My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black PasionariaAndrée 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.
