André Blouin is the overlooked heroine of African independence

“I know you can die twice. First comes physical death… to be forgotten is the second death,” notes screenwriter Eva Blouen in the epilogue at the end of her mother’s autobiography.

Eva understands this sentiment more than most.

In the 1950s and 60s, her mother, the late André 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 the status of a key adviser to Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DR Congo and a revered independence hero .

She exchanged ideas with famous revolutionaries such as Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, Guinea’s Sekou Toure and Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bello, but her story is little known.

In an attempt to correct this injustice, Blouin’s memoir, My Country, Africa: The Autobiography of a Black Passionate, has been republished after being out of print for decades.

In the book, Blouen explained that her drive to decolonize was prompted by a personal tragedy.

She grew up between the Central African Republic (CAR) and Congo-Brazzaville, which at the time were French colonies called Ubangi-Shari and French Congo respectively.

In the 1940s, her two-year-old son René was treated in a hospital for malaria in the CAR.

Rene was of mixed race like his mother, and because he was a quarter African, he was denied medication. Rene died a few weeks later.

“My son’s death politicized me like nothing else,” Blouen wrote in her memoir.

She added that colonialism was “no longer the work of my maligned fate, but a system of evil whose tentacles reached every phase of African life.”

Blouin was born in 1921 to a 40-year-old white Frenchman and a 14-year-old black mother from the CAR.

They met when Bloen’s father was passing through her mother’s village to sell goods.

“Even today, the story of my father and my mother, although it caused me a lot of pain, still amazes me,” Blouen said.

When she was only three years old, Bloen’s father placed her in a convent for mixed races girls run by French nuns in nearby Congo-Brazzaville.

It was a common practice in the African colonies of France and Belgium – it is believed that thousands of children born to colonizers and African women were sent to orphanages and separated from the rest of society.

Blouin wrote: “The children’s home served as a kind of dumping ground for the refuse of this black and white society: children of mixed blood who did not fit in anywhere.”

Bloen’s experience in the orphanage was very negative – she wrote that the children in the institution were beaten, malnourished and verbally abused.

But she was headstrong – she ran away from an orphanage at the age of 15 after nuns tried to force her into marriage.

Eventually, Blouen married of her own free will, and twice. After René’s death, she moved with her second husband to Guinea, a West African country that was also ruled by the French.

At the time, Guinea was in the midst of a “political storm,” she wrote. France promised the country independence, but also required the people of Guinea to vote in a referendum on whether the country should maintain economic, diplomatic and military ties with France.

The Guinean branch of the pan-African movement Desemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) wanted the country to vote “no”, arguing that the country needed full liberation. In 1958, Blouin joined the campaign, traveling across the country to speak at rallies.

A year later, Guinea secured its independence by voting “no” and Sékou Touré, the leader of Guinea’s RDA, became the country’s first president.

By this point, Blouen had begun to acquire considerable influence in post-colonial Pan-Africanist circles. She wrote that after Guinea became independent, she used that influence to advise the new CAR President Barthelemy Boganda, persuading him to abandon a diplomatic row with Congolese Brazzaville’s post-independence leader Fulbert Yulu.

But consulting is not all that Blouen has to offer this rapidly changing Africa.

At a restaurant in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, she met a group of liberation activists from what would later become DR Congo. They called on her to help them mobilize Congolese women in the struggle against Belgian colonial rule.

Blouen was pulled in two directions. On the one hand, she had three young children – including Eva – to raise. On the other hand, “she had the restlessness of an idealist with a certain anger at the world as it was,” Eva, now 67, told the BBC.

In 1960, with Nkrumah’s encouragement, André Blouin flew alone to DR Congo. She joined well-known male liberation activists such as Pierre Mulele and Antoine Gizengo on the road, campaigning across the country’s 2.4 million square kilometers (906,000 square miles). She looked a striking figure as she wandered through the bush with coiffed hair, skin-tight dresses and chic translucent shades.

In Kahemba, near the Angolan border, Blouen and her team suspended their campaign to help build a base for Angolan independence fighters fleeing Portuguese colonial rule.

She addressed the crowd of women, encouraging them to push for gender equality as well as Congolese independence. She also had a knack for organization and strategy.

Soon the colonial powers and the international press became aware of Blouin’s work. They accused her of being, among many things, Nkrumah’s mistress, Sekou Toure’s agent and “the courtesan of all African heads of state”.

She attracted even more attention when she met Lumumba.

In his book, Blouen describes him as a “flexible and elegant” man, “whose name was written in golden letters in the sky of the Congo”.

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 speechwriter. The pair worked so closely that the press dubbed them “Lumum-Blouen”.

America’s Time magazine described Blouen as “a beautiful 41-year-old” whose “steely will and quick energy make her an invaluable political aide.”

But a series of cataclysms befell Lumum-Blouin’s team – and the newly formed government – just days into their tenure.

First, the army rebelled against its white Belgian commanders, sparking violence across the country. Belgium, Great Britain, and the United States then supported the secession of Katanga, a mineral-rich region in which all three Western countries were interested. Belgian paratroopers returned to the country, allegedly to restore security.

Blouin described the events as a “war of nerves” with traitors “organizing everywhere”.

She wrote that Lumumba was “a real hero of our time”, but also admitted that she found him naive and sometimes too soft.

“Indeed, the most cruelly deceived are often the most conscientious,” she said.

Within seven months of Lumumba taking office, army chief of staff Joseph Mabutu seized power.

On January 17, Lumumba was shot dead with the tacit support of Belgium. Britain may have been complicitwhile the US had previously plotted to kill Lumumba, fearing that he had sympathized with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

In her book, Blewen said that the shock and grief caused by Lumumba’s death left her speechless.

“Never before have I run out of things to say,” she wrote.

At the time of the murder, she lived in Paris, after the Mabutu coup, she was forced to go into exile.

To ensure that Blouen 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 Eva describes as “very protective” and “very maternal.”

Reflecting on her mother’s personality, Eva adds, “I wouldn’t want to stand up to her because even though she had a big and generous heart, she could be quite volatile.”

While Blouen was in exile, soldiers ransacked her family home and brutally beat her mother with a shotgun, permanently damaging her spine.

Blouen’s family was finally able to join her after months of separation.

They spent a short period in Algeria, where they were offered asylum by the country’s first post-independence president, Ahmed Ben Bello.

Then they settled in Paris. Blouen remained involved in Pan-Africanism from afar “in the form of articles and almost daily meetings,” Eva wrote in the memoir’s afterword.

When Blouen began writing her autobiography in the 1970s, she still had great respect for the independence movement to which she had devoted herself.

She praised Séka Touré, who until then had established a one-party state and ruthlessly suppressed freedom of expression.

However, Blouen was deeply saddened that Africa did not become “free” as she had hoped.

“It was not outsiders who hurt Africa the most, but the crippled will of the people and the selfishness of some of our leaders,” she wrote.

She was so worried about the death of her dream that she refused to take medicine for the cancer that was destroying her body.

“It was horrible to watch. I was absolutely powerless,” Eva said.

Blouin died in Paris on April 9, 1986 at the age of 65. According to Eva, the world met her mother’s death with “sad indifference.”

However, in some corners, she remains a source of inspiration. In the DR Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, a cultural center named after Blouin offers educational programs, conferences and film screenings, all underpinned by a pan-African spirit.

And through My Country, Africa, Blouin’s extraordinary story is being released for the second time, this time to a world that is very interested in the historical contribution of women.

New readers will learn about a girl who made her way from a hidden 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 January 7 in the UK