Andrée Blouin – Africa’s unsung hero of independence

In the epilogue at the end of her mother’s biography, screenwriter Eve Blouin wrote, “I know you can die twice. First comes physical death… oblivion is the second death.”

Eve understands this feeling more than anyone.

In the 1950s and 1960s, her mother, the late Andre Blouin, threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, becoming Congolese’s first prime minister and a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, mobilizing the women of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against colonial rule. respected independence hero.

He exchanged ideas with famous revolutionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sekou Toure of Guinea and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, but his story is little known.

To remedy this injustice, Blouin’s memoir, My Country, Africa: The Autobiography of a Black Passionist, is being republished after decades out of print.

In the book, Blouin explained that his pursuit of decolonization was prompted by a personal tragedy.

He grew up between the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, then French colonies called Ubangi-Shari and French Congo respectively.

In the 1940s, his two-year-old son René was hospitalized for malaria in the CAR.

Rene was of mixed race like his mother, and because he was one-quarter African, he was not given medicine. A few weeks later, Rene died.

“My son’s death politicized me more than anything else could,” Blouin wrote in his memoirs.

He added that colonialism was “no longer a matter of my bad luck, but a system of evil whose tentacles reach 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 CAR.

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

“To this day, the story of my father and mother hurts me, but it still amazes me,” Blouin said.

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

That was it A common practice in the African colonies of France and Belgium – thousands of children born by colonialists and African women are thought to have been separated from the rest of society by being sent to orphanages.

Blouin wrote: “The orphanage served as a kind of dumping ground for the refuse of this black and white society: mixed-blood children who did not fit anywhere.”