The Inventor of the Future

“As a punishment for the crime of being born of a white father and a black mother I spent my early years in a prison for children.” So begins My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria by Andrée Blouin, first published in 1983 and recently republished by Verso Books after long being out of print. Blouin’s very birth troubled a colonial order erected on a strict racial hierarchy. She would make sure that her life would be far more of a problem for it.

Blouin’s very birth troubled a colonial order erected on a strict racial hierarchy. She would make sure that her life would be far more of a problem for it.

Blouin was an active partisan in the struggles for independence across West and Equatorial Africa. She worked alongside Guinnea’s Sékou Touré for the country’s contentious independence from France, was an associate of Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, and, most famously, was a loyal comrade of Patrice Lumumba in Congo. Her striking, assertive presence in the entirely male-dominated sphere of politics posthumously earned her a series of predictably gendered insinuations and epithets: the “red Mata Hari,” “Eva Peron of Central Africa,” “the woman behind Lumumba.” Sadly, today, she remains little-known outside of those well-versed in this history. Her funeral in Paris, notes her daughter, was attended by only a “small circle of activists and the faded old guard of the great anticolonial epic of the 1960s.”

Hers is a journey worthy of a novel, and indeed, My Country, Africa reads like one (a noted historian of Congo once likened her story to “a chapter out of Balzac”). The complexity of Blouin’s desires, the ambiguities of being mixed-race, the portrayal of her largehearted and vulnerable mother as a kind of personification of Africa itself, her conflicted search for recognition from her father who had abandoned her, her acute observations of the pathologies of colonial existence: all come together to form an extraordinary, gripping portrait. Yet the work Blouin had envisioned for herself may not resemble the final, published text—which, despite its billing as an “autobiography,” she was not the sole author of. Instead, the book is a mixture of Blouin’s own notes and a series of interviews with a friend, Jean MacKellar, who transcribed and composed them into the book that we get. Blouin wasn’t very pleased by the final version: she had wanted it to be a testament to her politics, but her editor, she felt, had focused far too much on the personal and the psychological. The text, Blouin’s daughter notes, also has several instances of racial essentialization and anti-Soviet sentiment that would have troubled her mother.

The epithet Blouin chose for herself, “black pasionaria,” was inspired by another woman revolutionary, Dolores Ibarruri (who coined the slogan ¡No Pasarán! during the Spanish Civil War). Ibarruri’s own remarkable autobiography, They Shall Not Pass: The Autobiography of La Pasionaria, is a book perhaps closer to the one Blouin would have had in mind. It takes one through the history of working-class struggle in the Basque country to situate her own revolutionary coming of age, moving intricately between the personal and historical in her accounts of the republican era and the civil war.

Imperfect as it might be, at least in Blouin’s eyes, Black Pasionaria remains an invaluable (and exceedingly rare) testimony by a female anticolonial revolutionary, and Blouin’s daughter, along with the editors of Verso’s new Southern Questions series, are due enormous credit for republishing it. It’s just that one has to look beyond the story in its pages to truly appreciate how extraordinary Blouin’s political life was.

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Blouin was born in the French colony of Oubangui-Chari (today the Central African Republic) to a Banziri mother and a French businessman father. Soon, he would abandon her mother for a “proper” Belgian wife and deposit young Blouin to a notoriously cruel orphelinat de métisses (Orphanage for Mixed-race children) run by the Catholic church in Brazzaville in today’s Republic of Congo. On her eighth birthday she accidentally witnessed a procession of Black men, chained to each other, naked and bloodied, shouting “We want to be French citizens” as they were being whipped. “Until then I had thought that the suffering that was the lot of my companions and myself was special to ourselves . . . due to the fact that we were illegitimate,” Andrée recalls. This was the moment that first made her consider that “black people suffered because they were black.” It would take a long journey, through many personal tragedies and humiliations, before that consideration became a political cause.

