As a punishment for the crime of being born of a white father and a black mother I spent my early years in a prison for children. This prison was the orphanage for girls of mixed blood at Brazzaville in the French Congo. The time was the dark years of colonialism in Africa.

At the orphanage, where we lived behind windows with thick bars, my companions and I were taught an abiding sense of shame and guilt for our parentage. All of us had been born out of wedlock, but that was not the worst of it. We were the issue of a white man's weakness for a black woman, and that was unpardonable. Because of this "sin," as the nuns who ran the orphanage called it, we, the product of this sin, were in need of great purification. This the nuns were willing to supply.

We girls were led to believe that by accepting their system of calculated humiliations and cruelties we could partially-although never entirely-expiate the offense which our lives represented. For fourteen years I lived in a regime of daily penance as the nuns sought to redress "the wickedness of my father and the primitive nature of my mother."

That girls such as I were given opportunity to atone for our existence was considered one more proof of the white man's charity as he scourged the black man's land.

It was while I was still in the orphanage-prison that I first identified with the struggle for freedom of my black countrymen. Like them I was beaten with the chicotte, a whip made of ox sinews. Like them I was the victim of injustices of which I hardly knew the name but against which my blood never ceased to rebel. For many years, however, I did not participate in the African struggle for self determination. I could not overcome the resignation taught me by the nuns. I bowed my head, I held my tongue, I shut myself up in the dreary passiveness of the other women of my race.

Only when I had been married-ironically, twice to white men-did I find the equilibrium and courage to become active in the cause of my people. Only then was I able to transcend my black and white inheritance and become more than the stereotype of each. To become, simply, a woman, a human being. It was then I opted to give my life to the struggle of the blacks. In this I was privileged to take part in the movement toward freedom of several African countries. I was to know some of the great leaders of Africa, and because of my passion for our cause, I was to be associated in their work.

Within these pages I want to set down an account of my youth and the events that formed me for my work in that still unfinished struggle. I have always said that my political work was my own option, but perhaps I flatter myself. Really, there was no choice. My fate and that of the Africa I so ardently love have been intertwined from the beginning. And where there is love there is no option but to serve. This is the story of an African woman who, branded by the misery of her own youth, and inflamed by the injustices that she saw everywhere, finally could bow her head and hold her tongue no longer.

Jean MacKellar My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Passonaria Andrée Blouin New York, Preager, 1981 (pp.3-4)