In William Gardner Smith's 1963 novel The Stone Face, we follow Simeon Brown, a black journalist who flees American racism by moving to Paris. At first, France feels like a color-blind sanctuary to him, until he inadvertently causes the police to harass several Algerian men. “We're the niggers here!” one of the men later tells him. Troubled, Simeon seeks out other Algerians living in Paris, who relay harrowing tales of French military torture and other atrocities during the Algerian War of Independence. By the book's end, Simeon realizes that the “stone face” of racism can never be escaped, that only the locales and the victims change, so he decides to return to the United States to fight for “America's Algerians.”
Elaine Mokhtefi makes a similar comparison in her memoir, Algiers, Third World Capital. Born into an American Jewish family that moved around frequently, she witnessed racism and anti-Semitism throughout the country, and her strong early disdain for both led her to join a global anticolonial movement while in college. Several years later, she moved to Paris and was struck, like Smith's protagonist, by the similarities in the treatment of black people in the United States and Algerian immigrants in France. “Something in me associated those gaunt olive-skinned men on the Faubourg Saint-Antoine with the darker wayfarers trailing along the dusty roads of the South,” she recalled, and she threw in her lot with those in France opposing the colonization of Algeria.
Mokhtefi's activism eventually led her to work for the Office of the Provisional Government of Algeria. After Algeria won its independence in 1962, she moved to Algiers the same year and became a civil servant in the new government. During this period, a number of anticolonial organizations set up shop in Algiers as well, and Mokhtefi once again found herself involved in various national-liberation struggles. After stints in several branches of the new government, she became a trusted aide to Eldridge Cleaver and the growing number of Black Panthers who had moved to the city and established the International Section of the Black Panther Party there.
As an observer and participant, Mokhtefi occupied a unique position in the world of black and anticolonial liberation struggles of the 1950s and '60s that enables her to offer a rare chronicle of the intersection of these movements. In Algiers, Third World Capital, she captures the camaraderie, shared ideals, and frequent miscommunication among the various struggles for liberation in these heady and ultimately frustrating years, and in particular the conflicts that emerged between the Panthers and the Algerian government in their competing visions of emancipation. The Panthers sought to run their organization in the city with as little official oversight as possible, and they struggled to reconcile this with their dependent position on the Algerian state. Meanwhile, the Algerian government sought to assert its sovereignty over the newly independent country and likewise struggled to come to terms with the tensions between its own nationalist and internationalist projects. Both groups also struggled to address contradictions within their movements, especially between their tendencies to reassert hierarchies and authority and their desire to be free of earlier forms of them. By focusing on these tensions, Mokhtefi tells several richly layered stories at once—her own and those of several intersecting groups of people who hoped to forge a new kind of internationalism out of the antiracist and anticolonial struggles of the 1960s.
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