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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ALGIERS, BLACK PANTHERS, FREEDOM FIGHTERS, REVOLUTIONARIES  
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Ben Ehrenreich
August 11, 2018
The Guardian
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_ In the 1960s, Algeria became an international home for exiled
artists, intellectuals and freedom fighters. Elaine Mokhtefi, who died
in New York City on September 11 at age 97, met them all. Here is a
2018 review of her memoir. _

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_Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries,
Black Panthers_Elaine MokhtefiVersoISBN: 9781788730037

“This is a story with a beginning and an end,” Elaine Mokhtefi
writes in the preface to her extraordinary memoir. The title is a bit
misleading – this is no dry history – but it carries something of
the revolutionary optimism of her tale’s beginnings, and, in its
anachronism, something too of the heartache of its ending. Because who
can even talk of a first or a third world any more, rather than a
whole planet of uncertainty and want, dotted here and there with
well-guarded islands of cosmopolitan abundance? And who can remember
anything as unitary as a capital, or as beautiful as a solidarity that
doesn’t care for borders?

Mokhtefi, born Elaine Klein in prosaic Hempstead, New York, was 23
when she moved to Paris in 1951. She thought she would find something
like history there – “I would drink at the fountain of the
past,” she wrote – and that it would have something to do with
Émile Zola and Alfred Dreyfus, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. It
turned out that history wasn’t over. By 1960, when no fewer than 17
African nations announced their independence, Mokhtefi had become
deeply involved with antiracist and anticolonial struggles. In France
that meant agitating for Algerian independence, and against a brutal
war that had already dragged on for six years.

 
In the process she had befriended anticolonial thinker Frantz Fanon
and had fallen in love with an Algerian activist. She returned to New
York that autumn and began working in the tiny apartment headquarters
of the provisional government of the Algerian Republic. When
independence came in the summer of 1962, she moved again, to Algiers,
to be with her lover. She was, as she put it, “one of the dreamers
who came to build a more perfect world”.

The challenges were enormous. The French had left trauma, stubborn
hope and little else. There were only 500 university graduates in the
entire country, which had a population of more than 9 million. A
quarter of the populace had been confined in concentration camps.
Hundreds of thousands had been killed. Throughout the 1960s, Algeria
nonetheless became a beacon to the world, with “an open-door policy
of aid to the oppressed”. Exiled artists, intellectuals and
guerrilla fighters flocked to Algiers, representing liberation
movements from the rest of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and
Southeast Asia. Mokhtefi met most of them, from South Africa’s ANC
to the Viet Cong. Timothy Leary, Jean-Luc Godard, Simone de Beauvoir
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Mokhtefi vacillates between describing herself as a participant –
“We were fellow militants and the future was ours” – and a
privileged observer: “I was a fly on the window, looking in,
beating its wings.” She was both. She found work as assistant to the
president’s press adviser, then in the national press agency and at
the radio station, and finally at the university. Officially she wrote
press releases and opinion pieces, organised conferences, published a
magazine, wrote and directed radio shows. Unofficially, she did
whatever needed to be done. When her relationship with her Algerian
partner ended, Mokhtefi stayed on. “I had espoused a cause and
taken the consequences,” she writes. “On a deeper level, I had
found a home.”

Late one night in June 1969, her phone rang. Eldridge Cleaver, the
Black Panther party’s minister of information, had landed in
Algiers. After a shootout with police in California, he had been
charged with attempted murder, skipped bail and fled to Cuba. He was
no longer welcome there. “The Cubans dumped me,” Cleaver told
Mokhtefi. His wife, Kathleen, was pregnant. He had no contacts in
Algeria, or even permission to stay. “Can you help me?” he asked.
For the next three and a half years, she would be Cleaver and the
Panthers’ (more would soon arrive) fixer, interpreter, comrade and
co-conspirator. She had the connections and knew how to make things
happen. When Cleaver wanted official recognition for the international
section of the Black Panther party, she got it for them, plus monthly
stipends and a villa in the hills. They called it “the Embassy”.
When a German support group bought the Panthers a minibus, she picked
it up from the Volkswagen plant in Hanover and ferried it to Algiers.
In 1971, after Huey Newton expelled Cleaver from the Panthers, she
toured the US with Kathleen, raising money for the Cleavers’ latest
venture. The next year, when things were beginning to look dodgy in
Algiers, she smuggled a stack of stolen US passports to a Red Army
Faction contact in Frankfurt, then smuggled them back with the
exiles’ photos sealed in place of the originals.

Cleaver is as charismatic and contradictory here as in his own books:
by turns warm, brilliant, manipulative and ruthless. One morning in
1969 he confessed to Mokhtefi that he had killed another American
fugitive, Clinton “Rahim” Smith, who, he said, had been planning
to run away with the Panthers’ money. The Algerian police found
Smith’s body but did not pursue the case. (She later learned that
Smith was rumoured to have become involved with Kathleen.) By telling
Mokhtefi, Cleaver had made her complicit in the murder; they never
spoke of it again.

The authorities would be less offended by killing than by their
guests’ inability to reckon with the realities of their position.
The Panthers made little attempt to understand their hosts. They
didn’t follow local news and interacted with few Algerians other
than the women they dated. In 1972, a group of African American
hijackers landed in Algeria with a million dollars in ransomed cash,
and Cleaver, “vibrating to the overtones of dollar bills”,
published an open letter complaining that President Houari
Boumédiène had confiscated the money and abandoned their cause. The
next day police raided their villa, took their weapons and cut off the
phones. The crisis passed, but the message was clear: it was time to
go.

For all Cleaver’s flaws, Mokhtefi writes, “I admired the man”.
Her feelings ran deep. Early on the morning he left – New Year’s
Day, 1973 – she drove to the Embassy to say goodbye. Cleaver,
disguised in a Chesterfield coat and homburg, was sweating. “He
hugged me,” she writes. She drove home “and cried
uncontrollably”.

They would see each other again. One year later, Mokhtefi was deported
to Paris. No explanation was given, but she had repeatedly refused the
Algerian security service’s demands that she inform on a friend who
had married the deposed former president Ahmed Ben Bella
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Because of her political activities, she was legally not allowed to
stay in France. Cleaver at this point was associating with “a swish
Parisian crowd”; his glamorous photojournalist girlfriend was also
sleeping with the minister of finance. Mokhtefi asked Cleaver for
help. He promised to get back to her, but never did.

“I bear no grudges,” she insists, “I feel no rancour.” I
believe her. Cleaver’s silence must have wounded her deeply. Algeria
certainly broke her heart. The world that she and so many others
struggled to create went instead in another direction. Many of her
generation grew bitter in their disappointment and turned against the
ideals of their youth. Mokhtefi is compassionate – true to her
younger self, the people she knew and the dreams that animated her
life. She is generous enough not to mention Cleaver’s later
transformations into a born-again Christian, a drug addict and a
Republican. She did not return to Algeria and was spared the pain of
witnessing its collapse in the 1990s into civil war. She leaves us
this eloquent record, written with great humility and with love.

* 1960s
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* Revolutionaries
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* Algiers
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* exile
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