Most of us will never know the dangers of boarding a 1960s commercial airplane from Léopoldville to Rome with a secret document—an article that would change the future of an entire country’s independence—tucked in the rolls of a chignon bun. Such a task could only have been assigned to someone once called the “Most Dangerous Woman in Africa,” “The Black Pasionaria,” or “the Woman Behind Lumumba.”

In My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, recently republished by Verso Books, Andrée Blouin, the activist and former chief of protocol in Patrice Lumumba’s government, reintroduces herself to the world on her terms while taking readers on an intimate “Africa Tour.” Originally published in 1983, Blouin’s autobiography is a hauntingly sincere recollection of her childhood and how she became a key figure within the pan-African decolonial movement. It offers an intensely intimate look into politics, defying the dominant male prism that has long defined the independence era’s historical record.

Childhood sets the stage for all coming-of-age stories. In his famous play Incendies, Lebanese playwright Wajdi Mouawad aptly describes childhood as “un couteau planté dans la gorge” (a knife stuck in the throat). The life of Andrée Blouin is no exception: Her autobiography contains all the elements of a true coming-of-age story, in which her own growing pains are entangled with those of the movements that awakened her. This framing not only reminds us of the stripped innocence that shaped generations of young African women affected by racial segregation and patriarchy under colonial rule in French Equatorial Africa, it also underscores how politicized the process of learning is.

Throughout My Country, Africa, Blouin vividly recounts her early life and punctuates these recollections with political observations from her future self. For Blouin, what can now be clearly described as childhood trauma was a consistent feature of her life from inception. She traces the pain’s origins through a tender yet critical engagement with the evolution of her parents’ relationship throughout the book. Her father was a 40-year-old white French man, then an agent of an import-export company whom her mother, the daughter of a powerful chief in the Kouango region of the Oubangui-Chari colony (now Central African Republic), married at the tender age of 13. Blouin explores their separation, remarriages, and enduring affection throughout My Country, Africa. Their relationship provides a unique map of the racial, gendered, and class stratification that governed parental claim during an era in which her father had the absolute legal authority to send Blouin to an orphanage for mixed-race girls.

Blouin’s childhood exposes the cruel contradictions that underpinned French colonial institutions in 1920s Congo-Brazzaville, applying a particular emphasis to the abusive nuns in the St. Joseph of Cluny Convent whose missionary mandate included running an orphanage for métisses or “girls of mixed blood.” This is where Blouin would grow up from the age of three, against her mother’s will: an environment beset by physically abusive humiliation and starvation at the hands of the nuns, no formal education beyond sewing or Catholic indoctrination, and omnipresent reminders of the impure shame embedded in what she and all the mixed-race girls represented. “The nuns hid Africa from us,” Blouin writes with fervor.“They refused it and forbade it, almost as if it were something shameful. And the French they taught us was only enough to eke out a living as a seamstress for white ladies. We had no real access either to Africa or to France.”

Introspective details on how this particular wave of history played out in private are often absent from political accounts, eclipsing the reality of the internal gender dynamics and colorism that existed around and within movement-building circles. As she maps her maturing evolution with love, Blouin lays bare the inner turmoil and painful contradictions that inhabited her as a mixed-race woman whose intimate relationships were governed by harsh social rules, both formal and informal. Blouin unpacks her romances with lovers and husbands—such as Roger Surreys, the Belgian aristocrat and former director of the Belgian Kasai company, Charles Greutz, a French businessman, and mining engineer André Blouin—with the urgency of a confessional. Each of these personal encounters coincided with a stage in her political coming of age, tying her discovery of her beloved Africa with her blooming sexual identity.

By Blouin’s accounting, she had no choice but to make the tensions, nuances, and difficult compromises of love a part of her analytical framework, starting by reckoning with the generational patterns and attitudinal differences between her and her mother’s views on relationships as having been “entirely shaped by the usages of colonialism.” Her intimate contact with white partners throughout the years offered her proximity, protection, and insight into the inner workings of the colonial system; direct access to which very few African women at the time were permitted. The instructive potential of these relationships becomes clear when bravely confronting one’s suffering, as Blouin’s existence as a colonial fantasy demanded. Ultimately, the same racial and sexual politics that bled into both her parents and her own relationships followed Blouin into her organizing career later down the line, where she was often described and shamed by the international press as a “courtesan of all the African chiefs of state.”

