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“Black Power to Black People: Branding the Black Panther Party” [https://www.flickr.com/photos/36521980095@N01/52743460491] by danxoneil is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
In this unlikely setting, Elaine moved in the same circles as world famous radicals, ragtag political parties, spies and military leaders. And she became an unlikely sidekick to one of the most iconic liberation groups of our time, just as it was beginning to fall apart.
Featuring Credits – Kerning Cultures
Credits – Making Contact
TRANSCRIPT
Making Contact Button:
Making, making contact, making, making, making contact.
Anita:
A warning before we start. This episode makes mention of sexual assault and violence. I’m Anita Johnson and this is Making Contact.
Collage audio:
Anita:
On today’s Making Contact, our friends from the podcast, Kerning Cultures, bring us “Black Panthers in Algeria.” It’s the story of when Elaine Mokhtefi (the American and Algerian activist, and author) landed in newly independent Algeria in the early 1960s and quickly found herself at the center of a special period in the country’s history, at a time when Algiers welcomed liberation groups from across the world – earning a reputation as the “Mecca of revolution.” Here’s hosts Dana Ballout and Deena Sabry
Collage audio:
Elaine Mokhtefi: I was raised in small towns. Upstate New York and in Connecticut. And I lived on a farm for a long while. My grandfather had a farm and I lived on the farm.
Dana Ballout: When Elaine Muhtafi grew up and became a young adult, she moved away from the family farm and became obsessed with politics. As a student in the 1940s, she got involved in America’s anti war groups.
Elaine Mokhtefi:
She worked with, uh, an organization called the United World Federalists.
Dana Ballout: But by the end of the second World War, she wanted to see more of the world. She was 23 when she got on board a ship from Virginia bound across the Atlantic for France.
Elaine Mokhtefi: In those days, we traveled by boat. There were no planes crossing the Atlantic.
Dana Ballout: She loved Paris before she even arrived. Her imagination was full of the romance of being an American in Paris in the early 20th century. Way before Emily in Paris. It was where F. Scott Fitzgerald had lived, where Hemingway had written A Moveable Feast. But when she arrived, that romanticism quickly dissipated.
Elaine Mokhtefi: And it was there that I discovered that, uh, there was a big problem with Algeria.
News Clips: As tension rises in French North Africa, France arms her Algerian supporters for defense against rebel race.
Dana Ballout By the 1950s, when Alain arrived in Paris, France was struggling and divided, desperately trying to cling on to its colonial rule in Algeria, which had been a colony of France and occupied by them for more than 120 years.
Their rule was one of violent tyranny, where torture, mass displacements, and discrimination against Algerians were endemic.
News Clips: soldiers in a rebel ambush. French troops launched a full scale drive against terrorists in Algeria.
Dana Ballout: But around this time, resistant movements across the globe were successfully launching opposition campaigns against their colonial occupiers.
And in Algeria, the independence movement was called the Algerian National Liberation Fronts, the FLN. You’ll hear that term a lot in this episode. And in 1954, the FLN launched a guerrilla war against the French military.
Elaine: The Algerian war was one of the most important, most significant wars of the 20th century. Uh, we don’t always realize What it meant for a victim of colonialism to stand up and fight. Only negotiation with the Algerians will solve the problem.
News Clip: Only the recognition of the Algerian national realities and the right of that country to independence will end the shedding of blood and will permit France to consolidate her in France.
Dana: The war became a defining political issue, and everyone took sides. Thousands of people marched through the streets of Paris, both against and in favor of French rule in Algeria. And there was Elaine. She had found herself an apartment in the North African quarter of Paris. And the way North Africans were treated in France reminded her of the way Black Americans were treated in America.
It made her angry. And as she learned more about the colonial war in Algeria, she wanted to join the protest movement against it, similar to the way she joined anti war groups in America. And she began making connections in the Algerian resistance community, marching in anti war demonstrations and working to support the cause however she could.
Elaine: Our job mainly was to try to get the United Nations to pass a resolution in favor of Algerian independence. It was very difficult at the time.
