“I know you can die twice. First comes physical death… being forgotten is the second death,” notes screenwriter Eve Blouin, in the epilogue at the end of her mother’s autobiography.
Eve understands this feeling more than most.
In the 1950s and 1960s, her mother, the late Andrée Blouin, threw herself into the struggle for a free Africa, mobilizing the women of the Democratic Republic of the Congo against colonialism and rising to become a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DR Congo and a revered hero of independence.
She exchanged ideas with famous revolutionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Sékou Touré of Guinea and Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, but her story is hardly known.
In an attempt to right this wrong, Blouin’s memoirs are being republished under the title My Country, Africa: The Autobiography of a Black Passionate, after decades of absence.
In the book, Blouin explained that her longing for decolonization was fueled by a personal tragedy.
She grew up between the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, which at the time were French colonies under the names Ubangi-Shari and French Congo.
In the 1940s, her two-year-old son, René, was treated in a hospital for malaria in the CAR.
René was a mixed race as was his mother, and since he was one-quarter African, he was not medicated. Weeks later, René was dead.
“My son’s death politicized me like nothing else,” Blouin wrote in her memoirs.
She added that colonialism “was no longer a matter of my own blackened destiny, 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 Blou’s father passed through her mother’s village to sell goods.
“Even today, the story of my father and my mother, even though it caused me a lot of pain, still amazes me,” Blouin said.
When she was only three years old, Blou’s father placed her in a convent for mixed races girls, led by French nuns in neighboring Congo-Brazzaville.
This was it a common practice in the African colonies of France and Belgium – it is believed that thousands of children born to colonialists and African women were sent to orphanages and separated from the rest of society.
Blouin wrote: “The orphanage served as a kind of dustbin for this black and white society: children of mixed blood who fit nowhere.”
Blouin’s experience in the orphanage was extremely negative – she wrote that the children in the institution were whipped, underfed and verbally abused.
But she was headstrong – she ran away from an orphanage at 15 after nuns tried to force her into marriage.
Blouin ended up marrying of her own free will, twice. After René’s death, she moved with her second husband to Guinea, a West African country also ruled by the French.
At the time, Guinea was in the middle of a “political storm,” she wrote. France promised the country independence, but also required Guineans to vote in a referendum on whether or not the country would maintain economic, diplomatic and military ties with France.
The Guinean branch of the pan-African movement Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) wanted the country to vote “no”, arguing that the country needed full liberation. In 1958, Blouin joined the campaign, driving around the country to speak at rallies.
A year later, Guinea secured its independence by voting against, and Sékou Touré, the leader of Guinea’s RDA, became the country’s first president.
By this point, Blouin had begun to develop considerable influence in post-colonial, pan-African circles. She wrote that after Guinea became independent, she used this influence to advise new CAR President Barthélemy Boganda, persuading him to back down in a diplomatic row with Congo-Brazzaville’s post-independence leader, Fulbert Youlou.
But consulting was not all Blouin had to offer this rapidly changing Africa.
In a restaurant in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, she met a group of liberation activists from what would later become the DR Congo. They invited her to help them mobilize Congolese women in the fight against Belgian colonial rule.
Blouin was pulled in two directions. On the one hand, she had three young children – including Eve – to raise. On the other hand, “she had the restlessness of an idealist with a certain anger at the world as it was,” Eve, now 67, told the BBC.
In 1960, with Nkrumah’s encouragement, Andrée Blouin flew alone to DR Congo. She joined prominent male liberation activists such as Pierre Mulele and Antoine Gizenga on the road, campaigning across 2.4 million square kilometers (906,000 square miles) of the country. She cut a striking figure, traipsing through the bushes with her tousled hair, skin-tight dresses and chic, sheer shades.
In Kahemba, near the Angolan border, Blouin and her team halted their campaign to help build a base for Angolan independence fighters fleeing Portuguese colonial rule.
