Andrée Blouin

Andrée Madeleine Blouin (16 December 1921 – 9 April 1986) was a political activist, human rights advocate, and writer from the Central African Republic.

Early life The daughter of Josephine Wouassimba, a fourteen-year-old Banziri girl, and Pierre Gerbillat, a forty-year-old French colonial businessman, Andrée Blouin was born in Bessou, a village in Oubangui-Chari (later the Central African Republic).

At three years of age Andrée was taken from her mother by her father and his new wife Henriette Poussart, and placed in the Sisters of St. Joseph of Cluny orphanage for girls of mixed race, in Brazzaville, in the French Congo, where she endured neglect and abuse. This orphanage was created to cover up evidence of Europeans’ "libertine ways" (including the crime of outright rape) and to "protect partly white children from living in supposedly primitive African conditions."

At age 15, the nuns tried to pressure her into an arranged marriage. Her son was ¾ white and both she and her son were French citizens, but they were both treated unjustly because of their blackness. an organization from Belgian Congo whose goal was freeing Africa from colonial rule. Blouin described how after one month in May 1960, she enrolled 45,000 members in the PSA. Some of the preoccupations that the platform reflected were the following:

To make all women, no matter what age, literate. To promote an understanding of health and hygiene. To combat alcoholism. To work for women’s rights. To work for the protection of the abandoned woman and child. To work for the social progress of the African. Later that year she became chief of protocol in Patrice Lumumba's government, formed during the aftermath of Congolese independence from Belgium.

During her life, her activism raised concerns in the Western world: the Eisenhower administration and the Belgian authorities worried about her supposed Communist links and the New York Times called her an "advocate of extreme African nationalism." Jean MacKellar collaborated with Blouin and completed interviews and the editing of the book.