When she was seventeen, penniless and with no family to support her, Andrée would escape from the orphanage, launching a precarious search for freedom in a world specifically designed to deny it to people like her. All throughout the colony’s history, the métisse (mixed race) occupied a peculiar place in its social order. They might have had a few more rights than their Black compatriots (Blouin was granted French citizenship, for instance) and received some education (even if of a regressively religious kind), but had to experience the countless quotidian forms of humiliation and degradation that inundate social relations in racialized societies.

Being a métisse woman also had its own unique tribulations. Seen by white men as objects of illicit desire, for many of them the only path to security—financial and otherwise—was in becoming a white man’s mistress. Blouin fervently resisted this path, choosing instead to eke out a meager living as a tailor. Still, she would find her relationships and marriages inescapably determined by the fact of her race.

The first was with Roger, a manager of the Kasai company, one of the several companies through which the exploitation of Belgian Congo (today Democratic Republic of Congo) was carried out. Whenever his friends came home, Blouin writes, she would have to hide: it was unseemly for a métisse woman to act as the woman of a white man’s house. Roger would never recognize the baby they would have together. The second was a marriage with Charles, a former French soldier so virulently racist that he would not allow Blouin’s mother to enter their house or see her grandchildren. “The fact that I had adapted to our life at all was due to my education which had taught me that my life as a métisse should be one of resignation and poverty, hoping for nothing better than a housekeeper to a white man,” Blouin acknowledges. “If we found scorn for our persons within our own house that was only our lot.” At least, she reasoned, this man was willing to recognize their children and offer them some security.

Even that meager aspiration turned out to be too optimistic. A few years into their marriage, their two-year-old son René comes down with a bout of malaria: a curable disease, but one for which quinine, the medicine, was restricted to only Whites by law. Andrée had to helplessly watch her son, who was one-quarter African, suffer and die. This event, told in extraordinarily powerful detail, is the fulcrum of the book’s narrative. In the intensity of her grief and anger, Blouin writes, “I understood at last that it was no longer a matter of my own maligned fate but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life.” She had suffered from countless indignities and heartbreaks since her childhood. She had been a witness to the horrors Black Africans—prisoners and workers—had to endure. She had rebelled, even spoken out now and again against injustice. But now she “saw finally the pattern connecting my own pain with that of my countrymen.” What once seemed individual misfortune now appeared clearly as a system of oppression.

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By the 1950s, the old European empires had ceased to be viable. Leaders in London and Paris hoped to ensure a gradual transfer of power, letting go of their former colonies in a way that didn’t cost them much of their influence. In 1958 Charles De Gaulle offered a referendum to France’s colonies in West and Equatorial Africa: they could either choose to remain a part of a “French Community” or become fully independent, severed from any aid and support from France. Most countries were expected to, and eventually did, choose the former. The only exception was Guinea, where the trade unionist Sékou Touré lead a successful campaign for full and immediate independence.

For Blouin, living in Guinea at the time, this campaign was the final step in her politicization—the moment when her already awakened consciousness found a concrete project. “When people have been abused and deprived of their humanness for too long, it becomes hard for them to imagine that a better life is possible,” she acknowledged. “Even when they realize that they deserve better, they still may lack the means to reach out for it . . . still they may not know the correct path on which to move forward.” To be successful, anticolonial aspirations had to find an organized expression. Blouin joined Touré’s party and “hurled myself in to this compelling political struggle, proud to be associated, at last, in my people’s cause.”

“When people have been abused and deprived of their humanness for too long,” Blouin acknowledged, “it becomes hard for them to imagine that a better life is possible.”