Dana: It took years of struggle and hundreds of thousands of lives lost. But in March, 1962, France reluctantly conceded and signed a set of peace treaties with the provisional governments of the Algerian Republic and a referendum.
Later that year, the people of Algeria were asked if they wanted their country to become independent. Six million people came out to vote, and over 99 percent voted yes. After the withdrawal of the French troops, it was finally possible for thousands of people like Elaine, who had supported the Algerian independence from afar, to finally visit the country.
She got on a plane as soon as she could, arriving in 1962. On a packed Air France flight bound for Algeria.
Elaine: I was there for the November 1st celebrations of Algerian independence. A very, uh, exciting time of, uh, celebration, uh, with, uh, lots of friends of, uh, Algeria, uh, at war and at present of the celebrations.
Dana: She had never planned to stay in post independent Algeria permanently, but that changed within a few days. She found a three bedroom apartment for herself, a job with the tourist authority, and began to settle in.
Elaine: And I felt that this was, uh, maybe my home.
Dana: Elaine had settled in her new home right at the beginning of an extraordinary period in Algeria’s history.
Because over the next decade, she would have a front row seat as resistant movements from across the world converged on the country, turning it into a melting pot of left wing political ideas. And in this unlikely setting, she moved in the same circles as revolutionaries, ragtag political parties, spies, and military leaders.
And she was witness to the final days of one of the most iconic liberation movements of our time, the Black Panthers. As Elaine puts it, a brief window of hope, before it crumbled and the world changed forever. Producer Deena Sabry takes it from here.
Deena Sabry: During French colonial rule, most ordinary Algerians had very little contact with French institutions.
And there weren’t very many Algerians in positions of power. So when the French settlers left, they left behind the power vacuum.
Natalia Bin Khaled Vince: So this creates sort of an immediate sort of practical problem uh, that the new Algerian government has to deal with.
Deena Sabry: This is Natalia Bin Khaled Vince. She’s a historian of the French empire, decolonization, and post colonial histories.
I’m a professor at the University of Oxford. Following independence, the Algerian National Liberation Front, the FLN, suffered an internal split. After a bit of infighting, eventually a man called Ahmed Mbella created the political wing of the party, and the army installed him as the first president of the newly independent Algeria.
There is some opposition to that, but really by that point, you know, Algerian people are pretty sick and tired of war, so sort of an uneasy compromise, if you like, comes about, and by autumn 1962, at least publicly, at least, you know, the people in power, Ben Bella and the people sort of around him are not particularly sort of openly contested.
As Elaine was settling into her new home in Algiers, halfway across the world in California, a man called Eldridge Cleaver was on the run from the police. In a twisted interpretation of justice, he saw the sexual assault of white women as part of his so called revenge against white people. And he was wanted on several charges of rape, assault, and attempted murder.
You know, I think that one of the things that’s important about Cleaver is that, you know, We look at him by holding kind of two contradictory thoughts in our head at at once. This is Justin Gifford. He’s a professor of English at the University of Nevada in Reno, and the author of Revolution or Death, the Life of Eldridge Cleaver.
And one of those ways of thinking about him is that he was deeply committed to black liberation in a very radical way. At the same time, this is an individual who raped women, who went to prison for assault. So, I think it’s important for people to be able to see both of these sides of Cleaver, because that’s the truth.
When the police caught up with him, he was convicted and sent to prison. During his time there, he wrote a collection of essays called Soul on Ice. I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist. And it was a hit, selling 200, 000 copies in just a couple of years. He quickly became an influential symbol of Black resistance during the 1960s.
Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me great pleasure to introduce our guest, a remarkable individual, Mr. Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver had also started reading up on the teachings of the civil rights leader, Malcolm X, and he was inspired to begin making plans to launch his own political movement. Malcolm X was actually dead already at this point when he got out of prison in the late 60s, and Cleaver decided that he was going to organize his own political group, radical political group, that would eventually try to overthrow the United States government.
