My country, Africa. Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria - Andrée Blouin

My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria is both a personal testimony and a historical record of Africa’s turbulent mid-20th century. Andrée Blouin, once called “the most dangerous woman in Africa,” lived a life forged in struggle: from a childhood of abandonment and abuse in colonial French Equatorial Africa to becoming a central figure in the liberation movements of the 1950s and 1960s.

Blouin’s political awakening came after the death of her young son, denied malaria medicine by French officials because of his mixed heritage. This wound became the fire that drove her activism. She organized in Guinea during Sékou Touré’s campaign for independence and later became an adviser to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, where she bore witness to his arrest and assassination — moments she recounts with haunting clarity.

Her memoir goes beyond her own story to map the networks of pan-African nationalism: the fragile diplomacy, the camaraderie and betrayals, and the vision of a continent breaking free from colonial rule. At the heart of her writing is the often-erased role of women in these struggles, a reminder that independence was never just the work of men in power.

In The Lab_Oratory, Blouin’s voice stands as a call to remember: “We who have been colonized can never forget.”