Both the euphoric highs and tragic lows of that cause would come two years later, in 1960—by any account, the most eventful year in the history of decolonization, when seventeen African countries would get their independence in what came to be known as the “year of Africa.” At a historic session, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution calling for an end to colonial rule and asserting the right of self-determination (all the European colonial powers along with the United States abstained). For those on the cusp of independence, the vote was seen as a victory for democracy—one country, one vote—in an international order forever structured around hierarchies. In politics and culture, it felt like the formidable old structures of empire and racial hierarchy might finally be crumbling for good, that something new could be built on its ruins. (The recent documentary Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, in which Blouin plays a starring role, brilliantly captures both the hopeful, turbulent energy of that moment as well as its tragic denouement.)

Yet 1960 was also the year when the “former” imperial powers sent a stark reminder that they had no intentions of passing gently into the night. The Belgian colony of Congo would be the first site of this message. Even within the bloody annals of colonialism, the Belgian rule in the Congo stood out for its brutality. Congo began as a private possession of King Leopold II, who imposed a regime of extraction so harsh that within the first three decades the colony’s population declined, according to some estimates, by nearly a half. The practices of forced labor—paired with the horrific punishments workers faced for underperformance—shocked even the imperial European conscience. Belgium’s discovery of rich mineral deposits in the Congo soon turned the country into one of the most lucrative colonial possessions and made the mining monopoly, Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, one of the most profitable companies in the world. Naturally, none of that wealth would benefit the Congo. When the Belgians ceded the colony in 1960, they left behind a rudimentary state that was designed for repression and little else. At the dawn of Congo’s independence there were only sixteen college graduates amongst all Congolese, and not a single Congolese doctor, engineer, or lawyer.

The closest the Congo had to an indigenous elite were the évolués, a formal category for “evolved” Africans who enjoyed slightly more rights than their compatriots. Patrice Lumumba, a successful beer salesman, was one of the brighter stars of the évolué community in the capital of Leopoldville (today’s Kinshasa). In 1958, he was elected as the president of the Mouvement National Congolaise (MNC), a moderate national party formed a couple of years prior. In that capacity, Lumumba made his first foreign trip to attend the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra, Ghana, a meeting of activists, trade unionists, and political parties from across the continent. There, in the company of other national liberation leaders, amidst the heady air of hope and visions of the future, he was transformed. The former moderate returned from Accra a committed Pan-Africanist, calling for immediate independence from Belgium. Within a year, he would become the country’s most popular leader. When Congo was finally independent, the MNC became the largest party in the parliament; a newly radicalized Lumumba the prime minister.  

A similar Pan-African milieu brought Blouin to Congo in 1960. Due to its early assertion of independence, Guinea had become a country that various anticolonial actors looked up to and frequented. In a bar in Conakry frequented by such activists, Blouin ran into the leaders of the leftwing Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA), who asked her to come with them to help organize the women in Congo. As a “patriotic woman of Africa,” she agreed and threw herself into an arduous nationwide campaign with PSA’s rulers. Herbert Weiss, author of the party’s history, notes how successful she was as an orator and organizer, and the significant ideological effect she had on the party within the few months of the campaign, especially her militant opposition to the ‘traditional’ tribal authorities appointed by the colonial rulers. Blouin had found that the Congolese women were “crushed between two pitiless stones”—tribal customs that treated them as chattels, and a Catholic church that taught them apathy and submission. To organize these women, whose “spirit had been damaged for many years,” was a daunting task. Yet within two months, Blouin was able to build a women’s wing of the party, with thousands of members and chapters in all major towns, and a partywide platform of women’s issues that promised the abolition of regressive customs. (One of the more fascinating parts of the book—and one that I wish was much longer than the ten odd pages—concerns the details of this organizing work: their meetings, their use of music, their logistical inventiveness.) Back in Leopoldville, Blouin first met Lumumba, who wanted to ally with the PSA. “He is committed. That’s the important thing. He is passionately committed,” she thought after their first meeting. “He won’t disappoint Africa.”

