Vol. 39 No. 11 · 1 June 2017

DIARY

Panthers in Algiers

Elaine Mokhtefi

In​ 1951 I left the US for Europe. I was working as a translator and interpreter in the new postwar world of international organisations: UN agencies, trade-union bodies, student and youth associations. My plan was to visit France briefly, but I stayed nearly ten years. For anyone living in Paris, the Algerian war was inescapable. Where did your sympathies lie? Which side were you on? In 1960 at an international youth conference in Accra, I struck up a friendship with the two Algerian representatives: Frantz Fanon, a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, and Mohamed Sahnoun of the exiled Algerian student movement. After the conference, I flew to New York, where I met Abdelkader Chanderli, the head of the Algerian Office, as the unofficial Algerian mission at the UN was known. Chanderli invited me to join his team, lobbying UN member states to support Algerian independence.

In 1962, with independence declared, I went back to Algeria. Vacancies left by close to a million fleeing Europeans meant that jobs were on offer in every ministry and sector. Before long, I found myself working in President Ahmed Ben Bella’s press and information office, where I received foreign journalists, scheduled appointments and dished out information to the reporters from Europe and the US who were streaming in. I even learned to fake Ben Bella’s signature for his admirers.

I stayed on after the coup that brought Houari Boumediene to power in 1965. I had made a home in Algeria; I was happy with my life and my work in the national press. In 1969, events took an extraordinary turn. Late one night I received a call from Charles Chikerema, the representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, one of many African liberation movements with an office in the city. He told me that the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was in town and needed help.

It was June. I remember it very clearly. I can see myself walking down a side street between the Casbah and the European sector of Algiers towards the Victoria, a small, third-rate hotel. I climbed four flights of stairs and knocked. The door opened and there was Cleaver, and beyond him, flat out on the bed, his wife, Kathleen, eight months pregnant. The sense of awe I felt that day never left me. The shortcomings of the Black Panther Party are clear enough in retrospect, but they took the battle to the streets, demanded justice and were prepared to bear arms to protect their community. Their slogans – ‘The sky’s the limit’, ‘Power to the People’ – resounded through black ghettoes across the US. They denounced American imperialism as the war in Vietnam gathered pace.

Cleaver had arrived secretly in Algiers using Cuban travel documents. After ambushing a police car in Oakland, he had jumped bail and headed for Havana, where he spent six months as a clandestine guest before he was ‘discovered’ by a journalist. The Cubans had put him on a plane to Algiers without informing the Algerians. Cleaver felt his life hung in the balance. He had been assured in Havana that everything had been cleared with the Algerian government, that he’d be received with open arms and allowed to resume the political activities denied him in Cuba. But his handlers at the Cuban embassy in Algiers were now telling him the Algerians weren’t willing to offer him asylum.

I’d never known the authorities to refuse asylum seekers, whatever their nationality. Since I was the only American the local officials knew, I was often called on to interpret and explain, and to take responsibility for Americans who arrived without realising that hardly anyone in Algeria spoke English. Later that day I talked to the official in charge of liberation movements, Commandant Slimane Hoffman, a tank specialist who had deserted from the French army to join the Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) and was close to Boumediene. I explained that Cleaver wished to remain in the country and to hold an international press conference. Hoffman agreed straightaway, but insisted that Cleaver’s presence be announced by the Algerian Press Service. ‘You saved my life,’ Cleaver told me repeatedly; he was convinced the Cubans had set him up.

The press conference went ahead, in a hall packed with students, members of the local and international press, diplomats and representatives from the world’s liberation movements. Julia Hervé, the daughter of Richard Wright, came from Paris to interpret from English into French. I did the same, into English, for the Cleavers. ‘We are an integral part of Africa’s history,’ Cleaver said at the conference. ‘White America teaches us that our history begins on the plantations, that we have no other past. We have to take back our culture!’

From then on, we were a team. Cleaver was tall – he seemed to me towering – and sexy, with a perfectly developed sense of humour and expressive green eyes. He and I had a rapport, no sex but much sharing of confidences. When the Cleavers arrived, I was working at the Ministry of Information organising the first Pan-African Cultural Festival, which was to bring together musicians, dancers, actors and intellectuals from every country in Africa and the black diaspora, including members of the Panthers from the US. For more than a week, the streets of Algiers overflowed, performances filled the day and carried on into the small hours. Among the performers were Archie Shepp, Miriam Makeba, Oscar Peterson, and Nina Simone, whose first performance we had to cancel after Miriam Makeba and I found her dead drunk in her hotel room. The local stagehands were shocked: they had never seen a drunk woman. The Panther delegation stayed at the Aletti, the best hotel in downtown Algiers, and were provided with a storefront – they called it the Afro-American Centre – on rue Didouche Mourad, one of the city’s two main commercial thoroughfares, where they distributed party literature and screened films late into the night. Cleaver and his companions – most of them also refugees from US justice – were quickly integrated into the cosmopolitan community of liberation movements. The Panthers may not have noticed, or perhaps didn’t care, that Algeria itself was a conservative, closed society, that women were not really free, that a form of anti-black racism existed among the population, and that the Algerian establishment’s generosity required certain codes of conduct and reciprocity on the part of their guests. The Panthers ignored whatever they didn’t want to deal with. After the festival, the delegation returned to California, while the exiles got down to business. I received invitations for Cleaver to meet the ambassadors of North Vietnam, China and North Korea, as well as representatives of the Palestinian liberation movement and the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Vietcong). I accompanied him on these visits: he was dignified and lucid, performing like a seasoned diplomat, despite his past as a school dropout, rapist and convict. He could also close down, and retreat to an inaccessible place.

Shortly after Cleaver’s arrival, the ambassador of North Korea invited him to Pyongyang to attend an ‘international conference of journalists against American imperialism’. Cleaver was the star of the conference and stayed on for more than a month. One morning, shortly after his return, he showed up at the Ministry of Information, where I was part of a small team working on a political magazine for international distribution. He was wearing shades and slumped down on a chair next to my desk. Then, without any preamble he lowered his voice: ‘I killed Rahim last night.’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Rahim, aka Clinton Smith, had escaped from prison in California with a fellow inmate, Byron Booth, in January 1969. They had hijacked a plane to Cuba and joined up with Cleaver. Not long after sending Cleaver off to Algiers, the Cubans packed off Rahim and Booth too.

Cleaver told me that Rahim had stolen the Panthers’ money and was planning to ‘split’. He and Booth, who witnessed the murder, had buried the body on a wooded hillside a little way out of town, near the sea. Once he’d finished telling me this he put on the cap he’d been playing with and strolled out of the office. I couldn’t get Rahim’s face out of my mind. I was angry with Cleaver for imagining I needed to know any of this. Did he think I could help him if the Algerian authorities got wind of the murder and decided to take action? Several days later a French friend told me that he had seen Rahim and Kathleen Cleaver ‘smooching’ in a cabaret when Cleaver was in North Korea. My friend didn’t know that Rahim had ‘disappeared’. When I next saw Cleaver he told me that the hastily buried remains had been discovered, and added that it must have been obvious from the afro and the tattoos that the victim was an African-American. By then Booth had left the country. A French friend of the Panthers was summoned to police headquarters to identify the body but no one from the Algerian authorities ever got in touch with the Panthers or with me, though I was sure the killing had gone on record.

