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A fascinating portrait of life with the Black Panthers in Algiers: a story of liberation and radical politics

About the Author

Elaine Mokhtefi was born in New York. After the Second World War, she joined the youth movement for world peace and justice becoming director of a militant student organisation. In 1951 she settled in France and became a translator and interpreter in the new postwar world of international organisations. In 1960 she joined the small team in New York of the Algerian National Liberation Front and government in exile lobbying the United Nations to support the independence of Algeria. Once victorious, she made Algeria her home, working as a journalist and translator. She was married to the Algerian writer and liberation war veteran, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, who died in 2015. She lives in New York where she is a writer and painter.

Reviews

Extraordinary. . .written with great humility and with love.
*Guardian*

Mokhtefi (née Klein), a Jewish American from Long Island, has had an exhilarating life.In the nineteen-sixties, she served as a press adviser to the National Liberation Front in postwar Algiers, before going to work with Eldridge Cleaver, who was wanted in the U.S. for his role in a deadly shoot-out with Oakland police. Half a century later, as an eighty-nine-year-old painter living on the Upper West Side, Mokhtefi still seasons her prose with the argot of revolution.
*New Yorker*

Algiers, Third World Capital is a return to a time when Algiers was Mecca and the Vatican for revolutionaries. Indeed, at the time Amilcar Cabral said: 'Muslims go on pilgrimage to Mecca, Christians in the Vatican and national liberation movements in Algiers.'
*Le Soir d'Algerie (French)*

Elaine Mokhtefi has written a fascinating insider's account of the Black Panthers' exile in Algiers in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Legendary figures take to the stage in the world capital of the national liberation movements: Ahmed Ben Bella, Frantz Fanon, Eldridge Cleaver. Mokhtefi was a key intermediary between the Panthers and the FLN during her own time in Algiers, and a militant anti-imperialist. This is a clear-eyed, first-hand recollection of the way things fall apart.
*Jeremy Harding, author of Border Vigils*

The behind-the-scenes work of post-WWII liberation movements comes to the fore in this gripping memoir from Mokhtefi...she makes palpable the turmoil and fervor of her experience there while sharing unbelievable stories previously known only to their participants.
*Publisher's Weekly*

A memoir of international radical activism, from helping Algeria and Africa shake the yoke of colonialism to helping the Black Panthers establish a revolutionary outpost in exile..A firsthand account of a time when so much seemed up for grabs.
*Kirkus Reviews*

The story she tells in her book is one of intrigue, political and otherwise. It is also about a revolution trying to create a government equal to its ideals in the face of very powerful enemies. Mokhtefi writes as a believer in the revolution, but does not hesitate to critique some of the twists and turns it took over the years she was part of the government.
*CounterPunch*

Mokhtefi handles some spectacular material in brisk, modest fashion. The inevitable doubts and conflicts that arise are not agonized over.Mokhtefi focuses less on how her political allegiances developed than on telling, in lively, lucid fashion, what happened and who did what.it [seems] possible that this readiness to minimize herself on the page is related to whatever capacity allows a person, over the years, to participate in politics, navigating the compromises involved.
*Harper's Magazine*

Mokhtefi artfully weaves together these various strands of radical struggle, while enriching our understanding of the Third World with personal anecdotes...this story reminds us that the Third World was not merely a destination. It was also a fabric of people woven together, even if the patchwork was sometimes unexpected, and at other times, imperfectly sewn.
*Public Books*

Elaine Mokhtefi's newly published autobiographical account of her life as an engaged anti-imperialist, Algiers, Third World Capital, provides an ideal occasion to reconsider the politics of "Third Worldist" internationalism linking Black Power, European radicals, and anti-colonial militants during (the late sixties).
*Eugene Brennan*