Elaine Mokhtefi, who has died at the age of 98 in a hospital in Manhattan, New York City, on September 11, was an American anti-colonial activist who devoted her life to the Algerian liberation struggle and whose memoir Algiers, Third World Capital remains one of the most vivid first-hand accounts of post-independence Algeria as the revolutionary capital of the world.
Born to Elaine Klein in 1928 in New York, into a Jewish family of dry goods retailers, she grew up witnessing discrimination against Black children and experienced exclusion herself as "the little Jewish girl" after her family moved to Ridgefield, Connecticut. From her mother she learned the virtue of not merely opposing racism but standing up for her principles without relenting. Moving back to New York, she came into contact with radicals, including refugees from Republican Spain, and became director of the Student Division of the United World Federalists, touring schools and universities to campaign for peace and an end to war. When the movement's leadership judged her too left-wing, she was expelled, a rebuke that pushed her towards Paris in search of a more egalitarian life away from the repressive atmosphere of post-war America.
She arrived in Paris in 1951, aged 23, and found work at the French section of the United World Federalists. There she discovered how far the French republic's promises of liberty, equality and fraternity extended to its North African population, who lived in shantytowns on the city's edge, invisible to ordinary Parisians. Working as a translator and interpreter, she travelled to Europe, Africa and India and attended international meetings, introducing resolutions and denouncing torture. Algeria became the turning point of her life. In 1958 she met Frantz Fanon and Mohamed Sahnoun, and joined the fight of the National Liberation Front (FLN). Returning to New York in 1960, she worked for the local office of the Provisional Government of the Algerian Republic, operating from a tiny apartment headquarters.
When independence came in the summer of 1962, she moved to Algiers and remained there for twelve years, working as a journalist and translator for the Algeria Press Service. When her relationship with her partner later ended, she stayed on. "I had espoused a cause and taken the consequences," she wrote. "On a deeper level, I had found a home."
Algiers in the 1960s adopted an open-door policy towards liberation movements, and Mokhtefi was at the heart of it. Every imaginable organisation had an office there, from the Vietcong and the African National Congress to SWAPO, FRELIMO and the MPLA, alongside Palestinian groups, exiled artists and intellectuals. In 1969 she played a pivotal role in the first Pan-African Festival of Algiers, receiving delegations from liberation movements across Africa and welcoming the Black Panthers in exile, among them Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver. She acted as interpreter and courier between the Panthers and the FLN, though her portrait of them was not uncritical: they never ventured beyond the city, read no local press, visited no Algerian homes and had no perspective on the colonial past they were living among. She was honest, too, about the internal strife and eventual disillusionment that brought the revolutionary moment apart, and about her own expulsion from Algeria in 1974, a ban that remained in place for decades.
In 2019 she returned to Algiers and published her book Algiers, Capital of the Revolution (issued in English as Algiers, Third World Capital), a gripping memoir written from memory without diaries or notebooks, carrying the reader from the Paris of the 1950s through the corridors of the United Nations to the corridors of power in revolutionary Algiers, where Ben Bella, Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Timothy Leary, Jean-Luc Godard, Simone de Beauvoir and Nina Simone all passed through her world. The book stands as a testament to the politics of Third Worldist internationalism, linking Black Power, European radicals and anti-colonial militants.
She married Mokhtar Mokhtefi, the FLN soldier and writer with whom she shared her life until his death in 2015, and took his name. In 2025, President Abdelmadjid Tebboune granted her Algerian nationality. She died on September 11th, leaving behind an indelible mark on the history of the anti-colonial struggle.
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*Freelance journalist
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