The Panthers financed themselves thanks to donations from supporters and Cleaver’s advances on book projects. His royalties from Soul on Ice, the defiant confession that had made him famous, were blocked by the US government. Over lunch one day in the spring of 1970, Cleaver pleaded with me to find a way for what the Panthers were now calling the ‘International Section of the BPP’ to be recognised as a sponsored liberation movement, allowing it access to a range of privileges, and a monthly stipend. I turned the problem over to M’hamed Yazid, who’d been the Algerian provisional government’s first representative in New York. He spoke fluent English and was married to Olive LaGuardia, niece of the former mayor of New York City.

M’hamed invited us to lunch at his house outside Algiers, built in the Ottoman period. We sat at a table in the garden, the Cleavers, Don Cox – the former military leader of the BPP, known as ‘DC’ or ‘the field marshal’ – and myself. M’hamed charmed us with stories of his life in New York, all the while sizing up his guests. The interview went well and soon afterwards he called to say the Panthers had been assigned a villa formerly occupied by the Vietcong delegation in the El Biar sector of the city. They would be provided with telephone and telex connections and Algerian ID cards; they wouldn’t need entry or exit visas; and they would receive a monthly cash allocation.

Why did the authorities decide to support the Panthers more openly? Perhaps they would serve as a bargaining chip in negotiations with Washington over Algeria’s oil and gas reserves. There were ideological reasons too. It was obvious to everyone living there that Algeria was not neutral in the struggle between the superpowers. Ties with the Soviet Union dated back to the liberation war and the Eastern bloc’s generosity in providing weapons, training and education.

Cleaver was on top of the world after receiving formal recognition. In May, he shipped his pregnant wife off to give birth in North Korea. The wonders of the Korean health system, it was thought, were unsurpassed, and the decision would strengthen the BPP’s ties with Pyongyang. Meanwhile Cleaver had met a gorgeous young Algerian called Malika Ziri who was constantly at his side. Attaching herself publicly to a black American at least 15 years older than her in a society where discretion was the rule would have required immense self-confidence. The Panthers were stars in Algiers, but their flamboyance was also looked on critically. They helped themselves to scarce resources – basic entitlements in American eyes – that other liberation movements didn’t have access to: houses, cars, media coverage, visiting celebrities. They openly dated attractive women, both Algerian and foreign. I can still picture Sekou Odinga, an exile from the New York branch of the Panthers, swooping along the rue Didouche in a shiny red convertible with the top down, a lovely auburn-haired American at the wheel.

The official opening of the headquarters of the International Section took place on 13 September 1970. ‘This is the first time in the struggle of the black people in America that they have established representation abroad,’ Cleaver told the crowd at the ‘embassy’. A few weeks later Sanche de Gramont, a French-American journalist, published a cover story in the New York Times Magazine entitled ‘Our Other Man in Algiers’.

Soon after the opening of the embassy Timothy Leary, the high priest of LSD (‘turn on, tune in, drop out’), and his wife arrived in town. Leary had been sprung from a US prison by the Weather Underground, who’d been paid $25,000 (some say $50,000) by the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a California hippy group that manufactured and distributed high-grade marijuana and LSD. Nixon had called Leary ‘the most dangerous man in America’. Cleaver and I gave Slimane Hoffman a toned-down version of Leary’s story, emphasising his career as a Harvard professor. Cleaver assured Hoffman that he was capable of controlling Leary’s drug use and his bouts of nonsensical eloquence. The commandant wished us well.

My first impression was that the Learys were elderly hipsters. I don’t know what I expected: something crazier, more flamboyant and exciting. In the name of the revolution Cleaver decided that Leary had to denounce drugs, and Leary agreed to take part in a BPP film session aimed at US audiences. Cleaver opened the interview by saying that the idea that drugs were a way to liberation was an invention by ‘illusionary guys’: the real path was through organisations like the Weathermen and the BPP who were involved in direct action. Leary’s reply was cagey. ‘If taking any drug postpones for ten minutes the revolution, the liberation of our sisters and brothers, our comrades, then taking drugs must be postponed for ten minutes ... However, if one hundred FBI agents agreed to take LSD, thirty would certainly drop out.’

The Panthers decided Leary should join a delegation invited to the Levant by Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s party, then the dominant force in the PLO. Leary should break cover there, it was argued, not in Algeria. The group, headed by Don Cox, landed in Cairo in October without incident, then went on to Beirut, where they were put up in a hotel frequented by the Western press. Leary was spotted and the hotel was besieged. The delegation was followed everywhere and it became impossible for them to visit Fatah’s training camps in Jordan and Syria as planned. They returned instead to Cairo, where Leary, paranoid and hysterical, became ‘uncontrollable’, DC reported, scaling walls, hiding behind buildings, raising his arms and screaming in the streets. The Algerian ambassador put them on a plane back to Algiers.

From there, they hired a car and began spending time in Bou-Saada, an oasis in the Sahara where, at their ease on handloom carpets, they partied with LSD. Algeria is an immense country, four-fifths desert, but one is never quite alone. The Learys would smile blissfully and wave to the astonished shepherds who came across them. The Panthers didn’t approve of these escapades and in January 1971 ‘arrested’ the Learys, putting them under guard for several days. Cleaver filmed the prisoners and issued a press release that was distributed in the US: ‘Something’s wrong with Leary’s brain ... We want people to gather their wits, sober up and get down to the serious business of destroying the Babylonian empire ... To all those of you who looked to Dr Leary for inspiration and leadership, we want to say to you that your god is dead because his mind has been blown by acid.’

When he was freed, Leary complained to the Algerian authorities and we were summoned by Hoffman. The atmosphere was heavy until Cleaver and DC produced bags of drugs recovered from Leary and his visitors – enough for 20,000 hits. Hoffman’s jaw dropped. Tim was tired of us and wanted to move on. He no longer hid his dislike of DC and me; we felt the same way about him. Early in 1971, he left without saying goodbye.

There​ must have been thirty Panthers, men, women and children, in the International Section. They operated in military style with strict regulations, daily worksheets and activity reports. They maintained contact with support groups in Europe and other liberation organisations in Algiers. They ran training sessions in self-defence and weapons instruction. Just before the embassy opened Huey Newton, the legendary BPP leader who had spent almost three years in prison on a manslaughter charge for killing a policeman, was granted parole, awaiting a new trial. When he was released from jail ten thousand people turned out to greet him. But the man who took back the leadership of the BPP was not prepared for the transformation that had taken place in his absence. The party had become a powerhouse that the FBI was bent on destroying, waging war against its members, attacking chapter headquarters, letting loose an army of paid informers and circulating fake information. Newton’s reaction was to demand total control, dismissing groups and condemning individuals who failed to fall in line.