She addressed a crowd of women, encouraging them to stand up for gender equality as well as Congolese independence. She also had a sense of organization and strategy.
Soon the colonial powers and the international press became aware of Blouin’s work. She was accused of being, among many things, Nkrumah’s mistress, Sékou Touré’s agent and “the courtesan of all African heads of state”.
She attracted even more attention when she met Lumumba.
In his book, Blouin describes him as a “slender and elegant” man whose “name is written in golden letters in the Congolese sky”.
When the country gained independence in 1960, Lumumba became its first prime minister. He was only 34 years old.
Lumumba chose Blouin as his “chief of protocol” and speech writer. The pair worked so closely together that the media nicknamed them “Lumum-Blouin”.
Blouin was described by the US magazine Time as a “handsome 41-year-old” whose “steely will and quick energy make her an invaluable political aide.”
But a series of disasters struck the Lumum-Blouin team – and the newly formed government – just days into their term.
First, the army revolted against its white Belgian commanders, sparking violence throughout the nation. Then Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States supported the secession of Katanga, a mineral-rich region in which all three Western countries had interests. Belgian paratroopers flew back into the country, ostensibly to restore security.
Blouin described the events as a “war of nerves”, with traitors “organizing everywhere”.
She wrote that Lumumba was “a true hero of the modern age”, but also admitted that she thought he was naive and sometimes too soft.
“It is true that those of the best faith are often most cruelly deceived,” she said.
Within seven months of Lumumba taking office, Army Chief of Staff Joseph Mobutu took power.
On January 17, Lumumba was killed by firing squad, with the tacit support of Belgium. It is possible that Great Britain was complicitwhile the US had previously organized plots to kill Lumumba – fearing he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
In her book, Blouin said the shock and grief caused by Lumumba’s death left her speechless.
I’ve never run out of things to say before, she wrote.
At the time of the murder, she was living in Paris, having been forced into exile following Mobutu’s coup.
To ensure that Blouin would not speak to the international press, the authorities forced her family – who had moved to Congo – to remain in the country as “hostages”.
The breakup was difficult for Blouin, who Eve describes as “very protective” and “very motherly.”
Referring to her mother’s personality, Eve adds: “One would not want to oppose her, because although she had a big and generous heart, she could be quite fickle.”
While Blouin was in exile, soldiers ransacked her family home and brutally beat her mother with a pistol, permanently damaging her spine.
Blouin’s family was finally able to join her after months of separation.
They spent a short time in Algeria – where they were offered refuge by the country’s first post-independence president, Ahmed Ben Bella.
Then they settled in Paris. Blouin remained involved in Pan-Africanism from afar “in the form of articles and almost daily meetings,” Eve wrote in the memoir’s epilogue.
When Blouin began writing her autobiography in the 1970s, she still had great respect for the independence movements to which she had devoted herself.
She praised Sékou Touré, who by that point had established a one-party state and ruthlessly stifled freedom of expression.
Blouin, however, became deeply disheartened that Africa had not become “free,” as she had hoped.
“It is not outsiders who have damaged Africa the most, but the crippled will of the people and the selfishness of some of our leaders,” she wrote.
She mourned the death from her dream, so much so that she refused to take medication for the cancer that was ravaging her body.
“It was terrible to watch. I was completely powerless,” said Eve.
Blouin died in Paris on April 9, 1986, at the age of 65. According to Eve, the world met her mother’s death with “sad indifference”.
Nevertheless, she remains an inspiration in some corners. In the capital of DR Congo, Kinshasa, a cultural center named after Blouin offers a variety of educational programs, conferences and film screenings – all underpinned by a pan-African ethos.
And through My Country, Africa, Blouin’s extraordinary story comes out for the second time, this time to a world that is showing greater interest in the historical contributions of women.
New readers will learn about a girl who went from being hidden by the colonial system to fighting for the freedom of millions of black Africans.
My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passionaria, published by Verso Books, goes on sale in the UK on January 7
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