Andrée Blouin

Andrée Blouin was born on the sixteenth of December 1921 in Bessou — some sources say Ndjoukou — in Oubangui-Chari, the present-day Central African Republic, daughter of Joséphine Wouassimba, a fourteen-year-old Banziri girl, and Pierre Gerbillat, a French colonial businessman some forty years old. At three she was taken from her mother and confined among the mixed-race daughters of empire in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny orphanage at Brazzaville, from which she ran away, after fourteen years, in 1938.

The grief that made her a revolutionary had a name: her son René, two years old, refused quinine for his malaria under the colony's Europeans-only rule, and lost. She fought the quinine law, and then she fought the order that wrote it. In Guinea in 1958 she worked with the RDA, mobilizing women for the "Non" — and Guinea stood alone among the French territories in voting No, taking its independence that October.

In the Congo of 1960 she organized women through the Feminine Movement for African Solidarity — the accounts say tens of thousands enrolled within weeks — and rose beside Patrice Lumumba as chief of protocol, speechwriter, and diplomatic hand; the press of the day called them "team Lumum-Blouin." When the government fell she was forced out under sentence of death passed in her absence, and carried the cause from exile.

From 1973 she lived in Paris, where she set down her memoir, My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria (1983). She died there of lymphoma on the ninth of April 1986, at sixty-four. Honored be Andrée Blouin, who answered a child's death with a continent's awakening.