With the attempt at containment came self-aggrandisement. He was living in a penthouse, had taken over a nightclub and was walking with a swagger stick. At the start of 1971 he was due to appear on a morning TV show in San Francisco and asked Cleaver to join him to demonstrate their alliance and dissipate the rising tension. The International Section met and decided unanimously to use the occasion to confront Newton. When Cleaver appeared onscreen he demanded that Newton overturn his expulsion edicts and called for the removal of Newton’s lieutenant David Hilliard. Newton cut short the broadcast, then called Cleaver. ‘You’re a punk,’ he said and expelled him from the BPP. Chapters and members across the US took sides.

Cleaver had taped the broadcast and the phone call. He asked me to come and listen to the recording, worried about the Algerian reaction. I didn’t think they would get involved: ‘It’s not their problem, it’s yours, Eldridge.’ The Panthers took down the BPP plaque at the entrance to their embassy and started to call themselves the Revolutionary People’s Communications Network. They hoped to enable information exchange between left-wing groups around the world and to produce a newspaper for distribution in the US and Europe. To take the measure of the damage caused by the Newton/Cleaver split, and launch the network, Kathleen and I headed for the US in October 1971 on a month-long cross-country speaking tour. We soon realised that the party was collapsing.

The group in Algiers plodded on. There was no reaction from the Algerians, no sign that they were following events in the BPP, though Newton had sent a formal message to Boumediene denouncing Cleaver. Then, on 3 June 1972, I received a call from the head of the FLN telling me that a plane had been hijacked in Los Angeles and was heading for Algiers. The hijackers had demanded that Cleaver meet them at the airport. They were holding $500,000 in ransom money, which they’d obtained in exchange for letting the passengers go. We stood on the tarmac, Cleaver, DC, Pete O’Neal (the former head of the Kansas City Panthers) and myself, and watched Roger Holder, a young African-American, and his white companion, Cathy Kerkow, slowly come down the steps from the aircraft. All were in high spirits until we realised that the Algerians had taken the moneybags and were not about to put them into Cleaver’s eager hands. The money was returned to the US; Roger and Cathy were granted asylum and became part of the local community of US exiles.

On 1 August another hijacked plane arrived, this one from Detroit. The hijackers, black but again not Panthers, had been paid $1 million by Delta Airlines for releasing the plane’s passengers in Miami. This time the authorities in Algiers kept the Panthers at a distance, and once again sent the money back to the US. The Panthers were furious: they were ‘vibrating to the overtones of dollar bills’, Cleaver would later admit. They wrote an open letter to Boumediene: ‘Those who deprive us of this finance are depriving us of our freedom.’ DC told his comrades they were crazy and resigned from the organisation: ‘The government is not going to risk the future of their country for a handful of niggas and a million dollars. There’s gonna be trouble.’ He was right. Reproaching Algeria’s head of state in public showed a lack of respect. The police invaded the embassy, confiscated the Panthers’ weapons, cut the telephone and telex connections, and closed it down for 48 hours. When the guard was lifted, Cleaver was called in by a senior official and severely reprimanded. The atmosphere cleared within a few days: Algeria wasn’t ready to abandon them.

Cleaver and his colleagues knew little of the country that had taken them in. They never ventured beyond Algiers. They didn’t read the local press or listen to the radio. Except for women friends, they knew few Algerians and never visited Algerian homes. They knew little of Algeria’s colonial past, the ravages of the war, or the under-development the regime was attempting to tackle. They saw themselves as free agents, able to protest and use the media at will. Some of them even proposed organising a demonstration in front of Boumediene’s offices. Cleaver had to remind them that this was Algiers, not Harlem. They had no real understanding of their hosts, their politics or their reservations about their American guests, and they underestimated them.

The Algerians, for their part, weren’t sure how to deal with the Panthers. Algeria was a leading light in the Third World, active in the non-aligned group of nations. It was hosting and training liberation movements from Latin America, Africa and Asia. There was too much at stake for the FLN to let itself be pushed around by these American exiles. And it couldn’t allow international hijackers to make Algeria look like a nation that didn’t abide by international rules.

With a dying organisation in the US and international support fast slipping away, the Algiers Panthers were close to stateless. ‘The International Section,’ Cleaver later wrote, ‘had become a sinking ship.’ He left the embassy. Malika had been replaced by a series of Algerian women. One of them, to my astonishment, was a veiled neighbour of mine who never left our building unaccompanied. He had wooed her as she hung out the laundry on her balcony and had been meeting her in my apartment while Kathleen was in Europe, seeking asylum for the whole family.

‘To each his own’ was a formula Cleaver used on many occasions. When he used it now, he was signalling his withdrawal from the organised left. The community of exiles began to look to their individual survival. They started leaving Algeria towards the end of 1972. Some settled in sub-Saharan Africa, a few attempted an underground existence inside the US; others, Cleaver included, left for France on forged passports: within a few years he would be back in the US, a born-again Christian. No one was ejected from Algeria. The group of Detroit hijackers left in mid-1973; Roger and Cathy were the last to go in January 1974. Cox, the field marshal, returned to Algiers that year and lived and worked there for another four years. The arrival of the Panthers in Algeria had been more than an education or an experience for me. I believed in them, I loved them and shared their goals. I hated to see them go.

I had made the arrangements for Cleaver’s departure: I found the passport he would travel on, the passeurs who would see him safely across national frontiers, the hideout in southern France, and the apartments in Paris. Before long, he was taken up by influential people there. His French residency and legal immunity were sorted out by the minister of finance, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, shortly before he became president. Then I stopped hearing from him. To each his own, I reminded myself.

Elaine MokhtefiElaine Mokhtefi is working on a memoir about her time in Algeria in the 1960s.

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Diary: Panthers in Algiers

Letters

Vol. 39 No. 15 · 27 July 2017

I lived in Algeria at roughly the same time as Elaine Mokhtefi, and I remember vividly the various exiles – Chileans and Palestinians in particular – hosted by the government (LRB, 1 June). I also remember the troupes sent by fraternal countries, such as North Korea, to stage events designed to promote cultural and ideological exchange. Almost invariably cultural difference won out over ideological sympathy. The North and South Americans tended to behave, as Mokhtefi reports, as if they were still back home; the Koreans, with shorter exposure, displayed incredulity towards their host society.

The reciprocal respect expected by the exiles’ Algerian hosts was often not shown. There seemed to be little understanding of the physical and mental devastation caused by colonisation and war, or of the magnitude of the tasks the regime faced. Expatriate teachers and oil workers mocked the Algerians. There was constant partying and open sexual promiscuity in what was a poor, conservative country. Another issue was the effect of exile on the exiles themselves; there can be a ‘creep’ in mindset. In Tunisia, after 1982, the PLO and its supporters were gradually drawn into patterns of consumption and individualism that destroyed their unity and lost them their hosts’ sympathy.

Mokhtefi’s article also illustrates the effects of a half-century of Western historiography. Who now would believe that the North Korea health service was ‘unsurpassed’, or credit the support the USSR gave to the Algerian independence movement, ‘in providing weapons, training and education’. Half a century later many young Tunisians, exposed to the Western media, tell me it was the US that freed Algeria.

