Anyone interested in the meaning of internationalism in the second half of the 20th century would have been wise to visit Algiers. When Algeria won independence from the French in 1962 – after an unspeakably brutal eight-year war of decolonization – it embraced wholeheartedly those who had supported the struggle from abroad. The new government instituted an ‘open-door policy of aid to the oppressed’, inviting ‘liberation and opposition movements and personalities from around the world’ to its capital city, as Elaine Mokhtefi writes in her memoir Algiers, Third World Capital. Algiers became a foreign base for Black Panthers, Palestinian guerrillas, exiled politicians from Latin America and southern Europe, representatives from liberation movements in South Africa, Ethiopia and what is now Namibia, and even separatists fighting for an independent Québec. As Amílcar Cabral, the Bissau-Guinean revolutionary, put it: ‘Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, Christians to the Vatican, and the national liberation movements to Algiers.’
Mokhtefi worked as a go-between for the Black Panthers and the Algerian government. She became a confidante of Eldridge Cleaver, the charismatic Panther leader, translating from French into English for him and helping the Black Panthers establish their first and only overseas office. A child of the Great Depression, Mokhtefi left the United States to escape McCarthyism, and ended up in Algeria via France. ‘Being international was a way of remaining political, finding out what was happening abroad, taking advantage of what opportunities there were,’ she tells me on the telephone from New York, where she now lives. This was a moment, in the wake of the Second World War, characterized by immense hope for the prospects of global co-operation. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in 1948, affirmed a profoundly important set of rights that by their nature were transnational; Garry Davis, a former B-14 bomber pilot, famously renounced his US citizenship and started issuing world citizen passports; the World Federalist Movement, which advocated a form of global government that was more democratic than the UN, could count on the support of Albert Einstein and, later, Martin Luther King; subjugated nations were supporting each other as they cast off the yoke of colonialism.
