Andrée Blouin was Africa’s forgotten power broker

The memoirs of the Central African revolutionary Andrée Blouin tell the story of a woman who witnessed firsthand the ecstatic highs and tragic lows of Africa’s struggle for independence.

Ernest Harsch

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My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andrée Blouin (Verso Books, 2025)

Andrée Blouin was one of the closest allies of Patrice Lumumba, the charismatic Congolese politician who led his country to independence before his murder in 1961. American and Belgian critics of the slain leader often held Blouin in contempt. To them, she was a ‘fanatic’, possibly a communist agent, certainly strongly opposed to Western power. Almost 40 years since her death in 1986, aged just 64, Andrée has drifted somewhat into obscurity.

The recent reissue of her long-out-of-print autobiography, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, provides evidence of her enduring importance. It comes at a time of renewed interest in the politics of Central Africa. The 2024 award-winning documentary film by Johan Grimonprez about American jazz music’s uncomfortable relationship with empire, Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, quotes her extensively. This renewed attention is overdue. Her life story is a remarkable tale of personal and political struggle by a truly extraordinary individual.

As with many activists, Andrée’s engagement was shaped by firsthand experiences. The late colonial era, when the continent’s subject peoples were starting to mobilise on a grand scale to throw off foreign domination, was the backdrop to her life. So much seemed possible. Yet optimism often ended in disappointment. The continent’s more conservative leaders saw sovereignty mainly as a replacement of European faces with African ones, leaving intact existing borders and social relations fostered by colonialism.

Blouin chose instead to side with the interests of ordinary people and viewed political struggle in Pan-Africanist, rather than nationalist, terms. Her ‘country’ did not have one flag, but many.

Personal trauma and growth

Andrée was born on 16 December 1921. Her father was a French businessman, and her mother the 14-year-old daughter of a Banziri chief in the French colony of Oubangui-Chari, today’s Central African Republic. Aged barely three, Blouin was sent off to a Catholic orphanage in Brazzaville, capital of the small French-ruled Congo, across the river from the much larger Belgian colony of the same name.

The orphanage in which she spent her early life was created for unwanted mixed-race girls guilty of the ‘sin’ of having been born of European and African liaisons. It was, as Andrée put it in her later years, ‘a kind of waste bin for the waste products of this black-and-white society’. The orphanage’s nuns, she recalled, were especially severe. They fed the girls sparingly and punished them for the slightest infraction. Blouin quickly developed a reputation as a troublemaker.

At 17, Andrée and two friends escaped by scaling the orphanage’s walls. For her, there were too many new sights, sounds and customs outside of these walls to stay put. In My Country, Africa, Andrée writes that she ‘watched with the ardent eyes of one who had been deprived of her Africa for fourteen years’.

In the years that followed, she lived in different French and Belgian colonies, worked as a seamstress, managed a transport enterprise and a plantation (with a hundred employees), ran her own parcel delivery business, and wrote prize-winning poetry.

Far from the clutches of the orphanage’s nuns, who planned early marriages between Andrée and other mixed-race orphans, she was free to pursue her own relationships. The first two were with European men, ‘of the race that had so often hurt me’. Both unions eventually soured, but gave her two children, a daughter and a son. When her son, at two, became seriously ill with malaria, she tried to obtain quinine to treat it. But the French authorities reserved the medicine for ‘whites only’. Her son died, a tragedy that, she wrote in her memoir, ‘politicised me like nothing else could’.

Rebirth in Guinea

In 1948, Andrée would meet a former French artillery officer and mining expert named André Blouin. The couple would marry four years later, stay together for a quarter-century and have two children. Unlike many other white men in Africa, André ‘had escaped the colonialist mentality’, she wrote.

The couple moved to Guinea in West Africa after André got a job researching alluvial gold mining in the country. The 1950s were a feverish political time across Africa, and André supported his wife’s activity throughout it. In Guinea, the strongest nationalist party was the local branch of the regional Rassemblement démocratique africain (RDA). It was led by Ahmed Sékou Touré, a fiery trade union leader. Andrée saw her own developing views crystalised by Touré’s determination to achieve genuine independence from colonial rule. His enthusiasm had, she wrote, given her a ‘second birth’.

The most pressing issue for the RDA was a referendum called by French president Charles de Gaulle in which voters in the colonies would choose whether or not to belong to a new French ‘Community’, which would retain military, diplomatic and economic ties to the metropole. Touré’s RDA saw this as a manoeuvre to perpetuate French domination and called for a ‘no’ vote. Andrée eagerly jumped into the fray, travelling hundreds of kilometres with RDA activists. Twice, she and several companions were almost killed in mysterious road ‘accidents’. Officials soon ordered her expulsion and fired her husband from his job.

By the time a majority of Guineans had voted ‘no’ – making it the only one of France’s 18 African colonies to do so – André and Andrée had fled the country. With Touré at the helm, the Blouins returned, he to work for the government and she to further promote Pan-African causes. Through Touré, she met Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah and recorded a radio appeal to African women to champion continental unity in a broadcast that went out in both French and English.