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That commitment would eventually get Lumumba killed. At the independence ceremony, the king of Belgium gave a speech on how the people of Congo should be grateful to King Leopold II for the gift of civilization, and now independence. In his speech that followed, Lumumba would respond:

Although this independence of the Congo is being proclaimed today by agreement with Belgium . . . no Congolese will ever forget that independence was won in struggle . . . in which we were undaunted by privation or suffering and stinted neither strength nor blood. It was filled with tears, fire and blood. We are deeply proud of our struggle, because it was just and noble and indispensable in putting an end to the humiliating bondage forced upon us. . . . We have experienced the atrocious sufferings, being persecuted for political convictions and religious beliefs, and exiled from our native land: our lot was worse than death itself.

Everything Lumumba said was a widely known truth. But “all truths are not good to tell,” Blouin writes. “For that one cost him his life.” Lumumba barely had the time to savor this hard-won independence when it was under threat again. Within two weeks, the province of Katanga, home to most of Congo’s mineral wealth, declared that it was seceding, with explicit encouragement and help of the Belgians. Within three months, Lumumba was deposed by a military coup led by Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a supposedly close ally of Lumumba’s who had actually long been in the pay of the CIA. Mobutu went on to become one of the most corrupt and cruel dictators of the twentieth century, and yet would enjoy the support of the West up until the end of the Cold War. Just deposing Lumumba was not enough: he had to be eliminated. After Lumumba’s infamous independence day speech, Eisenhower is said to have expressed the wish that Lumumba would fall into a river full of crocodiles—to which the British Foreign Minister wistfully replied that “we have lost many of the techniques of old-fashioned diplomacy.” Not so, as it turned out. In January of 1961, Lumumba would be taken to Katanga and killed under the supervision of the Belgians. Independent Congo was barely six months old. The United Nations, in which so many in the Third World had placed their hope, had troops in the country (the first peacekeeping mission in its history) the entire time, but did nothing to protect Lumumba against the coup, or even save his life. Blouin, who was forced to leave the country, narrates these last days of Lumumba in deeply moving terms. Her political arc, which began with the death of her son sanctioned by colonial authorities, came to its denouement with murder of her dear comrade by colonial authorities. The “Congo Crisis,” as it was euphemistically called by the U.N., was the moment when the optimism and confidence about decolonization gave way to premonitions about the persistence of empire. Formal political independence, it was clear, would not be sufficient in itself to overcome the global economic order colonialism had built. In the years following Lumumba’s murder, a new term would be coined to describe the phenomenon: “neocolonialism.”

The leaders of the countries Blouin had worked in would fall into the very forms of regressive cultural nationalism and tribal loyalty she abhorred.

What was it that had made Lumumba such a threat to the neocolonial order? Contrary to the suspicions of the Americans, he was no communist—just a leader who wanted to build a truly democratic nation. At the time of independence, the main source of revenue for the country was the mining industry, controlled entirely by Anglo-Belgian companies. To be viable as a nation, the new government had to at the very least renegotiate the scandalously unfair terms on which those companies had been granted the rights to Congo’s minerals. There could be no sovereign Congo if it had no control over its own resources. Lumumba’s defiant insistence that this be accomplished—that independence should mean independence—was more than enough to mark him out as a target. “He personified the best of a race that would never again be slaves,” Blouin writes. Yet it was not the best that would prevail: “The hardest thing for us to bear during this long struggle . . . has been the knowledge that it is not the outsiders who have damaged Africa most, but the mutilated will of the people and the selfishness of some of our own leaders. There are politicians amongst us who serve neocolonialism for their own interests.” The postcolonial future would, more often than not, be ruled by Mobutus, not Lumumbas.