Blouin cannot tell her story without tangentially making observations about  “her country, Africa” interwoven throughout the first sections of the book, with an earnestness and fervor akin to Maryse Condé’s famed memoir, What Is Africa to Me? Contrary to the nationalist air at the dawn of independence, between a childhood and adulthood split in Brazzaville, Bangui, with travels in between, the world Blouin discovered outside of the orphanage and the terms on which she sought reconnection with it was inherently borderless, tied to her relationship with her mother, yet unfamiliar enough for curiosity. This does not mean it was free from the semi-essentialist gaze in engaging explicitly with Africa as a unitary entity—moments such as her journey down the Congo River with the Belgian director of the Kasai mines evoke a reductive description of Africanness that her work seeks to shed. Her descriptions of the continent are often made through the lens of racial segregation, landscapes, and cultural attitudes and practices, with a few exceptions in the first part of the book (see VY Mudimbe).

The editing and translation of this published version of My Country, Africa by Jean MacKellar has been criticized by Blouin herself, who sought legal action against her for its distortive framing, a nuance echoed by her daughter in the book’s epilogue. As with any coming-of-age story, Blouin’s political mind becomes sharper as she grows and develops a heightened awareness of the historical events occurring abroad, the world order shifting in the background of her own evolution.

Blouin’s transnational exposure to the challenges and successes of bubbling independence movements, without the nationalist or ethnic anchors in her political aspirations, provided her with a birds-eye view unlike many male revolutionaries, whose complicated legacies are often glossed over by their savior status of sainthood. This is at the heart of the second half of the book—beginning in 1958 Guinea and her involvement in the campaign against President De Gaulle’s referendum, through Madagascar, and back to Brazzaville, Oubangui Chari, the Congo, and later Algeria. Amid growing fears of her political engagement from France, multiple assassination attempts, and expulsions, she chronicles her role in promoting political pan-African solidarity while advising the movement leaders shaping the trajectories of their respective countries’ independence. This included fraternizing with certain leaders in opposition to the RDA(Rassemblement Démocratique Africain, or African Democratic Rally Party), such as the newly elected President of the Central African Republic, Barthélemy Boganda, despite criticism from her family and others.

Blouin’s politicized anger would find refuge years later following her move with husband André to Siguiri, Guinea, coinciding with the rise of the RDA co-founded by Guinean leader Sékou Touré, whom she readily credits for her “second birth.” Her career would come full circle after overhearing the Lingala of Antoine Gizenga and Pierre Mulele, members of the Parti Solidaire Africain (PSA) under the Belgian Congo and comrades of Patrice Lumumba.

She was asked to organize the Feminine Movement for African solidarity and politicize the women of Congo during the PSA and MNCs (Congolese National Movement) fight for the country’s independence where she mobilized more than 4,000 women as the Congo crisis loomed. She believed deeply in African women’s inseparable liberation from the continent’s political future, and her initiatives in 1959 Congo marked the first time in history that the political condition of Congolese women was acknowledged. Blouin was later credited with writing part of Lumumba’s independence speech, organized broadcasts on “African moral rearmament,” and tirelessly sacrificed while organizing treacherous journeys for the movement across the country.

As she relays intimate details of exchanges between her, Gizenga, Mulele, and Lumumba as the danger of Belgian tactics and political betrayal grew more imminent, Blouin empathetically yet soberly criticizes the frequency of Lumumba’s travels, his naiveté in the company he kept close, and the tactical softness of his early policies which were clearly leading the country towards an inevitable catastrophe. Despite the damage and pain caused by the colonial system in her life’s journey, the most consistent feature of her political assessment is that the “mutilated will of the people” and selfishness of the continent’s elites have been “our worst enemies” in the project of establishing sustainable statehood and that this susceptibility may have been lowered if independence was won in the crucible of war:

I see now how ill prepared, morally we were for our new responsibilities… We often abandoned ourselves to selfish, short-term prizes.  We have not yet learned the long term, day-to-day faith and application needed in the slow task of building responsible citizenry.

The political lessons to be drawn from Blouin’s life and career are far-reaching and hold painful contemporary resonance, particularly in Congo. The current situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Eastern city of Goma overtaken by Rwanda-backed M23 rebels will be remembered as yet another dark chapter of the country’s history. This time it features the ongoing complicity of  Western leaders in shredding any remnants of international law, Rwandese state government and allies, and the Congolese political elite’s consistent abdication of responsibility to protect its citizens now under the “leadership” of President Felix Tshisikedi.

This moral rearmament will not come about in the DRC by recycling reductionist clichés as the go-to African poster child for global extractive industry or imperialist criticism. These lessons were harshly learned by Blouin as she came of age and suffered the disillusionment of the epochs’ pitfalls. They remain critical lessons, and their human costs will continue to pile up without a commitment to truth-telling and self-interrogation of our collective personal wounds.

As Amilcar Cabral argues, independence is but a trust-building exercise with stages of scrutiny by a population to “win material benefits” that must be continuously earned to exist, and whose ambition cannot be outsourced in perpetuity. In Blouin’s model for the future, she sketches out hope for a people-centered African development model, rooted in autonomy and optimization of human capital.

One can only hope that her vision ultimately becomes a reality.