Before returning to Guinea, Andrée had already engaged in several diplomatic initiatives of her own. She mediated a political rift between the presidents of the Central African Republic and Congo-Brazzaville, and another between clashing parties within Congo-Brazzaville. In the latter conflict, her intervention helped to end fighting that had claimed hundreds of lives.

Fighting for a free Congo

The year 1960 was pivotal for Africa. Seventeen colonies won their independence. France, Britain and Belgium had decided that maintaining formal rule was becoming too risky and began seeking new, less formal ways to retain economic and political influence. The ambiguities of that process were nowhere starker than in Congo, the vast, resource-rich territory that Belgians had pillaged for decades.

Although Andrée had previously spent some time in Congo, even learning a couple of Congolese languages, her introduction to that country’s politics came by chance. One day, at a restaurant in the Guinean capital, she overheard several Congolese speaking Lingala and struck up a conversation with them in that language. One happened to be Pierre Mulele, a leader of the Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA), who was in Guinea hoping to secure Touré’s support. Soon, the head of the PSA, Antoine Gizenga, invited her to help mobilise Congolese women. With Touré’s blessing, she agreed.

In early 1960, Andrée spent months touring Kwilu and other Congolese provinces addressing rallies of thousands of women and men with a PSA caravan. She organised a pro-independence women’s association, which by the end of May had recruited 45,000 members. On the border with Portuguese-ruled Angola, she also helped establish a village of Angolan refugees, an early rear base for the rebel Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA).

The Belgian authorities sought to keep the Congolese fractured by playing on ethnic divisions and promoting more conservative currents against those aligned with Lumumba. They also bristled at Andrée’s influence, denigrating her for being a woman and a foreign communist agent. Despite Lumumba’s strong objections, they ordered her expulsion. On her way out of the country, Andrée took with her a protocol signed by a majority of Congolese parties. Her dissemination of that document to the international media helped undermine Belgium’s plan to bypass Lumumba by handing power to a moderate.

On 30 June 1960, with Lumumba as its prime minister, Congo gained formal independence. Listening to the radio in Guinea, Andrée heard his hard-hitting speech. The words were already familiar to her, since the speech Lumumba delivered – destined to stand as one of the most famous critiques of colonialism – was one she had helped to draft before her untimely departure. Ever discreet, she made no mention of that detail in her autobiography; her daughter Eve reports it in the epilogue to My Country, Africa, citing as evidence the testimony of a Congolese security officer.

Dashed hope – but perseverance

At Lumumba’s request, Andrée returned to Congo, where she became his chief of protocol. But they had little time to build the newly independent state. Belgian politicians and businessmen continued to promote an array of factional splits and opponents, including a breakaway in the mineral-rich province of Katanga. America’s CIA recruited a young army colonel, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), who soon ousted Lumumba in a military coup. Andrée was again expelled.

For several months, chaos reigned. Mercenaries from Belgium, South Africa and elsewhere flooded into Congo. United Nations peacekeepers were generally ineffective, but in some cases, they sabotaged nationalist efforts to retain control. Pro-Lumumba forces led by Gizenga attempted to rally opposition. As Lumumba tried to join them, he was captured, taken to Katanga and murdered.

Andrée was in Switzerland in January 1961 when she learned of Lumumba’s death. To journalists who confronted her and asked for comment, she said that ‘all the hot words, the passionate outpourings that had been the substance of my days for so long, had been drained from me in this loss. I was unable to speak.’

Steeled by a lifetime of difficulties and disappointments, Andrée eventually bounced back. In 1962, after the victory of Algeria’s independence war against France, she and her family moved to Algiers. For at least the next decade, the Algerian capital served as a ‘Mecca’ for revolutionaries worldwide, as Guinea-Bissau’s legendary guerilla leader Amílcar Cabral put it.

Andrée wrote regularly for El Moudjahid, the newspaper of Algeria’s National Liberation Front. Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella asked her to oversee humanitarian relief for orphans of the Congolese struggle. She championed the massive rebellion of ‘Lumumbist’ rebels that shook eastern Congo in the early and mid-1960s, led in Kwilu by her old friend Mulele.

She was often visited by a diverse range of revolutionaries from South Africa, Mozambique, Angola, Eritrea and other African fronts, even Palestinians and American Black Panthers. Her living room, she quipped, was ‘the chancellery of the United States of Africa’.

After moving to Paris, where she would die of cancer in 1986, she continued to write essays and books throughout the 1970s and 1980s, including her autobiography, which was first published in 1983 but was out of print before Verso Books reissued the book in 2025. According to her daughter Eve Blouin, Andrée remained convinced to the end that Pan-African revolution would eventually overcome all the neocolonial intrigues and that ‘the future belonged to the unity of free, sovereign peoples’.

Almost 40 years on from her death, the value of Andrée’s work remains in its sober assessments of the prospects and aims of many prominent African leaders, the heart-wrenching descriptions of human sufferings, and the sharp dissections of colonialism’s many injustices and absurdities.            

Ernest Harsch, a research scholar at Columbia University’s Institute of African Studies, has been writing about the continent since the 1970s. His most recent book is Corruption, Class, and Politics in Ghana. The above article originally appeared on the Jacobin website (jacobin.com).

*Third World Resurgence No. 365, 2025/4, pp 30-32