My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria

Blouin (1921–1986) shines a spotlight on women’s contributions to the decolonization of Africa in this remarkable autobiography. The author was born in 1921 in what is today known as the Central African Republic to an African teenager and a French businessman, and raised in a home for abandoned biracial children. She details years of abuse meted out by nuns who ran the home, and describes how racism plagued her intimate relationships with white men. But it wasn’t until the 1946 death of her two-year-old son, who was denied malaria drugs because he was one-quarter African, that Blouin spoke out publicly against racism. She made her first foray into revolutionary politics in Guinea, where a chance encounter with Congolese leaders fighting Belgian rule thrust her into the center of Africa’s mid-20th-century independence movements. Blouin gives a thrilling account of the revolutionary fervor that swept the continent and its crucial interplay with gender politics: “I saw that one could not separate the problem of the African continent’s resources from the problems of African women,” she writes, arguing that women needed to be “freed from [their] role of servitude” and join together with men in the name of independence. This is a must-read for anyone interested in the intersection of race, gender, and freedom. (Jan.)