Um, before he was able to do this, he met with the Black Panthers for the first time, and they enlisted him to be their
The Black Panther Party was set up to fight for black liberation, against American imperialism and institutional racism. The Panthers believe the whole economic and political system is against them, against the poor black and white, and that if death is the result of picking up the gun, well that’s the price you have to pay for what you believe in.
Their message was potent, and they began to rally support from across the U. S. Power to the people! To the people! Their slogans, like power to the people, became everyday expressions. And their image was just as iconic. Dark sunglasses and black leather jackets.
They began running community action schemes. Panthers say that 6, 000 children are served breakfast across the country each week. Breakfast for children, health care, after school programs, and organizing marches. And then Some very sad news for all of you, and I think, uh, sad news for all of our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world.
And that is it. Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis. America is shocked and saddened by the brutal slaying tonight. After Martin Luther King was killed in April of 1968, Cleaver decided that he was going to use that moment to try to start the revolution. The people are going to wage a people’s war against you.
In Cleaver’s worldview, Martin Luther King’s peaceful politics had gone in the Black Liberation Movement nowhere. Learn They needed to be more direct and more violent. And so he and a number of other Black Panthers, uh, tracked down various white police officers and attacked them in a gun battle that left one, uh, Panther, Bobby Hutton, dead and Cleaver in prison.
But they literally murdered Bobby Hutton and shot and wounded. Eldridge Cleaver and Warren, these other men. Cleaver was let out on bail and he decided that he would rather flee the country than go back to prison again. I went to the penitentiary to investigate it for you and I didn’t like it. I’m going to stay out here where the people are and let the penitentiary be for the pigs.
So in
1968 he traveled to Cuba on a cargo ship. He saw the Cuban president Fidel Castro as a potential ally in his fight against American imperialism and he thought he might be able to garner his support. All right. It’s help with things like training for the Black Panthers. But his plan didn’t get very far.
Shortly after arriving, a Reuters correspondent recognized Cleaver on the street and blew his cover. On top of that, his hopes of getting any support from Fidel Castro were drying up. As it turns out, Cuba didn’t want to have anything to do with this kind of activity. Relations between Cuba and the United States were already fraught as it was, and so they quickly shuttled him off to Algeria in the summer of 1969.
At the time, Algerians had just overthrown French colonial rule. And the newly instated government was keen to support other anti colonial movements however they could. So there’s this idea that Algeria sort of threw off the yoke of colonial rule against the odds, um, and they don’t see this struggle as sort of ending sort of once national independence has been achieved.
It’s sort of a global struggle against forces of imperialism and oppression. What that means in practice is that Algeria becomes something, a hub Of, uh, sort of, you know, revolutionaries and anti colonialists from, from around the world. So it’s really sort of cultivating this image, if you like, mecca of revolution.
The Algerian government helped out resistance and leftist groups in two ways. Military support through weapons and training, and political support by lobbying on the world stage. They also adopted an open door policy, inviting opposition leaders from around the world to Algiers, like the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam, various Palestinian liberation groups, and exiled politicians from Brazil, Argentina, Tunisia, and Morocco.
So Eldridge Cleaver, when 60s, was looking for the same thing he’d gone to Cuba for. An opportunity for the Panthers to earn more recognition, financing, and training to revolt against the U. S. government. Actually, he arrived in Algeria and, uh, the Algerian authorities had not been warned that he was arriving, and so no one was at the airport to meet him.
Late that night, the telephone in Elaine’s apartment rang. On the line was the leader of another visiting liberation movement. He’d been trying to reach her for hours. He told her Cleaver was in town. And since she was one of only a handful of French speaking Americans in Algiers, he asked her if she’d go and meet him.
So I did go. He was in a hotel, a hotel that was at the time called the Victoria. And I went there the next day, and I met him, and his wife was with him, and an American journalist, and another member of the Black Panther Party, and, uh, Eldridge told me his story, and said that he would like to remain in Algeria, and I happened to know the head of the liberation movement section of the Liberation movement.
Uh, National Liberation Front. So I called him and told him about Eldridge having arrived in Algeria. And, uh, he said it was more than welcome. And, uh, I relayed this message along and, uh, Eldridge, uh, then organized a press conference. We came over here to do what we can to communicate to you what’s happening in our struggle in the United States.
