Andrée Blouin

Andrée Blouin—once called the most dangerous woman in Africa—played a leading role in the struggles for decolonization that shook the continent in the 1950s and ’60s, advising the postcolonial leaders of Algeria, both Congos, Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea, and Ghana.

In this autobiography, Blouin retraces her remarkable journey as an African revolutionary. Born in French Equatorial Africa and abandoned at the age of three, she endured years of neglect and abuse in a colonial orphanage, which she escaped after being forced by nuns into an arranged marriage at fifteen. She later became radicalized by the death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria medication by French officials because he was one-quarter African.

In Guinea, where Blouin was active in Sékou Touré’s campaign for independence, she came into contact with leaders of the liberation movement in the Belgian Congo. Blouin witnessed the Congolese tragedy up close as an adviser to Patrice Lumumba, whose arrest and assassination she narrates in unforgettable detail.

Blouin offers a sweeping survey of pan-African nationalism, capturing the intricacies of revolutionary diplomacy, comradeship, and betrayal. Alongside intimate portraits of the movement’s leaders, Blouin provides insights into the often-overlooked contribution of African women in the struggle for independence.

Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria

My Country, Africa

Marion

The children of mixed blood were a shameful stigma to this society in which the lines for blacks and whites were so clear cut. That we existed at all was evidence of error in the ways of the infallible colonials. We therefore had to be separated from this society. With this miserable orphanage for us mixed bloods, the colonialists provided a means of controlling a potentially dangerous idea: that black and white could mix. It was therefore imperative to keep us shamed and humiliated in order to quench any spirit among us that might seem ready to draw advantage from this carnal association of black and white.

Our first lesson from the sisters, thus, was one of racial discrimination.

We girls of mixed blood, the métisses, were taught that we were to have absolutely nothing to do with the black girls. As for white people, we were taught that they were a superior and infallible race. The orphanage had little contact with them except through what was respectfully known as

"The Charitable Committee of Good Works."

The nuns hid Africa from us. They refused it and forbade it, almost as if it were something shameful. And the French they taught us was only enough to eke out a living as a seamstress for white ladies. We had no real access either to Africa or to France.

And the odd thing was that when these white women first arrived in Africa, they were not like that. It was their contact with the other colonials that changed them. Within a week, they were different: I saw it happen. If a white person said, "Bonjour" politely to a black, the other whites would mock him. "Look!" he would be warned. "Those are dirty niggers and you had better let them know their place. If you don't, you'll be badly seen by the rest of the whites here."

You cannot tell a child to forget all it has suffered in an unhappy childhood by saying, "You are big now, that is past. Let us be friends." One does not forget. We who have been colonized can never forget.

The French of France proved an extraordinary revelation to me. The people I met were kind, generous, and apparently not racist.

I was overwhelmed. After all the cruelties I had suffered at the hands of the French in Africa, culminating in the death of my beloved son, to find the people of France so different astonished me. Africa must somehow corrupt whites, I decided. How else to explain the mentality of most of the colonials I had known: narrow-minded, mediocre, coarse, and scornful?

A kind of malediction must descend on white people when they came to our land, I decided, blinding them to knowing us as human beings.

As punishment for the crime of being born of a white father and a black mother I spent my early years in a prison for children. This prison was the orphanage for girls of mixed blood at Brazzaville in the French Congo.

The time was the dark years of colonialism in Africa.

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.

We girls were led to believe that by accepting their system of calculated humiliations and cruelties we could partially— although never entirely-expiate the offense which our lives represented. For fourteen years I lived in a regime of daily penance as the nuns sought to redress "the wickedness of my father and the primitive nature of my mother?."

That girls such as I were given opportunity to atone for our existence was considered one more proof of the white man's charity as he scourged the black man's land.

In spite of the cost in personal humiliation to us, we had to make our presence telt. We had to make the whites admit that we could no longer be ignored. The shopkeepers' attitudes galled us. Most of them were Portuguese but they got their point of view from the French administration.

When we entered a shop and asked for an article in French, they would answer in Lingala or Kikongo to humiliate us. It was a way of saying that although we had French citizenship, we had no real right to use the French language. When we persisted in speaking French they would make such remarks as, "This malblanchie [badly bleached woman] is trying to act as though she is an evolved person."]

Because I have so often made derogatory remarks about the Portuguese shopkeepers, I would like to explain the special position that they held in the colonialist system, and at Brazzaville. Most of the Portuguese had been poor in their own country, and they arrived in Africa as sailors. They were illiterate, with no pretensions of any kind-the proletariat. On Africas warm shores they saw they could have a better life than in Portugal. They took women of the country as their wives and lived with them in their villages, working to build up small shops and enterprises in the town.

These poor people, who had failed elsewhere, who never asked themselves the why of things, found themselves under the French administration and they fell in with the system as it was, adopting all its prejudices.

As I look back, I think the hardest thing for us to bear during the long struggle for viable statehood has been the knowledge that it is not the outsiders who have damaged Africa most, but the mutilated will of the people and the selfishness of some of our own leaders. There are politicians among us who serve neocolonialism for their own interests, and

they sell out their black brothers and sisters to do so. They are our worst In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, black chiefs collaborated with white traders in the sale of their own race into the slavery of the New World. In the last half of the twentieth century, African history has repeated itself. Some of our corrupt leaders have betrayed their people, and are still doing so, in tyrannies of cruelty that are sheer madness. And among the people themselves, the spirit of slavery too often prevails: an attitude of cynical resignation alleviated by a childish escapism. Within this lack of belief in the right to determine one's own destiny, corruption finds an easy foothold.

I believe that Africa's susceptibility to cynicism and corruption comes from the fact that African independence was not won in the crucible of war. The people have never been united, through crisis, in the self-abnegation, work, and sacrifice that would have prepared them for the tasks of new nationhood. Our independence came-after much suffering, it is true, but with no real preparation in its disciplines— on a European timetable, at the stroke of a pen. I see now how ill prepared, morally, we were for our new responsibilities. Like greedy children freed from unjust restraints, we often abandoned ourselves to selfish, short-term prizes.

We have not yet learned the long-term, day-to-day faith and application needed in the slow task of building a responsible citizenry.

My Country, Africa quotes

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