“Fate gave me fourteen years in an orphanage for girls of mixed parentage, from which all my subsequent experiences seemed to derive,” writes Blouin of her turn to politics. “My fate was swerving in a new direction now.” Yet the first fate retains its hold over her, an uninterpretable origin like the navel of a dream. At nineteen years old, Blouin travels by boat down the Congo River. The trip, an escape from a drab life as a seamstress in a Brazzaville slum, nevertheless expresses her privilege as a métisse: she is allowed to occupy a whites-only cabin because she is a friend of the captain, and falls in love for the first time with a handsome Belgian aristocrat working in systematized colonial plunder. Yet she is “marked” by another penetrating moment of injustice. The black passengers travel in the boat’s open hull with “no protection against either sun or rain” and are forced to carry heavy loads of wood to fuel the boat. When one of them is bitten by a snake, the teenage Blouin is “almost ashamed of my cabin, of my privileged existence, while my black brothers were outside, exposed to the dangers of the jungle. . . . I was shocked by this event.” Did the words she wrote as Lumumba’s speechwriter bear the trace of her experiences, as illuminated by this book? She quotes the speech he delivered to mark the independence proclamation of June 30, 1960, without revealing that—according to her daughter’s epilogue—she wrote it herself. Among the injustices he enumerates, “Who will ever forget . . . that blacks travelled in the holds of the barges, beneath the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.”
Blouin witnessed Lumumba’s extraordinary life at first hand, as comrade and confidante, advising on strategy and hosting visiting diplomats in her role as chief of protocol. She sketches with quick, definite strokes his unswerving optimism bordering on the innocence of a holy idiot: “Poor Patrice! It is true that those who are of the best faith are often the most cruelly deceived.” His talent for hope was inextricable from his capacity to channel inchoate popular desire for freedom into a movement, but it was also his undoing. “His goodness will ruin us,” says his deputy Antoine Gizenga—admittedly not a problem that any Congolese leader has had since then. Blouin’s portrait of Lumumba is, as Getachew and Meaney’s introduction puts it, “full of imaginative sympathy but also a cool-headed assessment of his room for political maneuver.” Hers is also the judgment of a whole milieu, bearing a strong resemblance to Frantz Fanon’s anonymously published article on Lumumba in the revolutionary Algerian newspaper El Moudjahid, which Blouin later also wrote for. “He had an exaggerated confidence in the people,” writes Fanon. “The people, for him, not only could not deceive themselves but could not be deceived.” Fanon and Blouin spent time together in Ghana in 1960, the year before both Fanon and Lumumba died, one of cancer and one of capital.
To invoke Fanon here is only to emphasize that Blouin’s book is a memoir, not a manifesto. Her political writing—the ghostwritten speeches, “the first leaflets for a free Angola,” “broadcasts called The African Moral Rearmament to teach the Congolese people the need for unity”—is so far uncollected. In this book, beyond her deep feeling for the injustices of colonization, Blouin confines her political beliefs to desultory commentary. Understanding her intellectual relationship to the wider anti-colonial movement requires some reading between the lines. In the final chapter, she provocatively suggests that Africa’s “susceptibility to cynicism and corruption comes from the fact that African independence was not won in the crucible of war.” Though the thought is all her own, there is a resonance with Fanon’s emphasis in The Wretched of the Earth on “the important part played by the [Algerian] war in leading [the Algerian people] toward consciousness of themselves,” and his warning in the pages of El Moudjahid that “the greater danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” He died before the IMF stranglehold began to close around Africa’s throat, while Blouin lived to see her movement’s ruin.
Blouin’s political commitments are also, in a way, absent of ideology; at heart, they are personal and emotional. She conflates her love of Africa with her love of her mother Josephine, whose life—dubiously partnered to a wealthy white man, possessed by trivial petty bourgeois aspirations, eventually paralyzed by Mobutu’s soldiers—serves as a kind of political allegory. Although Josephine “detested all my efforts to improve the lot of my people,” for Blouin her work “is inseparable from my feelings for Josephine, and for Africa. My little mother with her marvellous smile, and the heart of a child. My marvellous Africa, where the sun warms all and laughter is king.” This doesn’t beat the charge of exoticism, but it is deeply heartfelt, with the fierce loyalty of a child longing for her absent mother. In Congo, Blouin founded a women’s movement that aimed to liberate village women like her mother, its aims a mix of radical political education and patrician moral improvement. “Most of [the women], by the time they were twelve, had already had relations with a man. I am ashamed to speak of such things,” she winces. Her mother was thirteen when she married her father.
The “contradictions” of Blouin’s parentage are unresolvable, but her love for her mother compels her to see her story in the best possible light. “How did it happen that this forty-year-old man from an exceptionally bourgeois and traditional background should find himself captivated by a thirteen-year-old girl of a remote and primitive village?” Anyone not conceived as a result of this relationship would not feel as much compelled to drape its sharp edges in tulle. Her attempts at a balanced description of their love have a sweetness approaching nausea (perhaps MacKellar’s influence) and read more painfully than open criticism. “Josephine was a child when he found her, a child designed to love and please. Her heart-shaped face radiated the beauty of Africa . . . one must concede the usefulness of this relationship for him . . . he did not feel alone because he had this delicious girl for company.” But morality has notoriously little purchase on experience, and Blouin is telling the truth when she emphasizes that this pedophiliac liaison “developed into an affection that . . . was to last my father’s lifetime,” and provided the meaning of her mother’s life.
However hard she tries to honor her mother’s love for her father, Blouin knows that her parents’ relationship expresses, rather than contravenes, the European pillage of Africa. In a conversation shortly before her father’s death, she finally expresses her anger toward him, the hatred—“more than a little”—that has motivated her efforts to love him. And yet she sees in his patriotism to France a reflection of her commitment to African liberation. In the moment of historical inversion as “Nazism transformed the whole of Europe into a veritable colony” (Fanon), her colonial father’s patriotic anti-fascism was “an exalted repudiation of all that his life had been until then.” His significance to her is as opaque as her mother’s is radiant. Like her mother, she marries white colonials. Unlike her mother, she does not experience it as a victory. “All my life I had been trapped by racism. Why should my heart now turn toward that which had so often made me suffer?” The mixed girls in Blouin’s childhood orphanage are “brown-skinned, well-oiled robots, docile, disciplined, totally submissive.” Like a colonial version of Godard’s Alphaville, Blouin at times seems to narrate her life as the story of how one robot overcomes her programming through love. “Only when I had been married—ironically, twice to white men—did I find the equilibrium and courage to become active in the cause of my people.” The paradox belongs to the first birth and can’t be unpacked. “Perhaps I will never be fully able to integrate the meaning of [my father] in my life.”
What can’t be integrated remains visible. For all of childhood’s powerlessness, its mystery, the implacability of its injuries is the pattern of resistance. “You cannot tell a child to forget all it has suffered in an unhappy childhood by saying, ‘You are big now, that is past. Let us be friends.’ One does not forget. We who have been colonized can never forget.” {read}