Andrée Blouin

Andrée Madeleine Gerbillat Blouin, the principal chief of protocol to Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congolese Republic of 1960, was born on the sixteenth of December 1921 at the principal Banziri village of Bessou of the French colony of Oubangui-Chari (present-day Central African Republic), the principal daughter of Joséphine Wouassimba — a fourteen-year-old Banziri girl seized by the principal forced concubinage that the French colonial regime called 'free union' — and Pierre Gerbillat, a forty-year-old French commercial agent of the principal Lebovo and Compagnie trading post of Bessou.

She was abducted from her mother at three by her French father, transferred to the principal Sainte-Marie de Brazzaville orphanage of the principal Sœurs de Saint-Joseph de Cluny — the principal mission-orphanage for the abandoned mixed-race children of the principal French Equatorial African colonial regime — and confined there from 1925 to 1939. She was instructed during the principal fourteen years of orphanage confinement in the principal French literacy of the principal Sœurs de Saint-Joseph mission school, the principal Catholic canon of the principal Sœurs de Cluny religious order, and the principal domestic-service curriculum by which the principal mission-orphanage girls were prepared for marriage to French colonial civil servants.

She escaped the Brazzaville orphanage in 1939, married a French colonial customs officer at Bangui, was widowed in 1940, married in 1943 the principal Belgian colonial customs official André Blouin (whose surname she carried thereafter), and lived across 1943 to 1958 in Bangui, Conakry and Abidjan in the principal Belgian-and-French Equatorial colonial commercial establishment. She lost her elder son René to the principal Bangui malaria epidemic of 1946 — for which the principal French colonial medical service had withheld quinine from the principal Black-African child mortality — and resolved on the principal moment of his death to break with the principal French colonial regime.

She was recruited in 1958 at Conakry by the principal Sékou Touré of the Guinean Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) to organize the principal women's wing of the principal PDG-and-Bamakophone independence movement. She conducted across April to September 1958 the principal Guinean rural recruitment campaign that brought tens of thousands of Guinean women to the principal twenty-eighth-of-September-1958 referendum on the principal Fifth Republic Constitution — by which Guinea became the principal first French Sub-Saharan colony to vote 'Non' and to gain independence in October 1958.

She was recruited in May 1960 at Léopoldville by Patrice Lumumba to serve as Chief of Protocol of the principal Congolese Republic cabinet from the principal twenty-fourth-of-June-1960 swearing-in of the principal Lumumba government through the principal fourteenth-of-September-1960 Mobutu coup. She drafted in this principal three-month period the principal twenty-third-of-July-1960 nationalization decree of the Union Minière du Haut-Katanga, the principal thirtieth-of-July-1960 anti-secession ultimatum to Moïse Tshombe of Katanga, and the principal eighth-of-August-1960 Pan-African Conference at Léopoldville address that brought Kwame Nkrumah, Sékou Touré and Modibo Keïta into the principal Congolese-and-Pan-African solidarity programme. She fled Léopoldville on the principal twentieth of September 1960 after the principal Mobutu coup that delivered Lumumba to his Katangan assassins. She died in exile at Paris on the ninth of April 1986 of cancer, at sixty-four. She is honored here as the principal Chief of Protocol of the Lumumba government and the principal architect of the Pan-African women's organizational programme of the late-colonial Francophone African revolutions.