Anne Murray

Tunis

IMPERIALIST TROPHIES OF COLONIALISM
Algeria buries fighters whose skulls were in Paris museum

A soldier and members of the Algerian Republican Guard, guard the remains of 24 Algerians at the Moufdi-Zakaria culture palace in Algiers, Friday, July, 3, 2020. After decades in a French museum, the skulls of 24 Algerians decapitated for resisting French colonial forces were formally repatriated to Algeria in an elaborate ceremony led by the teary-eyed Algerian president. The return of the skulls was the result of years of efforts by Algerian historians, and comes amid a growing global reckoning with the legacy of colonialism. (AP Photo/Toufik Doudou)
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https://apnews.com/695349764cae2a309c6d4ca82cbdd35a

ALGIERS, Algeria (AP) — Algeria at last buried the remains of 24 fighters decapitated for resisting French colonial forces in the 19th century, in a ceremony Sunday rich with symbolism marking the country’s 58th anniversary of independence.

The fighters’ skulls were taken to Paris as war trophies and held in a museum for decades until their repatriation to Algeria on Friday, amid a growing global reckoning with the legacy of colonialism.

Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune said he’s hoping for an apology from France for colonial-era wrongs.

“We have already received half-apologies. There must be another step,” he said in an interview broadcast Saturday with France-24 television. He welcomed the return of the skulls and expressed hope that French President Emmanuel Macron could improve relations and address historical disputes.

Tebboune presided over the interment of the remains Sunday in a military ceremony at El Alia cemetery east of Algiers, in a section for fallen independence fighters. Firefighters lay the coffins, draped with green, white and red Algerian flags, in the earth.

The 24 took part in an 1849 revolt after French colonial forces occupied Algeria in 1830. Algeria formally declared independence on July 5, 1962 after a brutal war.

Algeria’s veterans minister, Tayeb Zitouni, welcomed “the return of these heroes to the land of their ancestors, after a century and a half in post-mortem exile.”

Algerians from different regions lined up to pay respect to the fighters on Saturday, when their coffins were on public display at the Algiers Palace of Culture.

Mohamed Arezki Ferrad, history professor at the University of Algiers, said hundreds of other Algerian skulls remain in France and called for their return, as well as reparations for French nuclear tests carried out in the Algerian Sahara in the early 1960s.

In 1966, seven years after Algeria's National Liberation Front (FLN) successfully fought France for their country's independence, filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo released the iconic The Battle of Algiers. Despite winning a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and its widespread public influence, inspiring notable activists such as pro-Palestinians and the Black Panthers, the film was banned in France until the 1970s. Featuring interviews with revolutionary leaders such as Saadi Yacef, Algerian filmmaker Malek Bensmaïl looks back on the making of this landmark film half a century after its release. His doc presents us with an Algeria still gripped with pride for its independence, and one in which the annually broadcast The Battle of Algiers remains a staunch cultural phenomenon.

How Algeria Became a Home to Africa’s Guerrillas, Anti-Fascists and Liberators

After fighting for its independence, the country exported its ideology — and arms — across the continent

Hanna Bechiche

is a French-Algerian journalist and fiction writer

June 28, 2024

Illustration by Joanna Andreasson for New Lines Magazine

“The Algerian army made me a man,” declared Nelson Mandela as soon as he landed in Algiers on May 16, 1990, choosing the country that had introduced him to armed resistance as his first stop on his diplomatic tour after being released from prison in South Africa. Barely out of the plane and still inside Boumediene Airport, the revolutionary figure spoke of the influential time he spent in the training camps of the Algerian National Front of Liberation (FLN) in 1962, where, alongside fighters from the FLN’s armed wing, he learned about the ideology — and practicalities — of leading a war of liberation. Mandela would reflect fondly on his time with the FLN in his 1994 memoir, “Long Walk to Freedom,” despite it being the main reason he would be branded as a “terrorist” when arrested and sent to prison that summer.

Mandela’s recollection of Algeria’s support for the African National Congress (ANC) testified to the crucial but forgotten role the country played in Africa’s decolonization throughout the 1960s. At the start of the decade, the newly born North African state was signing its independence after winning what The New York Times called “the cruelest colonial war of the modern epoch.” As many as 1.5 million Algerians died in the eight-year conflict, instigated by the FLN with independence as its central aim. The war itself was riddled with guerrilla warfare and war crimes; the political turmoil it caused in France forced the undoing of the Fourth Republic.

But the successful armed struggle for independence enabled Algeria to position itself as the spearhead of African liberation and the champion of pan-African unification. A foreign policy focused on providing material and political support to every African liberation movement propelled Algeria to the forefront of a nascent postcolonial order overflowing with optimism and idealism for a new Africa — free, anticolonial and revolutionary.

“Well before we won independence, our country was conscious of its responsibility toward the peoples engaged in struggles against colonialism like we were,” Ahmed Ben Bella declared in his first public address as prime minister of the independent state of Algeria during the Nov. 1, 1962, celebrations held to mark the anniversary of the FLN’s insurrection. His speech was punctuated by thunderous troops marching, the sheer number of which garnered a telling comment from Tunisia’s foreign minister: “There are arms enough in this country to supply all of Africa.”

Within a year, Ben Bella had successfully supplied such cross-continental material support. His first action was to transform Algiers into a host city welcoming any liberation movement, guerrilla group, anti-fascist organization, opposition party or exiled revolutionary seeking refuge, training or help. By the end of 1963, more than 80 organizations found safe haven in the capital city, including representatives from colonized countries across the continent: Namibia seeking independence from Germany; South Africa from Dutch settlers; and Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde from Portugal. All were given villas and official buildings — vacated by the French a year prior — to live in and work from, a monthly stipend and passports to travel to international conferences for diplomatic work, as well as weapons and supplies to train their militants. Seven hundred South African freedom fighters were training in Algerian camps to learn the FLN’s guerrilla-style warfare, 60 Congolese cadres were interning in the FLN’s government to learn about revolutionary politics, and all officers from the Canary Islands’ independence movement were training in Algerian military schools.

The capital city that had been destroyed by French troops during the 1957 Battle of Algiers was now sheltering every aspiring revolutionist and exiled militant. In its streets brewed radical, subversive theories and hope for a new order led by a free, united Africa. Stephane Hessel, a French diplomat stationed in Algiers, would explain this utopia in his memoir: “Dissidents from every authoritarian regime in the Southern Hemisphere flocked to Algiers to devise the ideology that came to be known as ‘Third Worldism.’ It rejected the inertia of Western civilization and counted on the new youth of the world, who sought to liberate themselves once and for all.”

Home to some of the most famous revolutionary fronts in the world, from the ANC to the Black Panthers, Algiers was baptized the “Mecca of Revolution” in 1967 by Guinean nationalist militant Amilcar Cabral who, speaking with a journalist, declared: “Take your pens and write: Muslims go on pilgrimage to Mecca, Christians to the Vatican, revolutionaries to Algiers.”

Algeria’s bloody efforts to wrench itself from French control became a clarion call to so many movements, which saw their own struggle reflected in its fight for independence. “The situation in Algeria was the closest model to our own,” wrote Mandela in his memoir, “in that the rebels faced a large white settler community that ruled the indigenous majority.”

