Andrée Blouin

Andrée Blouin ( December 16, 1921 in Bessou , Oubangui-Chari - 1986 ) was a Central African political activist, civil rights activist and author. She dedicated her life to pan-Africanism and the liberation of Africa from colonial powers.

Live and act

Blouin's mother, Joséphine Wouassimba, came from Banziri , and her father, Pierre Gerbillat, was a French adventurer. She should only contact her parents in adulthood. When her father married a European, Blouin was locked in an orphanage, where she grew up separated from her family in Brazzaville. It was to be fourteen terrible years for her under the rule of the Joseph Sisters of Cluny , abandoned by all and cut off from their roots.

When her two-year-old son fell ill with malaria , the French colonial administration refused access to the necessary medicine, as only Europeans were entitled to it; her child succumbed to the disease. She once said:

“The death of my son politicized me like nothing else. […] The difference between my new belief and the old one was a question of clarity of vision. […] When I lost my tanned little boy, I finally saw the pattern that linked my own pain to that of my compatriots and knew I had to act. I started a campaign against the infamous quinine law. "

- Andrée Blouin

Her initially petty bourgeois life at the side of her second husband, the French engineer André Blouin, was interrupted by Ahmed Sékou Touré and his political charisma.

Knowing about the atrocities of the French colonialists, she organized a grassroots movement in the Belgian-ruled part of the Congo and was able to get women to protest against colonialism. She rose to the closest circle around Patrice Lumumba , but also advised Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea), and thus several anti-colonial leading figures, so that she took on three colonial powers.

The Belgian colonial power had them taken out of the country. On the way to the plane, she was asked by a colonial official if she was planning to return to the Congo; she replied by asking if he was planning to leave the Congo. On her flight to Rome she had hidden a document with the signatures of African politicians in her hairstyle; their plan was to organize a press conference in Rome. However, this was thwarted by a planned assassination attempt on her, whereupon she fled to Guinea. After Lumumba's murder in the Congo, Blouin was sentenced to death and fled again, this time to Paris. She lived in exile until her death.

A journalist once asked her if she was a communist; she replied, “Little fools call me what they want. I am an African nationalist. "

references

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Andrée Blouin. In: aflit.arts.uwa.edu.au. Accessed November 9, 2021 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Annette Joseph-Gabriel (2020). Remembering the Congolese women who fought for independence. Al Jazeera, June 30th. (Engl.) https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/remembering-congolese-women-fought-independence-200630091359924.html
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Ormerod, B., & Volet, JM (1996). Ecrits autobiographiques et engagement: le cas des Africaines d'expression française. French Review, 426-444.

Fonts

1. My Country, Africa. Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, autobiography with Jean MacKellar. Praeger, New York, 1983, ISBN 978-0030627590 .