Throughout the course of reading My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, I found myself stopping every so often to look at the picture on the cover. It’s the picture of a striking woman who is looking toward the camera with an expression that seems to indicate she’s been caught in the middle of a sentence. That woman also happens to be the book’s author, Andrée Blouin, and I found myself returning to the picture and wondering what that sentence might have been. What was Blouin in the midst of saying?

Born in a region of what was then the French Congo and is today part of the Central African Republic, Blouin emerged from a childhood of abuse to become a young, nomadic romantic and ultimately a well-respected Pan-African nationalist revolutionary. My Country, Africa is her extraordinary memoir. It is both a dramatic look at the realities behind European colonial rule in Africa, including its impact on the consciousness of the oppressed themselves, and an account of the factors that led to Blouin’s transformation and that of the world she entered. Originally published in 1983, it has now been reissued by Verso, with a foreword by Adom Getachew and Thomas Meaney, in an effort to advance our understanding of the 20th-century anti-colonial movement. In both form and content, it’s a book about far more than a single life—even one as extraordinary as Blouin’s. It’s a book about a liberation struggle that spanned an entire continent, as well as the limitations of that struggle. It is a story, as Blouin puts it, that is “inextricably entwined with Africa’s fate as a land of black people colonized by whites. The contradictions within my life are those from which Africa has suffered.”

My Country, Africa reads at first like two different books. The first is a powerful look into the author’s formative years. Blouin was born to a European man in his early 40s and a 14-year-old African girl, and the saga of her early years is compelling and painful, drawing the reader into what at first seems a “no exit” from hell and then later becomes an unusual journey. This second “book” tells a very different story: the remarkable transformation of a young, unfocused woman into a revolutionary Pan-Africanist deeply committed to ending colonialism (and later, neocolonialism) but ultimately frustrated by the limitations of actual African independence. Yet to separate these “books” would be a mistake, since together they form part of a much larger story: the story of European empire and colonization and of African resistance and revolution—and the eventual liberation of a continent that saw its people kidnapped by slavers and then was drawn and quartered by the various European powers in the 19th century.

The intertwined nature of Blouin’s story is revealed almost immediately. Reading the description of how her father, a French businessman working in what was then a French colony, ended up having a child with a 14-year-old girl—whom Blouin describes as having been very pretty and captivating—leaves one screaming with rage, and not just at the criminality of the “marriage” of the 14-year-old to a much older European man but also at the system of colonial oppression and male supremacy that enabled it.

Blouin describes the evolution of this relationship between her parents in such a way that it almost appears as sarcasm. How, one asks, can Blouin profess any degree of love for a father such as hers—or, for that matter, for a mother who, during most of her life, identified beauty, stature, and success with whiteness?

To the extent to which there is an answer, it can be found only through reading the entirety of the book. It’s a story about the confusion of a child born from such a relationship, of the denial, the revelation, and the defiance—a pattern that, as Blouin points out, might offer us an account of Africa in general, a continent raped by the barbarities of European colonialism. From the start, it is both eye-opening and jaw-dropping. As the child of this “union” between a European and an African, Blouin is designated by the French term metisse, meaning “mixed race.” Living in a colonial society of white supremacy and male supremacy, she finds that her future rests in the hands of men in general, and white men in particular.

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Although Blouin’s father married her mother, this marriage had no validity for Europeans. Thus her father could, at his own discretion, also establish a so-called legitimate marriage with a European woman. Although polygamy was accepted by Blouin’s tribal or ethnic group, it was not accepted, either legally or socially, by Europeans, and when her father chose to leave the area where Blouin was born with his European wife, he ordered Blouin sent to an orphanage in Brazzaville, in another area of what was then known as the French Congo. It was there, in the orphanage, that she remained a de facto prisoner for 14 years under unbelievably inhumane conditions.

Had My Country, Africa 
ended here, it would still have been a powerful examination of white supremacy, patriarchy, and child abuse, and how this was embedded in the very culture and social organization of European colonialism in Africa. But it would also have joined the long list of books about individuals who have managed to survive such disasters more or less intact. Blouin’s story, however, is about what happens when those individuals come together, when they begin to do something about the unfair facts of their lives.

The beginning of her transformation comes in early adulthood. After two relationships with European men, Blouin is traumatized by the death of her son. The death of a child is always an indescribable agony for a parent, one from which many never recover. But when that death is easily preventable, it casts even stronger and longer-lasting reverberations. In the case of Blouin’s son, his death could have been prevented had he received malaria medication. But he was denied the medicine, and no amount of pleading by his anguished mother would convince the French authorities to release it: As far as they were concerned, this medicine was reserved for Europeans. This incident, above all else, set in motion the events that, combined with a second, near-mystical occurrence, would transform Blouin into an activist for African liberation.