Algeria’s unwavering dedication to African liberation followed its 132-year struggle against French occupation and colonization. In 1830, France invaded Algiers to distract public opinion from the failing Bourbon monarchy and a divided, roiling country. After 41 years of war, France declared Algeria a metropolitan department, reducing natives to second-class subjects devoid of any citizenship status while French settlers moved en masse to what they deemed their new territory. The resulting order was upended when the FLN launched a series of violent attacks across Algeria on Nov. 1, 1954, after decades of thwarted legal resistance.

The seed of Algeria’s radical solidarity with other colonized states was planted during the next seven years of war by the FLN’s prime theorist, Frantz Fanon, an Afro-Caribbean former psychiatrist living in Algiers. Fanon, who was born in the French overseas department of Martinique, had been responsible for the psychiatric care of patients distressed by the French army’s routine use of torture and the consequences of a century of subjugation. He used the Algerian experience to theorize liberation: To him, Algeria was demonstrating to the world that independence could be seized only by force, never gifted.

To publicize the Algerian cause across Africa, Fanon led the FLN’s delegation to join heads of African nations at the All-African Peoples’ Conference, hosted by Ghana, in 1958. There, he included Algeria in a long list of African countries choked by the hand of Euro-American imperialism. Fanon upheld Algeria as a “guide territory” where “the rot of the [colonial] system … the defeat of racism and the exploitation of man” was at stake. In his 1964 book, “Toward the African Liberation,” he eloquently described the FLN’s pan-African mission: “Having carried Algeria to the four corners of Africa, we shall return with all of Africa towards African Algeria, towards the north, towards Algiers, continental city, and launch a continent upon the assault of the last rampart of colonial power.”

By the time independence was declared, the FLN’s liberating action against a colonial state, which had reportedly displaced 2 million Algerians into surveillance camps and killed 1 million people, had won the country admiration, moral authority and a long list of supporters among African heads of state. Because Algeria had gained recognition as the first African country to win its independence by means of force, it became natural for the FLN to advocate for the country’s responsibility to help other African nations win back their freedom.

In every speech, Ben Bella would highlight Algeria’s “duty toward our African brothers,” defining brotherhood not by blood or ethnicity but by degree of revolutionary zeal and the commonality of a history of suffering under colonialism. “The Africans expect a great deal from us. We cannot let them down,” Ben Bella stated in a public address, explaining that “Africanism [is] deeply embedded in the [Algerian] popular consciousness.”

To achieve Africa’s unity, mending the ideological divide that split the continent was a first necessity. While radical states like Algeria, Sudan, Congo-Brazzaville and Guinea believed in a pan-African project achieved through revolutionary means, more conservative states still had ties to Western governments and were distrustful of revolutionary rhetoric. To rally them, Algeria promoted the use of force as a tool of liberation. As ardent defenders of armed resistance, the FLN argued for the necessity of violence as underlined by Fanon in his final study of the Algerian war, “The Wretched of the Earth”: Occupation being a violent phenomenon imposed through violent means, the colonized had no choice but to take back the initial violence and force it upon the occupying powers in order to break it.

Through Fanon’s philosophy, the FLN successfully rallied supporters of nonviolent resistance to its cause, like Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah, whose commitment to nonviolence dwindled after the FLN’s visit in 1958. Similarly, following his initial time in Algeria, Mandela concluded that “South Africa ruled by the gun could only be liberated with use of force,” despite years of having believed that peaceful liberation was possible. Colonialism “understands only the language of force and violence,” Ben Bella would explain. “We tell our South African brothers that hunger strikes and demonstrations will get you nowhere.”

With the African political limelight increasingly occupied by radical states, the continental city of Algiers established as the mecca of revolutionaries, and the FLN military camps full of African resistance figures, the pan-African unity and revolutionary solidarity Algeria had dreamed of leading was taking shape. One event in April 1963 would propel it to greater heights — the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU). The new intergovernmental institution was the first of its kind, designed as a continental equivalent to the United Nations, free from Western influence and oversight.

A month later, the largest African Union festival was organized to celebrate the founding of the OAU, which opened its doors in Addis Ababa. The choice of Ethiopia as a host was immensely symbolic: It was the only country in attendance that was never under the yoke of colonialism. The festival welcomed 32 African countries and upheld culture and art from every corner of the continent to give concrete expression to African unity and identity.

There, Algeria took the stage, front and center, and for Ben Bella, it was time to talk of blood. “We have spoken of a development bank. Why haven’t we spoken of a bank of blood to come to the aid of those who are fighting in Angola and elsewhere in Africa?” the Algerian president declared in one of his many flamboyant speeches. “We have no right to think of eating better when people fall in Angola, Mozambique, in South Africa. But we have a ransom to pay. We must accept to die together so that African unity does not become a vain word.” He continued, “Let us all agree to die a little … so that the people still under colonial rule may be free.”

Impassioned and charismatic, Ben Bella never missed an opportunity to take the mic and call for collective responsibility. Yet his enthusiasm was not without a patronizing tone and risked giving rise to a cult of personality. Struck by the talk of martyrdom and the belligerent imagery conjured, one attending journalist recorded, “I do not think that I have ever had such a profound sense of African unity as when I listened to Ben Bella, tears in his eyes, visibly moved, urging his listeners to rush to the assistance of the men dying south of the equator.”

Melodramatic as they were, the speeches from the Algerian contingent did produce tangible measures — the OAU festival concluded with the creation of a Liberation Committee and an African Battalion tasked to come to the aid of revolutionary and liberation movements in need of weapons, money or militants. The committee’s role was to coordinate support among states and consolidate newly won independence by fostering cooperation across the continent.

Through the committee, Algeria started to advocate for African solutions to African problems. In 1963, Ben Bella blocked British military aid meant to be sent to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to resist armed mutiny and provided arms to Prime Minister Julius Nyerere instead. The goal was to maintain sufficiency within the continent and avoid being indebted to the West.

While Ben Bella rebuked Western states for their interventions in Africa, he did not hesitate to come to the aid of Latin American and Middle Eastern movements. He defied the embargo to meet with Cuba’s Fidel Castro, welcomed a delegation of the Venezuelan National Liberation Front, inaugurated an embassy and an African-American center for the Black Panthers in central Algiers, and opened the first office abroad for Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s Fatah.

These actions quickly attracted the ire of the American press. To The New York Times, Ben Bella was bordering on hubris — the paper painted Algeria as being “proud to the point of arrogance,” criticizing the government’s constant need to “meddle in the affairs of others.” The criticism did not stop Algeria from continuing to export its support for radical movements internationally, choosing to let its diplomatic ties with America and Britain fray and leaning toward non-Western countries instead. It was a decisive choice in the context of a Cold War that drew lines between pro-Soviet and pro-Western blocs.

But transnational revolutionary solidarity and unity was a heavy demand to ask of a continent the size of Africa. Although the first half of the 1960s brimmed with limitless possibility and galvanizing talks, application of the policies set in place by the OAU was lukewarm at best. Conservative African states continued trading with Portugal and South Africa despite the embargo enforced by Algeria, and too many did not meet their mandatory financial contribution to the Liberation Committee. Meanwhile, liberation movements began to grow frustrated by conservative states’ efforts to constrain their activities and the Liberation Committee’s constant oversight. To some, the committee had become a stifling authority rather than the intended facilitating institution.

