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PORTSIDE CULTURE

MY COUNTRY, AFRICA: AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THE BLACK PASIONARIA  
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Viswesh Rammohan
November 1, 2025
Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
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_ Andrée Blouin was a significant figure in the early 1960s African
liberation struggles. She is featured in Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat,
the 2024 documentary film about the events leading to Patrice
Lumumba's assassination. _

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_My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria_Andrée
BlouinVerso, New York, 2025ISBN 9781839768712

 

The republication of Andrée Blouin’s _My Country, Africa:
Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria _is a welcome addition to the
literature from Africa at a time when imperialism continues to have
devastating effects across the continent. This book is a wonderful
companion piece to the 2024 documentary film _Soundtrack to a Coup
d’Etat_ by Johan Grimonprez, reigniting historical interest in the
politics and history of colonialism in different parts of Africa. The
documentary and the book together bring back focus to commonly
neglected African leaders such as Blouin, who were at the forefront of
the African liberation experience. These were important leaders in the
global history of decolonial movements since they witnessed events
play out in real time, often paying heavily for their involvement in
progressive struggles. The book is written in the form of a memoir
that chronicles different parts of Blouin’s life and the multiple
ways that her life intersects with the various social, political and
economic processes that were underway in Africa. At times, her life
becomes a microcosm for these processes and at other times, the
processes have a deep and resonant impact on her life. The book will
be an indispensable resource for people interested in postcolonial
studies, intersectional gender studies, pan-African studies as well as
autobiographies.

Blouin opens the memoir with the story of her parents’ meeting. Her
father was a French trader, and her mother was a local from what is
now the Central African Republic. Two things stand out about the
meeting of her parents: the age difference between her parents, and
the fact that her mother would never become the lawfully wedded wife
of her father, further complicating her life as well as that of her
mother. Her dad was a European and a trader around forty while her
mother was barely in her teens. Her mixed-race heritage will accompany
Blouin throughout her life and dictate her personal and political
choices. Given her father’s profession, he quickly left Africa to
return to Europe, leaving Blouin at the mercy of local colonial
forces, resulting in her being admitted into a home for black and
mixed-heritage children. The home was run by Catholic nuns who often
have a ruthless approach towards children and segregate different
groups. The anecdotes in this section show us a lot about the
functioning of colonialism on the ground and the ways in which
colonial power, religion and race intersect, often with devastating
consequences for the colonized population. The sections depicting life
in the home bring to the fore Fanon’s analysis of colonialism,
wherein colonial rule does not only distort local social relations but
also has a lasting and devastating impact on the psychological state
of the population which has been colonized. This is one of the most
harrowing sections of the book, but Blouin does it in a way by which
it seamlessly moves between her own life, African society at large and
the process of colonialism, describing the true nature of its
brutality. 

The book is also unapologetic in its depiction of the functioning of
religious organizations under colonialism. The nuns at the home spare
no chance in using methods of deprivation, including starvation and
whipping. These methods are rationalized as necessary, particularly
for children of mixed heritage owing to the primitivism they have
inherited from their maternal line and the idea of sin inherited from
their paternal line (being born out of wedlock). These attempts at
purification by religious organizations is an often-understated
element of the way in which colonial power operated. Often
rationalized through slogans such as ‘civilizing the savages’ and
Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’, the descriptions
of the home show the multiple ways in which imperial power
ideologically furthered an expansionist and exploitative mission while
employing racist rhetoric as justification for the same.

Blouin’s own childhood was heavily influenced by her parents. The
absence of her father in her life is something she struggled to come
to terms with. While her fondness for her mother shines through in
their interactions, Blouin was unable to understand her mother’s
acceptance of humiliation at the hands of the colonizer and the racist
structuring of colonial society that separated her parents. While
there are contradictions between what she sees around her and the
teachings that she had been forced to adopt in the home, Blouin
frequently questions the system around her, often resulting in even
greater punishments at home. In a first act of rebellion, she refuses
to remain shackled within the confines of the home and escapes at the
age of seventeen. Even at the time, Blouin remained committed to an
independent life at the core of which is her own financial
independence, often working odd jobs for white clients to sustain
herself. As Walter Rodney’s work on Africa demonstrates, the
underdevelopment in Africa in which Blouin existed was a direct
consequence of material gains in the ‘developed world’ and these
gains were built on the backs of colonized and slave labour. The jobs
she was forced to take up show us the inner workings of the
underdeveloped colonial economy and the ways in which the labour of
the colonized is expropriated. 

Blouin’s personal relationships are also animated by her childhood
experiences and her position in colonial society as a mixed heritage
woman. She was twice married to white men, both of whom were the
embodiment of the racism in colonial societies. Her two-year-old son
that she had with her second husband got malaria and was unable to get
treatment, as it was reserved for whites only. At different points in
her personal life, Blouin comes into direct contact with
segregationist policies, deprivation techniques and the dehumanizing
procedures that Africans are subjected to. This brought her to terms
with how deeply colonialism had permeated but had also destroyed every
aspect of African life. The kinds of experiences in Blouin’s
autobiography are discussed in the work of the anticolonial theorist
Aime Cesaire. Cesaire refers to the multiple ways that colonialism
seeks to disconnect the local society from its own past. For Cesaire,
colonialism completely alienates and destroys both the material and
spiritual ways of life of local societies. At the same time however,
it is at these instances that critiques of colonialism begin to be
formulated and for Blouin, witnessing these were the moments when she
was transformed and took nascent steps towards an anti-colonial and a
radicalized position. This leads us to the second part of the book,
that of her political journey.