At the press conference, Cleaver announce his arrival to an auditorium filled with journalists, students, and diplomats, and to learn, uh, what is happening over here and what have been the successes and what have been the failures, and what are the dangers that we must be aware of and it something new.
Soon, more and more, black Panthers began to arrive in Algeria. The Algerian governments gave them travel documents, a monthly stipend and a villa to work from a two story house with huge arch doorways and manicured hedges. It’s just, it was a private house, private, I mean, it was a government house, but it was a, it was a home.
It looked like a boutique hotel, except by the entrance was a shiny silver plaque with the Black Panther’s logo and the words, Black Panther Party, in our national section. It was the group’s first overseas outpost. With Cleaver and his wife Kathleen living in Algeria full time, leading its operation. Yes, I think the Algerian authorities were very sensitive to the problem of black Americans.
And they gave them their support. They set about creating alliances with other liberation groups from places like China, North Vietnam, and the Congo. They’re often invited to other embassies or liberation organization headquarters. And we were very close to the Viet Cong representative. He was, uh, one of the first people that Eldridge visited when he, uh, arrived in Algeria, was the representative of the Viet Cong, Tran Hoi Nam.
We join hands with the Vietnamese people, because the Vietnamese people are fighting the pigs of the power structure. And we’re fighting the pigs of the power structure, and we’re both oppressed. We’re both dying. And we both know that we must put an end to this. We need each other. And we love each other.
So Cleaver was really trying to establish these connections in order to get not only, like, training and advice, um, but also to try to build a coalition, a global coalition, between and among various peoples of color. The thinking here was that someone like Martin Luther King’s assimilationist philosophies were not going to get the black population anywhere in the United States precisely because they were an oppressed community under a police state.
And so the only solution to this problem was to overthrow what they saw was a colonial authority. We are facing a common enemy and it is this common enemy. which we must all crush. If our Afro American brothers score success in the United States, that success is not only theirs, it is ours too. I was very glad that I was in a position to help them.
It was one of the causes I was most sensitive to, the cause of racism in the United States. I was extremely sensitive to that cause. It was one of the causes that was most, uh, was closest to my heart.
When Cleaver first joined the Black Panthers, the FBI saw them as the biggest internal threat to the security of the United States. So with him out of the country, they saw an opportunity to drive a wedge between the Panthers and California. run by Huy Nguyen and the faction working under Cleaver in Algeria.
For Newton and the Panthers in the United States, they were really interested in, in shifting the, um, party toward community programs. So free breakfast for children, free tests for sickle cell disease. They had an ambulance that they ran through Oakland to help sick people. So the Panthers in the United States were shifting more toward kind of a reformist mainstream political model.
And at the same time, Cleaver was in Algeria really hyping up his approach, which is all about black insurrection and overthrowing the government. And he was deeply militant. So there was already an internal split, but The FBI really exploited that by sending false letters both to Cleaver and to Newton, essentially accusing the other one of trying to take over the party.
This all came to a head on live TV.
Newton was a guest on a show called AM San Francisco, and Cleaver phoned in from Algeria to air his grievances. The whole thing descended into chaos. Anything you want to say, we’ll let this one out. And Newton expelled Cleaver and
the entire international section of the party right then and there. You’re a coward and you’re a punk, you understand? I think you’ve lost your ability to reason, brother. Hey brother, you hear what I’m calling you, that’s what I feel about you now. You’re a punk. Without the support of the Panther’s HQ back in the US, Cleaver was in desperate need of cash to keep his branch of the party operating.
Andrew Cleaver had been cut off from the Black Panthers in the U. S. and needed money to finance his branch of the party in Algeria. In 1973, a couple of Panthers actually hijacked airliners There was another airplane hijacking today. A Delta Airlines jet taken over by a gang of hijackers after landing in Miami to pick up the biggest with between half a million and a million dollars and came to Algeria to give the money to Cleaver.