During a decade when a new international order was rapidly taking shape, African states’ had to prioritize consolidating their own statehood. Ghana’s idea of African federalism was shut down soon after being promoted — a weakening of the nation-state was not a price African countries were ready to pay to establish pan-African unity.

Simultaneously, African solidarity was used as a tool to serve national sovereignty. The FLN’s own colorful speeches about Algeria’s duty and responsibility toward colonized peoples conveniently fed into the country’s heroic myth of resistance, one forged in this period to heighten nationalism and delineate national identity. In 1963, Ben Bella summoned and used revolutionary pan-African fervor to cement its borders and discredit Morocco’s territorial claims after the monarchy launched a military offensive to gain control over a portion of Algeria’s Sahara region. To garner the African community’s overwhelming sympathy and support, the Algerian government made a case highlighting Morocco’s alliances with the United States and France. “This aggression is a battle between progressive republic and conservative monarchy, between revolution and imperialism,” proclaimed Ben Bella. Morocco’s King Hassan II was thus isolated and was one of the only African heads of state who did not attend the OAU’s festival in Addis Ababa.

Domestically, Ben Bella’s international appeal and Algeria’s leadership role in Africa came with dire consequences. Kabyle separatist movements paid the price of a policy that upheld a unified national identity at all costs and that refused to accept ethnic diversity and the culture of the Amazigh people indigenous to Algeria. Many Algerians criticized Ben Bella as a hubristic president who preferred fixing the world’s problems instead of focusing on Algeria’s grim socioeconomic realities.

Ben Bella’s dream of Algeria as the social leader of the “Third World” was brought to an abrupt end in June 1965 after his right-hand man, Houari Boumediene, orchestrated a military coup against him. The event triggered outrage across Africa. The heads of many states had woven threads of affinity with the outspoken and charismatic Ben Bella, and his ouster was regarded as an unforgivable betrayal. Following the coup, the ties that held radical African countries together unraveled and the diplomatic relations with revolutionary leaders soured.

Boumediene, in his first address to the nation, did attempt to reaffirm Algeria’s principle of unconditional support to revolutionaries: “The riches of the third world have served the interests of the rich nations. It is time for those nations to understand that economic colonialism — like political colonialism before it — must vanish.” Yet the personal relationships that Ben Bella had forged never fully transferred to Boumediene.

Throughout the 1960s, the “country of a million martyrs” proved its dedication to anticolonial solidarity by giving substance to African unity and support to liberation movements. But unifying the continent and holding it together proved to be an ambitious project that failed to take into account the inner divisions and contentions of Africa’s nascent independent states. By the beginning of the 1970s, domestic upheavals and the demands of a growing capitalist order got the better of Algeria’s revolutionary idealism and its left-leaning, radical foreign policy.

The last gasp of utopia in Algiers came with the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival, which brought together singers, artists and intellectuals from every African country and diaspora to perform in the name of African unity and revolutionary consciousness. There, dissidents and revolutionaries from the continent mingled with the likes of poet and author Maya Angelou and the Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael in between sets by famous Tuareg musicians and Nina Simone.

On a hot July night, the South African singer Miriam Makeba took to the stage at the main stadium to perform some of her greatest anthems to freedom. Makeba, who had become stateless after South Africa revoked her citizenship for criticizing the regime and calling for an arms embargo at the U.N., had been granted Algerian citizenship several years earlier. “I am honored to have the nationality of a country that did so much for the liberation of Africa,” she said at the time.

As the heat settled and the crowd buzzed, Makeba raised the microphone to her lips; her strong, pure voice rang out as she sang, in the Algerian dialect, “Ana hourra fi al-Jazair, watani, umm al-shaheed” — “I am free in Algeria, my homeland, the mother of martyrs.”

Battle of Algiers

Is is not just a classic movie, it is a great political movie. It shows that the current so called Muslim Middle East grew out of nationalist, secular, anti-colonial struggles.


Battle of Algiers director dies

Pontecorvo was nominated for two Oscars

Italian film-maker Gillo Pontecorvo, who directed The Battle Of Algiers, has died at the age of 86.

Pontecorvo's film depicted the brutality of both sides during the guerrilla uprising against French colonial rule in 1950s Algeria.

Shot like a documentary, the highly influential film was banned in France for some time, while its scenes of torture were cut in the US and Britain.

Ironic since now this is common practice by the US and Britain in Iraq.

And even more irony......

In 2003 the Pentagon screened the film to officers and civilian experts who were considering the challenges faced by the U.S. military in Iraq, the New York Times reported. A flier inviting guests to the screening read: "How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas."

It is one of those political films that every progressive should have along with the films of Costa Gavas. Who recently co wrote a film on the Battle of Algiers, and has been given an honorary degree from SFU.




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obituary, deaths, directors, movies, Battle-of-Algiers, Morroco, France, Gillo, Pontecorvo, Iraq, Middle-East, Islam, nationalism, muslim, colonialism, anti-colonialism,
Costa, Gavas

Will Spain face a gas crisis as Western Sahara conflict flares up?

Madrid's U-turn on its formerly neutral stance on the conflict has enraged Algeria. Trade relations have been frozen unilaterally and a cut in gas supplies to Europe could be in the pipeline.

The new alliance forged by Pedro Sanchez and King Mohammad VI is viewed with 

suspicion in North Africa

Perhaps it was by accident, but the coincidence was nevertheless striking. On the very same day Algeria suspended its friendship treaty with Spain on June 8, some 113 African refugees landed on the shores of the Spanish holiday island of Mallorca. The number of refugees, who had set sail from Algeria, was the biggest registered in a single day on the island this year.

Immediately, the government in Spain started wondering whether Algeria was now also resorting to illegal migration as a political weapon to sort out its differences with the EU member state. A similar tactic was applied by Algeria's neighbor Morocco last year in May, when the North African state opened its borders to allow about 6,000 refugees to swim to the Spanish exclave of Ceuta.

Refugees reached Ceuta by swimming or by walking at low tide, some used inflatable swimming rings

High stakes for the EU

However, there's more at stake in the spat between Spain and Algeria than renewed wrangling over migration policy. In the European Union, concern is mounting that the bilateral dispute might provoke a gas supply crisis on its southern periphery. And this at a time, when the EU is desperately exploring alternative gas resources to cut its huge dependency on supplies from Russia.

Algeria is Spain's second-biggest supplier of natural gas and covers about one-quarter of Spanish needs. But the North African country is important for the whole of the EU, supplying a total of around 11% of the bloc's overall gas demand.

Western diplomats have repeatedly warned that the authoritarian government of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in Algiers could pose a security risk to EU energy policy by using gas as a political weapon, similar to Moscow's current efforts to counter EU sanctions. 

Latest developments have shown that the concerns in Brussels are not unfounded. In November 2021, Algiers shut off one pipe of the Maghreb-Europe Pipeline (MEG) which links Algerian gas fields via Morocco with Spanish and Portuguese gas grids. Annually, about 12 billion cubic meters of natural gas flow through the dual pipeline, with Morocco also benefiting from a gas-for-transit deal.

