The memoir of Andrée Blouin, a key figure in the fight for African independence, is being re-released decades after it went out of print. Blouin worked closely with Patrice Lumumba and other revolutionary leaders, but her story has largely been forgotten.
Andrée Blouin was born to a French father and a mother from the Central African Republic. 'I know that you can die twice. First comes physical death... to be forgotten is a second death,' notes screenwriter Eve Blouin, in an epilogue at the end of her mother's autobiography.
In the 1950s and 60s, her mother, the late Andrée Blouin, threw herself into the fight for a free Africa, mobilising the Democratic Republic of Congo's women against colonialism and rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, DR Congo's first prime minister and a revered independence hero. She traded ideas with famed revolutionaries like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea's Sékou Touré and Algeria's Ahmed Ben Bella, yet her story is hardly known. In an attempt to remedy this injustice, Blouin's memoir, titled My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, is being re-released, having spent decades out of print. In the book, Blouin explained that her yearning for decolonisation was sparked by a personal tragedy. She grew up between Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, which at the time were French colonies named Ubangi-Shari and the French Congo respectively. René was mixed-race like his mother, and because he was one-quarter African, he was denied medication. Weeks later, René was dead.She added that colonialism 'was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached 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 the CAR. 'Even today, the story of my father and my mother, while giving me much pain, astonishes me still,' Blouin said.girls, which was run by French nuns in the neighbouring Congo-Brazzaville.- it is thought that thousands of children born to colonialists and African women were sent to orphanages and separated from the rest of societ
AFRICA COLONIALISM INDEPENDENCE PATRICE LUMUMBA REVOLUTION
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