Blouin’s political activism begins not in her own country but
Guinea. She traveled there with her husband to allow her to be
introduced to the pro-independence and anti-colonial leader Sékou
Touré. For Blouin, this is in stark contrast to her own hometown,
where such demands were still far away. She began her political work
with Touré’s Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which worked
with the masses in Guinea towards an anti-colonial future free from
colonialism. At the very outset, there are attempts on her life, and
her husband at the time loses his job over her political activism.
This period is a crucial turning point in Blouin’s life and while
Blouin herself dubbed her time working with Touré as a ‘second
birth’ (p. 250), two things crystallize in her life. Firstly, she
sees the anti-colonial cause in Guinea, her hometown and the two
Congos as a singular cause rather than as separate, which leads to her
formulation of a Pan-African identity and her considerations of the
anti-colonial cause as an African cause. Secondly, she was able to
fuse together two important elements: mass media and revolutionary
leaders. Through her speechwriting for anticolonial leaders, Blouin
was able to address women in Africa, often fusing anti-colonialism and
gender-based questions in colonized societies together. At the same
time, her close relationship to towering leaders in Africa also made
her a shrewd negotiator and mediator in rifts between leaders, a
profession that has often been associated only with men. 

While a lot of African countries were becoming independent in the
years following the Second World War, in some countries European
nations continued to maintain informal rule for maintaining their
economic gains. The classic case of this was Belgium and its continued
plundering of the Congo into the 1960s. Though Blouin encountered
Congolese politics by accident, her connections to Touré make her the
central figure in mobilizing Congolese women for the Parti Solidaire
Africain (PSA). Her work for the party mobilized women in large
numbers and within a short time the party membership grew
exponentially. At the same time, Belgium hit out at Blouin, dubbing
her a foreign communist agent. Eventually, Blouin was forced to leave
the country but not before revealing Belgium’s imperial plans for
the Congo to the international media and drafting what was perhaps one
of the strongest anti-colonial speeches, which was delivered by
Lumumba when Congo gained independence on June 30, 1960. 

While she was invited by Lumumba to join him in building the new
nation-state, Belgium was still unwilling to let go of Congo and
promoted factionalism in Congo. Owing to its economic interests, the
Congo became a confluence point for colonial powers as well as the
imperial interests of the USA through the CIA (the focus of the
documentary mentioned in the introduction). Blouin warned Lumumba
about forces within the Congo that were looking to oust him and align
Congo with imperialism, but her advice was not taken. Lumumba was
ousted in a military coup and Blouin was expelled from the Congo.
After months of clashing with mercenaries, pro-Lumumba forces were
weakened, and Lumumba himself was captured and killed. Blouin was in
Switzerland when she heard of Lumumba’s death and her words at the
time are very revealing of her feelings: ‘Words had always been so
quick to my lips…Never before had I been without torrents of things
to say. But before this stroke of destiny, I had nothing to give’
(363). Lumumba’s death did not dampen Blouin’s spirit. If
anything, it strengthened her resolve for the articulation of a
pan-Africanism and anti-colonial politics, something that got even
more traction through the Algerian struggle for independence from
France. She wrote regularly for _El Moudjahid, _the newspaper of the
Algerian National Liberation Front and like many revolutionaries of
the time, she relocated to Algiers in 1962. Her unique position and
firsthand experiences made many progressive organizations flock to her
for support and at the same time, sharpened Blouin’s
internationalism through support for causes beyond just the continent
of Africa including Palestine as well as the Black Panthers. 

Verso chose to republish Blouin’s memoirs nearly four decades after
the first edition ran out of print. A lot has changed in Africa since
then and yet a lot has remained the same. While postcolonialism is
still seen as a useful lens in challenging colonial ways of thinking
and knowing, it has come with its own challenges. Blouin’s memoirs
are a very useful addition to rethinking these challenges. She never
hesitates to challenge the male leaders she worked with nor in
criticizing social groups within African society who often collaborate
with imperialism even if it means tearing Africa apart. Her memoirs
are a mix of brutal depictions of all aspects of colonial society
interspersed with tender moments of hope. She mixes the strengths of
organizing with the pitfalls of unchecked optimism seamlessly. Being a
first-hand witness to many aspects of suffering that colonialism
induced in Africa, her pan-Africanism is a pragmatic approach to
building alliances and solidarities rooted in an anti-colonial
framework. Her memoirs are a testament to the various attempts that
have tried tirelessly to rethink what a world without suffering and a
world without colonialism might look like.

* anticolonialism
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* postcolonialism
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* Africa
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* Patrice Lumumba
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