The never-ending dispute over Western Sahara

What's behind the disruptions of gas flows from North Africa is the ongoing dispute over Western Sahara  — a territory occupied by Spain until 1975 when Morocco annexed it. Since then, the desert region has been claimed by Morocco and the Indigenous Sahrawi family, led by the Polisario Front and backed by Algeria. Polisario is fighting for an independence referendum and has the support of the United Nations.

Until three months ago, Spain had remained neutral in the political row regarding its former colony. But in March, the Spanish government led by Socialist Pedro Sanchez made a surprise policy U-turn. In a letter to King Mohammad VI of Morocco, Sanchez announced his support for limited autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, calling the plan "the most realistic basis" for Western Sahara.

In May 2021, Spain’s high court refused to arrest Polisario leader Brahim Ghali who was being treated for COVID in Madrid

Quite naturally, Rabat applauded, while Algiers fumed. In retaliation to the Spanish decision, Algerian President Tebboune recalled his ambassador to Madrid and suspended an agreement for the repatriation of thousands of Algerian refugees in Europe. In addition, the state-owned gas company Sonatrach said Spain would now have to pay more for Algerian gas.

Is reconciliation possible?

A few days ago, President Tebboune chose to escalate the rift by suspending a 20-year-old friendship treaty with Spain. Moreover, he threatened to freeze trade between the two countries, but refrained from cutting gas supplies altogether. He argued that the Spanish decision was a "violation of international law" and that the illegal occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco "cannot be tolerated."

Reconciliation with Madrid was only possible, Tebboune added, if Spain returned to international law and acknowledged the people of Western Sahara's right to self-determination.

Madrid's policy change not only plunged the Sanchez government into a major dilemma, but is likely to create a fresh conflict on Europe's southern periphery. This comes at a time when Europe's gas conflict with Russia is worsening, with a "new frontline emerging in the South," as the influential Spanish newspaper El Pais wrote recently.

Meanwhile, the European Commission has stepped into the fray, warning Algiers against imposing an all-out Spanish trade blockade. The EU's executive arm threatened to push back with sanctions, which prompted President Tebboune to give in and announce that gas contracts with Spain and Europe would be honored. Even bilateral trade would continue without interruption, he said.

Nevertheless, a gas blockade remains the elephant in the room as the EU and Algeria seek to normalize relations again. Despite Russia's war in Ukraine, Algiers has remained a close ally of Moscow and has so far refrained from publicly denouncing the invasion. Russia's state-owned gas giant Gazprom is a major player in North African gas fields through its multiple stakes in various national operators.

When push comes to shove, nobody can say just how Russian President Vladimir Putin will use his strong leverage in the region.

This article was originally published in German.

The Wretched of Palestine: Frantz Fanon Diagnosed the Pathology of Colonialism and Urged Revolutionary Humanism

By Dan Dinello

April 8, 2024

Source: Informed Comment

Frantz Fanon at a press conference during a writers’ conference in Tunis, 1959. Frantz Fanon Archives



“The colonized took up arms not only because they were dying of hunger and witnessing the disintegration of their society,” wrote the Frantz Fanon in his incendiary book The Wretched of the Earth. “But also because the colonist treated them like animals and considered them brutes. As soon as they are born, it is obvious to them that their cramped world can only be challenged by out and out violence.”

The name Frantz Fanon has become inseparable from both the horrors of colonialization and the history of liberation movements. He inspired generations of militants to fight colonialism. Since the 1961 publication of The Wretched of the Earth, which has been called the “Bible of Decolonialization,” Fanon — the Black West Indian psychiatrist who fought for Algerian independence — has been idealized by activists in the global south and beyond. For them, Frantz Fanon is the uncompromising prophet of revolution.

In The Wretched of the Earth’s infamous first chapter “On Violence,” Fanon described colonialism as a pathological system — the complete imposition of violence by the settler on the natives, who are given a “colonial identity,” ”reduced to the state of an animal,” and thereby dehumanized. The colonist uses a “language of pure violence” and “derives his validity from the imposition of violence.” The colonial system, Fanon emphasized, was itself founded on “genocidal acts of dispossession and repression.”

Since Hamas‘s brutal October 7 attack, Fanon has been frequently invoked, seeming more popular than ever. Quoted in essays and social media posts, Fanon’s provocative ideas have been used by supporters of Palestine to contextualize or justify Hamas’s horrific assault as well as to castigate Israel’s colonial subjugation and genocidal obliteration of Gaza and its people. The Israeli bombardment has slaughtered more than 33,000 Palestinians with uncounted more buried under the rubble and has wounded over 75,000 people while starving the surviving population.

The ongoing calamity for Palestinians is not limited to the besieged Gaza Strip — it also afflicts those in the occupied West Bank, which has been all but shut down since October 7. Road closures, checkpoints, and the increased risk of military and settler violence have kept West Bank Palestinians restricted to their towns and villages. As Israeli soldiers carried out a mission of dispossession, U.N. data showed that 2023 had been an especially deadly year for Palestinians, with Israeli forces killing more of them — 499 — than in any other non-conflict year since 2005. According to Hamas‘s leaders, this provided motivation for their attack. The pure violence of the Israeli Occupation has never been more clear.

“Colonialism is not a thinking machine,” wrote Fanon. “It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.” The way out of colonial oppression and the colonized person’s “inferiority complex and his despairing attitude,” is through the “cleansing force” of violence. Fanon believed that violent resistance would restore the humanity of the colonized, elevate them psychologically to a position of equality, and deliver social justice: “The native discovers that his life, his breath, his beating heart are the same as those of the settler. He finds out that the settler’s skin is not of any more value than a native’s skin.”

Fanon’s concepts have become integral to the rationalization of Hamas‘s terrorism. On X, TikTok, and Instagram, Fanon quotes proliferated after October 7: “Decolonization is quite simply the replacing of a certain ‘species’ of men by another ‘species’ of men” and “Decolonization is an inherently violent phenomenon” among many others.

An article in the Middle East Eye declared, “Don’t ask Palestinians to condemn Hamas – they are already condemned to live in hell on Earth” and concluded “those bearing the brunt of the onslaught today aren’t caught up in the semantic trap of condemnation. For Palestinians in Gaza and beyond, for the wretched of our shared earth, as for Fanon, ‘to fight is the only solution.’”

In a statement titled “Oppression Breeds Resistance,” Columbia University students began by mourning “the tragic losses experienced by both Palestinians and Israelis” but concluded with a Fanon quote: “When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

Many of Fanon‘s contemporary admirers have apparently not read past the first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth; or, they have ignored the final chapter “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” — a series of disturbing case studies that depict the debilitating and long-lasting effects of violence. By regurgitating his provocative phrases alone, Fanon’s devotees portray this complex and challenging thinker as nothing more than a sloganeer of political violence. In a timely new biography — The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon — author Adam Shatz, an editor at the London Review of Books, rescues Fanon from reduction while still agreeing that he wrote “some of the most memorable catchphrases of the liberation struggle.”

The Rebel’s Clinic elaborates the drama and contradictions in Fanon’s life story and political writings, striving to explain why he is such a compelling figure more than 60 years after his death. Significantly, Shatz points out that Fanon’s “practice as a healer” who pledged to do no harm contradicted his practice as a revolutionary, who advocated violence which is harmful to both the victim and perpetrator.