Blouin’s second moment of radicalization came a little later: In a store, she saw a picture of Sékou Touré, then the leader of the independence struggle for Guinea-Conakry (and later the president of an independent Guinea). The picture, she recalled, almost spoke to her—in fact, she thought she heard the words of Touré, calling on her to fully embrace the African freedom struggle and to reject much of her former life.

And that is exactly what she did. Blouin joined and became very active in the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, which was initially a regional anti-colonial formation in so-called French West Africa, and she also became a fierce proponent of Africa’s freedom from European colonialism, traveling throughout West Africa promoting the cause of independence from France. In addition, Blouin was a key intermediary in efforts to resolve disputes among the advocates of independence, and her work would evolve in fascinating directions. In 1960, she was asked to organize the Feminine Movement for African Solidarity in what was then the Belgian Congo. With the recommendation of Guinea-Conakry’s Sékou Touré, Blouin undertook this major task. The organization’s platform included the following goals:

  To make all women, no matter what age, literate.
  To promote an understanding of health and hygiene.
  To combat alcoholism.
  To work for the protection of the abandoned woman and child.
  To work for the social progress of the African.

The Feminine Movement for African Solidarity, which is rarely mentioned in discussions of African anti-colonialism, organized thousands of women. As indicated by its platform, it was a formation that addressed not just colonialism but also patriarchy; in that sense, it was fighting on two fronts. This dual struggle became critically important for Blouin, who saw in the male supremacy practiced in Africa not only a force for the continued suppression of women but also one that countered the potential contained in African liberation.

Blouin’s work in building this women’s formation also positioned her at the heart of the struggle for the independence of the Belgian Congo, and it was there that she met and became a close confidant of Patrice Lumumba, the iconic freedom fighter who would go on to become the first prime minister of an independent Congo, only to be murdered by traitorous elements actively encouraged and supported by the US Central Intelligence Agency.

It is this section 
of My Country, Africa, detailing a moment of triumph that would soon be undone and lead to decades of tragedy, that is perhaps the most engrossing and heartbreaking part of the book. Blouin was there at the very center of this struggle, someone who became a thorn in the side of the Belgians and their Congolese neocolonial servants—for example, the notorious Joseph Mobutu, who would eventually become the president of Congo after Lumumba’s assassination (and change the name of the country to the Republic of Zaire).

In these years, Blouin’s activities ranged from what was then the French Congo to French Guinea and the Belgian Congo. Few causes were unworthy of her attention, and some of the greatest names in the African freedom struggles—Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Congo’s Patrice Lumumba—became comrades. The organizing of women, and the specific request for her assistance in Congo, were particularly noteworthy. Both Nkrumah and Touré were major proponents of Blouin’s work. And once in Congo, she became an important adviser to Lumumba—so important that the Belgians and their African allies wanted her out of the country.

I found Blouin’s story astounding, and it was all the more remarkable to me because although she was seemingly everywhere, I had never heard of her before. While I’m not claiming to be an Africa specialist, I am quite familiar with many of the major—as well as minor—names in the African freedom struggles of the 20th century. As I moved toward the end of Blouin’s book, I kept asking myself: How could I have not known about her? Was it simply that I had somehow overlooked the material on her life and work?

The simple—yet still incomplete—answer would certainly be that history is frequently, if not generally, written by and about men. This includes even the progressive histories, which often focus on the work of great men and their particular contributions. But there are other reasons, too, one suspects. Blouin’s story—compelling, painful, and heroic—is also a story about a person caught between many different worlds, and it’s one that can’t be easily summarized or categorized. Her early life as the child of a mixed-race relationship between a man who was over 40 and a girl who was just 14; her miseducation and brutalization as a child; her romantic relationships with European men and, separately, her intense political relationships with African revolutionaries—all point to the complicated and entangled histories of European colonialism, African anti-colonialism, and patriarchy.

In this way, My Country, Africa is not just an account of one individual. Blouin’s life is one that overlaps and is intertwined with the larger story of empire, oppression, resistance, and transformation in Africa. Indeed, the book can be read as a near allegory for the conditions that the continent faced while colonized by Europe and its struggle for liberation, a struggle that necessitated—and still necessitates—awareness, repudiation, progressive action, and the recognition of the constant possibility of failure.

Told through the eyes of a Black woman, the story reveals the overdetermined nature of colonialism and the manner through which male supremacy operated as a partner to European domination (including among the oppressed). And this story, despite not having a so-called happy ending, is one that will resonate with all those who engage in emancipatory struggles.

For Blouin and for countless other revolutionary women, there was no going back, regardless of defeats or tragedies. The course had been chosen; the word had been given. Perhaps in that picture on the cover, Blouin was not caught in mid-sentence. Perhaps she had just finished one.