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SPEAKER_05: Before we get started, just a warning that this episode contains racial discrimination and violence. ["The First Noel"] Hi everyone, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Anamalika Tubbs, the author of The Three Mothers, How the Mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. My work focuses on motherhood through the lens of feminism, intersectionality, and inclusivity. And I'll be your guest host for this month of Womanica. This month, we're talking about mothers, women who ushered forth new generations and new futures through their care, work, and imagination. Today, we're talking about a woman who helped birth several African countries into new eras of independence, free from French colonial rule. Let's talk about Andrei Blouin.
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SPEAKER_05: André was born on December 16th, 1921, beneath an extraordinary moon in a colony of French Equatorial Africa. Today, the area is part of the independent Central African Republic. André's mother, Josephine Wausemba, was the daughter of the chief of their village and just 14 years old when she became a mother. André's father was a 41-year-old French businessman. André's father left her mother not long after his daughter's birth. And when André was three years old, he took her from her mother and left her at an orphanage in the French Congo. Locals called the orphanage the convent. It served a specific purpose, a dumping ground for white men trying to hide their interracial relationships. The girls were subjected to a combination of seclusion and neglect, protected for their whiteness, abused for their blackness. By the time André was 15, life in the orphanage had become unbearable. She and two friends hatched a plan to escape, which they did by scaling the convent's walls, cutting their feet on the broken glass at the top. Eventually, André reunited with her mother, Josephine. This love would bring André's strength and comfort during a string of painful relationships. The first was with a man named Roger Cerui, with whom she had a daughter named Rita. André lived in her mother's home for a few months before her daughter was born. Josephine would check on André every morning, putting her hands on her daughter's belly. André wrote, through her hands, she gave the child strength and health and love. A month before Rita was born, Roger married someone else. André saw her own childhood experience being repeated. But she later became aware of the flip side of the cycle, as her daughter was born on her birthday, December 16th. My hopes for my child's recognition were never to be realized, she said. But my delivery in the Belgian Congo was to be prophetic of a later phase of my life. One day there, I was to be deeply involved in the labor pangs and bloody birth of that country in its independence. André later married a Frenchman named Charles Gutes. She had a son with him in 1942 named René. Like André and Rita, he was also born on December 16th. When René was two years old, he began to suffer bouts of malaria. At one point, he was hospitalized, but he was denied medication because he was a quarter African. Desperate, André burst into the mayor's office to demand help. He denied her the medicine. André watched as her son's health worsened, while a white child, the child of a neighbor, recovered thanks to medicine. A month later, her son died. The death of my son politicized me as nothing else could, she later wrote. She realized that colonialism was no longer just about her own painful fate, but a system of evil whose tentacles reached into every phase of African life. In 1952, André, now divorced, married a French engineer, also named André, and took his last name, Blouin. They had two children together and moved to French Guinea for his work. At the time, the independence movement in French Guinea was gaining momentum under the leadership of Ahmed Sekou Ture. André was in a shop one day when she looked up to see a poster of Ahmed Sekou Ture on the wall behind the shopkeeper. She stared at the poster of this man whose name she had heard so much since her arrival. She felt she recognized him. André later wrote, a few people are fortunate enough to know the precise moment when their life takes a powerful new course. I am one of those lucky few. Like the other French colonies on the continent, Guinea was preparing for a referendum where people could vote to either remain a part of France or become independent. André joined Ture and his party's efforts to campaign for independence. She drove around the country organizing rallies and giving speeches and became a trusted counselor to several party leaders. She did all this in spite of the sacrifice of leaving her family for extended periods of time. And in spite of the physical threats she faced from a French opposition determined to squash the campaign. Finally, in September 1958, Guinea was the only colony that chose to leave France. Two years later, in 1960, André overheard two men at a nearby table speaking a language from her youth, Lingala. They were politicians from the Belgian Congo who connected her to the leader of their nationalist party, Antony Gazinga. André met other powerful activists and became the only woman in the circle of leaders campaigning for independence. Her feminist speeches mobilized thousands of women. When the Congo did gain independence, she became a chief advisor to Patrice Lumumba, the country's first prime minister. André's Western critics denounced her as a courtesan and a communist for her involvement in multiple African independence movements. When a journalist asked her if the latter was true, André responded, "'Let small fools call me what they like. I am an African nationalist.'" After Prime Minister Lumumba was assassinated, André moved to Paris. She lived out the rest of her life there in an apartment on the outskirts of the city where she would visit with revolutionaries and African leftists whenever they passed through. She died on April 9th, 1986. She was 65 years old. All month, we're talking about mothers. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica Podcast. Special thanks to co-creators Jenny and Liz Kaplan for having me as a guest host. Talk to you tomorrow.
SPEAKER_08: Bye.
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