Andree Blouin (Photo: Wikimedia)
One of the enduring impacts of the Black Lives Matter movement was that it enlarged the ranks of those who look to understand colonialism. It’s not just a matter of the past, but something that has active legacies that shape society and the world today.
The republishing of My Country, Africa, the autobiography of activist Andree Blouin, is an important contribution to this process.
Blouin’s book provides a rich account of life under French colonial rule in Ubangi-Shari—what is today the Central African Republic. She writes how her French father forcibly separated her from her African mother and abandoned her to a cruel orphanage for metisse—mixed heritage—girls. And she describes the poverty she experienced once she ran away.
But more than that, the book is an insight into how peoples’ ideas change and are shaped by their experiences. It shows how this can be accelerated when people are engaged in struggle.
Despite her later career as an activist for African liberation movements, the harsh realities of colonial rule hadn’t always instilled her with a will to challenge that system. There is nothing automatic or uniform about people’s responses, ideas and conclusions about the oppression they face.
For Blouin, the turning point in her life would be the preventable death of her infant son. Having caught malaria, he was denied the necessary medicine, quinine, to cure it.
A racist law prohibited non-whites from using the medicine. Her fight to repeal the law would open the door to further political campaigning.
There’s much to be said of Blouin’s political career in and of itself—the peak of which was her time campaigning for Congolese independence from Belgium. This led her to work with the Pan-African nationalist Patrice Lumumba.
The Belgians wanted to appear as though they were prepared to accept independence for Congo. But at the same time they manoeuvred to prop up leaders who were co-operative with them.
They were working to undermine the likes of Lumumba who was uncompromising on complete and total removal of Belgian influence and presence in the country.
Unsurprisingly, this made Lumumba and his associates a target for the Belgian colonialists.
Blouin’s account of her time in Congo is a rich but infuriating insight into how the Belgians were prepared to use every dirty trick against Lumumba’s supporters.
Blouin was not spared these attacks—and was vilified by the Belgians using both racism and sexism. For instance, they called her the “mistress” of various political figures, when in truth she was their comrade. Evidently, they found the idea of an independent African woman in defiance of colonialism very threatening.
Blouin’s autobiography is a powerful account of an Africa shaking off the shackles of colonialism and finding its feet after independence. But it is also incredibly tragic. It ends on a low about the prospects of a liberated Africa. Of course, in many ways this is understandable.
Blouin would witness the brutal coup and assassination of Lumumba alongside her own exile from Congo and the Central African Republic. And she would see the advance of “corrupt” politicians who were more loyal to “neo-colonialism” than to their own people.
But we should not share the author’s despair. Dying in 1986, a few years after the first publication of her autobiography, Blouin would not live to see some of the explosive movements that keep alive the potential for social justice across Africa.
They range from the Sudanese revolution in 2019 to the #EndSARS movement against police brutality in Nigeria in 2020 and the revolt in Niger in 2023.
All of these have been critical in challenging the corrupt regimes that have kept millions of people in Africa in poverty and repression. The end of these regimes will rely on the same masses overthrowing and dismantling their state, and reorganising society along totally different lines.
- My Country, Africa by Andree Blouin, Verso, 2025
