This is Andrée Blouin (1921-1986), writer and activist from the Central African Republic. She is the daughter of a French businessman and an African woman. Andrée grew up in an orphanage for mixed girls. Andrée was placed there when she was 3 years old. And escaped when she was 17.

Andrée Blouin


Andrée then lived in Guinea, where she was impressed by the efforts of the anti-colonial struggle of Sekou Touré. There she built her Panafrican consciousness.

Andrée Blouin around 1960. One Belgian official called her “a beautiful woman — but also a dangerous woman, perhaps the most dangerous in all Africa.”Credit…Terence Spencer/The LIFE Images Collection, via Getty Images ( Via The New York Times)

In 1960, in the midst of the independence movement led by Patrice Lumumba, she was recruited to work with women in Leopoldville, now Kinshasa.

There, she became Lumumba’s chief of protocol for a short time. Before being expelled from the country a few months prior to Lumumba’s assassination.

In Congo, she brought 45,000 women into the Mouvement Feminin de la solidarité Africaine (Women’s Movement of African Solidarity). Which was the women’s section of Patrice Lumumba’s Parti Solidaire Africain.

After leaving Congo, she eventually settled in Paris where she became active in protesting against French policy in Africa. In 1983, three years before her death, she published her autobiography “My Country, Africa.”