Did the hijackers say where they wanted to go, or did you talk with them at all? Now, uh, Stewardess said they wanted to go to Algiers. But the Algerian government seized the money. The U. S. demanded that the ransom be returned. An official said they expect Algeria to comply. And gave it back to the airlines because they were in the middle of brokering a deal with the United States over oil rights and they didn’t want to disrupt any sort of relationship with the U.
So, at that point, the Cleaver and the group of, uh, Panthers that remained had a press conference and wrote this press release in which they basically demanded the money from the Algerian president and the president reacted by sending secret service agents to try to assassinate Cleaver and he and Kathleen were just barely able to get out Algerian Civil Aviation Authority who was responsible for dealing with these hijackings.
Although Algeria had been a so called Makkah for revolutionaries at the time, He said that these hijackings were a step too far. So from independence, the Algerian government has to walk a fine line between sustaining this reputation of being the Mecca of revolution, of being sort of this pilot revolutionary state, this inspiration for liberation movements around the world, and its need and desire to be seen as a normal country playing by the rules of international relations.
that cautiousness also becomes entangled with the idea of international respectability. Yeah, so they actually want to be seen as a normal state playing by the normal rules of international diplomacy. And when, you know, your country becomes really well known for welcoming plain hijackers, that actually is a challenge to that image.
You want to be an international broker, not kind of like a rogue state. So in that sense, sort of the, the plainjackings, um, become a political problem. For the Algerian government, the Panthers had crossed the line with these attacks. It wasn’t a good look for them to be seen supporting a group that had resorted to hijacking planes to fund their cause.
So they started to withdraw their support. And, uh, that was when the Panthers had to take stock of what their position was internationally. And they had lost a lot of their influence because of the split and because of the FBI intervention. So, uh, Things changed rather rapidly for them, caused the breakup of the Panthers and Algiers and many, as many of them moved along to other countries to settle and, um, and live.
Cleaver left Algeria for Europe in 1973. He snuck into France and later got a visa to live there. He flew back to the U. S. two years later and was arrested as soon as he landed in New York. With his hands cuffed behind him, Cleaver was processed by the FBI and then taken by car to a federal court in Brooklyn.
He died in California in 1998. Elaine was deported in 1976. She says it was because she refused to become a spy for the Algerian government. Yes, they contacted me and I refused and the final result, it took some time, but the final result was that they deported me because I wouldn’t work for them. She went to Paris for a few years before moving back to New York.
The Panthers had moved to Algeria at a time when the future was still up for grabs. Between 1950 and 1962, more than 30 African countries gained their independence. For a moment in time, it seemed like the colonial capitalist template that dominated the world for centuries was being dismantled. It was an unbelievable period of time.
We believed that the third world had gained its place in the world forever. But that quickly changed when the Cold War ended in 1991. In Algeria, support for liberation movements started to dwindle after the Panthers left. In 1971, the government revived relations with the U. S. and the two countries signed a 25 year long gas agreement.
Algeria’s heyday as a haven for revolutionary groups was over. Little did we know that the world would be, the whole world would become capitalist in a short period of time. That the East would disappear and the West would be a long time winner.
There were so many, so many favorite memories. Can’t number them all. It sort of flashed across my mind from time to time, but I, I met my husband to be in Algiers in 1972, and that’s an unforgettable experience. I worked at the, uh, The Algerian press office was there the day that we were asked to be part of the film, uh, The Battle of Algiers.
And, uh, I actually spent a day with the group that filmed Ponte Carvo’s, uh, Fantastic film. And I was even president in that film for about 20 seconds.
There were so many, I mean, meeting the Viet Cong and becoming friends with the leaders of the, of so many progressive organizations. It brings back many memories. Makes me want to cry.
Anita: This episode, “Black Panthers in Algeria” was produced by Deena Sabry and Alex (A)tack for the podcast,”Kerning Cultures,” Stories from the Middle East and North Africa and the spaces in between. If you want more information about this episode or our weekly shows, visit us at focmedia.org. Also you can visit us on Twitter or Instagram and leave us a comment. We’d really like to hear from you. I’m Anita Johnson. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
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