As a psychiatrist, Fanon believed that the violent struggle of the colonized for liberation was a kind of shock treatment that would “restore confidence to the colonized mind” and “overcome the paralyzing sense of hopelessness induced by colonial subjugation,” but “was only a first step toward the birth of a new humanity.” The Rebel’s Clinic provides a comprehensive perspective on Fanon — one that social media slogans cannot suggest. As for Fanon’s advocacy of violence, Shatz calls it “alarming” at one point but emphasizes the humanist side of Fanon — “a dashing and sophisticated intellectual who earned the admiration of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.”

Though Fanon would eventually identify with the powerless, he was a child of empire — born into a middle-class family on the island of Martinique, a French colony. A fervent French patriot, Fanon eagerly joined the Free French Army. He fought against the Nazis in North Africa and Europe, even sustaining a shrapnel injury. Experiencing racism in the Army, his relationship to France and his own racial identity underwent a radical change – from French patriot who fought for empire to Black West Indian who rebelled against it. His first book Black Skin White Masks, published in 1952, diagnosed the pathological symptoms of racism in everyday life.

After completing his studies, Fanon directed a psychiatric hospital in colonial Algeria, where he discerned the many ways that French colonialism itself was the main cause of his patients’ psychological ailments. Algerians — like Palestinians today — were violently uprooted, their lands were confiscated, while their culture, language, and religion were denigrated. These experiences of dispossession, violence and alienation constituted a profound psychological trauma. Mental illness could never be divorced from racist social conditions, writes Shatz, so Fanon “approached psychiatry as if it were an extension of politics by other means.”

He turned against French colonialism, joined the revolt orchestrated by the National Liberation Front (FLN) in 1954, and fought for Algerian independence. Subversively, Fanon used the hospital as a hideout for anti-French fighters as well as a treatment center for all walks of colonial Algeria, including FLN militants who had been tortured by French forces.

The Martiniquais philosopher later incorporated his insights and experiences as a psychiatrist and a revolutionary into what would be his final book. The Wretched of the Earth was published in 1961 as Fanon, 36, lay perishing from leukemia in a Maryland hospital in the heart of the American empire he despised as “the country of lynchers.” He would never see a free Algeria, dying three months shy of its liberation in March, 1962. The Wretched of the Earth was the culmination of his thinking about anti-colonial revolution and, writes Shatz, “one of the great manifestos of the modern age.”

The Wretched of the Earth spread across the planet within a few years of its appearance transforming Fanon into a hero among leftwing and developing-world revolutionaries and inspiring radicals in the national liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was translated widely — Che Guevara commissioned a Cuban version — and “cited worshipfully by the Black Panthers.” Huey Newton, for example, spoke of Black people as an occupied colony in imperialist America whose only option was revolutionary violence. According to Shatz, Fanon’s book helped galvanize the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, Latin American guerrillas, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Islamic revolutionaries of Iran, Black Lives Matter activists, and “not least the Palestinian fedayeen in training camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.”

Helping to propel the book’s proliferation, especially in the West, was Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 movie The Battle of Algiers. Though not an adaptation, The Battle of Algiers functioned as a filmic depiction of The Wretched of the Earth. A strikingly realistic, politically radical film that sympathized with the revolutionaries, The Battle of Algiers reconstructs the oppressive colonial social conditions, the French brutality in response to anti-colonial demonstrations, the FLN attacks on French policemen, the torture of Algerian civilians, and the terror bombings that marked the four-year insurgency in the streets of Algiers leading to independence.

Summoning Fanon in support of Hamas implies that the war in Gaza is the battle of Algiers of our time. However, the Gaza catastrophe is less a reenactment of The Battle of Algiers, more Hotel Rwanda or Apocalypse Now. Israel cannot extinguish Palestinian resistance through indiscriminate violence any more than Palestine can win an Algerian-style war of liberation. “Palestine today is not Algeria in 1956,” notes Al Jazeera, “which was Fanon’s most important reference point. There will be no long-fought war of independence resulting in the vast majority of Jews” being evicted “from a reconquered Palestine.”

Further, the outcome in Algeria does not provide a model for a free and democratic Palestine. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon stressed that mere violence as an end in itself, disconnected from any wider achievable political and social goal, would only reproduce the power relations of the colonizer. He suggested that liberation movements can become new oppressors once they attain power, thus exchanging one barbarism for another.

Though Fanon did not live to see it, Algeria descended into one-party rule built on state terror and religious fanaticism. Fanon’s warnings about the obstacles to post-colonial freedom: corruption, autocratic rule, religious zealotry, the enduring wounds of colonial violence, and the persistence of underdevelopment and hunger came to pass and still haunt liberation movements today.

“The militant who confronts the colonialist war machine with his rudimentary resources realizes that while he is demolishing colonial oppression he is indirectly building up yet another system of exploitation,” wrote Fanon. “Such a discovery is galling, painful, and sickening. It was once all so simple with the bad on the one side and the good on the other. The people discover that the iniquitous phenomenon of exploitation can assume a Black or Arab face.”

In a passage that none of his latter-day followers have cited, Fanon warned that “racism, hatred, resentment, and the legitimate desire for revenge alone cannot nurture a war of liberation — one does not endure massive repression or witness the disappearance of one’s entire family in order for hatred or racism to triumph.” Fanon — the authentic revolutionary — shows himself more doubtful of violent resolutions than his less courageous social media acolytes, who indulge in easy revolutionary talk from positions of comfort.

The social media application of The Wretched of the Earth to Palestine eliminates the aspirational aspects of his anti-colonial prescription. Fanon’s advocacy of anti-colonial violence cannot be separated from his belief in a revolutionary humanism, emancipated from colonialism and empire. He wrote that the overthrow of the colonial oppressors will inevitably lead to a “new humanism written into the objectives and methods of the struggle.”

Fanon asserted that a violent uprising by the native people would be the first step in a transformative process that would lead to a postcolonial society based on universalist ideas of freedom and equality for all — a society that might very well include the former colonizers. Palestine, however, is a long way from this social transformation that would deliver a political solution rooted in equality, dignity and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis.

The Caribbean thinker perceptively diagnosed the disease of colonialism that Israel continues to propagate as it replicates its primary pathology: the obliteration of Palestinians. As a new UN report states: “Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically – seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources.” Fanon, the psychiatrist, did not enunciate a enduring cure for this vengeful colonial pathology.

Surprisingly, Fanon concluded The Wretched of the Earth in the same place as John Lennon in his utopian song Imagine, which conceives of “no wars and a brotherhood of man.” Fanon ended The Wretched of the Earth with an idealistic challenge to imagine a new world: “For humanity, comrades, we must make a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man.” But Fanon did not clarify how we would arrive at this new, more equitable reality.

Despite this apparent disconnect, we read Fanon today for his startlingly prescient analysis of contemporary ills: the enduring trauma of racism, the persistent plague of white supremacy and xenophobia, the scourge of authoritarianism, and the savagery of colonial domination. Poetic, enraged, and insubordinate, Frantz Fanon gave voice to the anguish of the colonized voiceless and his words continue to resonate with a new global “wretched of the earth.”