Algiers, Mecca of Revolutions

Abstract

From November 1954 until July 1962, the National Liberation Front (FLN) fought, militarily and diplomatically, to free Algeria from French colonial control. The eventual victory of the FLN was heralded across the globe by other liberation and revolutionary movements, many of whose members then flocked to Algeria, and specifically to its capital city Algiers, hoping to benefit from political support and practical training that would enable them to obtain similar results in their own struggles. In addition to the challenges of building a new nation from the rubble of colonialism in the wake of an extremely violent and destructive war, presidents Ahmed Ben Bella (1962–5) and Houari Boumediene (1965–78) and their socialist regimes thus also had to navigate the expectations surrounding Algeria’s new-found status as the ‘Mecca of Revolutions’, to use anti-colonial activist Amilcar Cabral’s famous phrase. Employed for her language and communication skills first by the FLN and then by the post-independence Algerian government and multiple liberation movements who landed in Algiers, Elaine Mokhtefi was afforded a front row seat to all of the above. From this unique vantage point, her memoir provides personal insights and intimate anecdotes which reveal the human dynamics that animated and shaped some of the major geopolitical events and processes that defined these decades. The book opens in 1951, as twenty-three-year-old Mokhtefi (still Klein) boards a boat in Virginia headed for France, a country she had fallen in love with from afar. Once there, she soon abandons her studies in favour of increased involvement in political activism, continuing a path first embarked upon in the United States when she was a member of the Union of World Federalists. Her introduction to Algeria’s struggle for independence and her associated realization of the hollowness of the French motto ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’, comes after she witnesses the exclusion of Algerian labourers from the annual May Day parade in 1952. Drawn progressively into anti-colonial activism and into the orbit of FLN militants, including Frantz Fanon, she ends up working for the Algerian Office at the United