lumumba was a “true hero of modern times”, but also admitted she thought he was naïve and, at times, too soft.
“It is true that those who are of the best faith are often the most cruelly deceived,” she said.
Within seven months of Lumumba taking charge, army chief of staff Joseph Mobutu seized power.
On the 17 January Lumumba was assassinated by firing squad, with the tacit backing of Belgium. It is possible the UK was complicit, while the US had organised previous plots to kill Lumumba – fearing that he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In her book, Blouin said the shock and grief caused by Lumumba’s death left her speechless.
“Never before had I been left without torrents of things to say,” she wrote.
She was living in Paris at the time of the killing, having being forced into exile after Mobutu’s coup.
To ensure Blouin would not talk to the international press, the authorities made her family – who had moved to Congo – stay in the country as “hostages”.
The separation was crushing for Blouin, who, as Eve describes, was “very protective” and “very maternal”.
Reflecting on her mother’s personality, Eve adds: “One wouldn’t want to antagonise her because even though she had a big and generous heart, she could be rather volatile.”
While Blouin was in exile, soldiers looted her family home and brutally beat her mother with a gun, permanently damaging her spine.
Blouin’s family were finally able to join her after months of separation.
They spent a brief period in Algeria – where they were offered sanctuary by the country’s first post-independence President, Ahmed Ben Bella.
They then settled in Paris. Blouin remained involved in pan-Africanism from afar “in the form of articles and almost daily meetings”, Eve wrote in the memoir’s epilogue.
When Blouin began writing her autobiography in the 1970s, she still had great reverence for the independence movements she had dedicated herself to.
She had high praise for Sékou Touré, who by that point had established a one-party state and was ruthlessly suppressing freedom of expression.
Blouin did however grow deeply despondent that Africa had not become “free”, as she had hoped.
“It is not the outsiders who have damaged Africa the most, but the mutilated will of the people and the selfishness of some of our own leaders,” she wrote.
She grieved the death of her dream, so much so that she refused to take medication for the cancer that was ravaging her body.
“It was terrible to watch. I was absolutely powerless,” Eve said.
Blouin passed away in Paris on 9 April 1986, at the age of 65. According to Eve, her mother’s death was met by the world with “dreary indifference”.
She remains an inspiration in some corners, however. In DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, a cultural centre named after Blouin offers the likes of educational programmes, conferences, and film screenings – all underpinned by a pan-African ethos.
And through My Country, Africa, Blouin’s extraordinary story is being released for a second time, this time into a world that shows greater interest in the historical contributions of women.
New readers will learn of the girl who went from being stashed away by the colonial system, to fighting for the freedom of millions of black Africans.
For 12 years, Andrée Blouin (second from bottom right) lived at the Order of Saint Joseph Cluny convent in Brazzaville
-BBC