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Lumumba’s death taught the Third World that formal decolonization did not necessarily mean true freedom for the country or its people—that history did not always march triumphantly toward a happy ending. In Une Saison au Congo (A Season in the Congo), a play written by Aimé Césaire only a few years after the assassination, Lumumba appears as a hero of a tragedy whose actions—the independence day speech, beautifully reimagined by Césaire—bring about his catastrophic end: his tragic flaw his fidelity to the idea of freedom in the face of a world that remained hostile to it. Africa, the character of Lumumba asserts, needs his intransigence. The figure of Mobutu, on the other hand, appears as the convictionless pragmatist, a man who profits by surrendering to the world as it is. Tragedies reveal the contradictions and fissures of their time. In the play, those appear through the two different words for “independence.” The first is dipenda, an African mispronunciation of the French indépendance, that is associated with the formal transfer of power from the Belgians. “How does it come, dipenda? By car, by boat, by air?” asks a character in the play. “It arrives with the . . . little white king . . . it is he who brings it to us,” responds another. The other word, appearing in the second half of the play, is Uhuru, the Swahili word for freedom. This means the uncompromising ideal of true freedom, a new beginning for the once colonized. A Season in the Congo ends with a crowd shouting “Uhuru Lumumba. Uhuru!” With few exceptions, decolonization had generally been a peaceful process, achieved by a negotiated transfer of power. That is, it has by and large been dipenda. Why has Uhuru remained out of reach? The most trenchant answer to that question can be found in The Wretched of the Earth, written by Lumumba’s friend Frantz Fanon and published the year of Lumumba’s murder. Colonialism, Fanon found, was not just the domination of one country by another; it was a global system of exploitation—one that the local elites of the colonized countries, who played the role of intermediaries or agents of colonial rule, had no interest in dismantling. True independence could only come “through the upward thrust of the people, and under the leadership of the people, that is to say, in defiance of the interests of the [national] bourgeoisie”—in other words, through a revolutionary mass movement. Fanon’s defense of violence, often mistakenly read as some kind of moral or psychic advocacy, actually follows from the logic of revolutionary mass struggles, where “peace” and “order” become alibis for negotiated settlements that break nothing old and make nothing new.  Blouin’s reflections on the lessons of the Congolese tragedy at the end of the book are strikingly similar. “Our independence came—after much suffering, it is true, but with no real preparation in its disciplines—on a European timetable, at the stroke of a pen,” she notes with regret. Black Pasionaria also levels some implicit criticisms of Lumumba’s naïve faith in the rules and norms of international order, in particular the time he spent making the case for his legal authority to foreign countries and the United Nations. Negotiations and laws, Round Tables and United Nations resolutions, proved to be too feeble a means to achieve freedom. “I believe that Africa’s susceptibility to cynicism and corruption comes from the fact that African independence was not won in the crucible of war,” Blouin writes. “The people have never been united, through crisis, in the self-abnegation, work, and sacrifice that would have prepared them for the tasks of new nationhood.” But as her own experience testifies, it was simply not possible for Lumumba to build a true mass organization in a country like Congo within a year, much less one that could sustain an armed struggle. He had a lot of faith in the masses, wasting precious time during his doomed escape to stop and give speeches. But he did not have the time or opportunity to build a mass movement. These were merely assembled crowds, Blouin notes, not an organized collective.

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As the title of her autobiography suggests, Blouin would always identify as an African rather than with any nationality. The new that was to be born—the place of Uhuru—had to transcend the inherited divisions of tribes, races, and arbitrarily drawn national boundaries. She traveled between various countries of West and Equatorial Africa preaching unity and alliance. But independence came constricted by the borders drawn by Europeans in their scramble to carve up Africa, the geography of colonial domination repurposed as the space for national dipenda. In due time, the leaders of the countries Blouin had worked in, unable to offer true change to their people, would fall into the very forms of regressive cultural nationalism and tribal loyalty she abhorred.

Mobutu, the most loyal ally of the Western powers, would launch an “authenticity” campaign where the name of the country and the cities were “Africanized” and people forced to wear “African” attires. On the other hand, Blouin’s Africa was a product of revolutionary political self-making—a project defeated before it could be born by the reactionary regressions to the inherited. As the Lumumba of Césaire’s play tells his captors: “You are the invention of the past, and I am the inventor of the future!”

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