"Eldridge Cleaver is in Algiers and he needs help, go see him"

July 27, 2017 6:51 AM

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.

–Short memoir by Elaine Mokhtefi about working with the Black Panthers in Algeria. Interview with Mokhtefi (audio and transcript).
posted by Kattullus (6 comments total)

This is an amazing story, it reads like something out of Pynchon, but it's non-fiction.

It's always nice to see the London Review Of Books make an appearance here. I've had a subscription ever since Andrew O'Hagan's long piece on Julian Assange, discussed here back in 2014. The LRB is consistently interesting and provides a nice culturally-rich, stimulating, and non-USA-based point of view.

As a sort of companion piece to the Cleaver in Algeria article, here is a more recent, and almost equally surreal, LRB article about Eldridge Cleaver in Havana in 1968. Those Panthers really got around!
posted by crazy_yeti at 7:17 AM on July 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

Angela Davis is still active and was recently at a symposium in Bahia.
posted by adamvasco at 8:12 AM on July 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

"The Panthers, for their part, just wanted to stay long enough in Cuba to arm themselves and invade Mississippi in a rubber boat."
posted by crazy_yeti at 9:06 AM on July 27, 2017

I especially enjoyed the Mokhtefi article. Partially because it verified everything I had thought about Cleaver since he first came on the scene - a charismatic, attractive, opportunistic, shallow, womanizing, dangereous a-hole.
posted by charlesminus at 10:13 AM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

womanizing

literally a serial rapist
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:19 PM on July 27, 2017

The article truly is great reading, though.
posted by Sticherbeast at 5:24 PM on July 27, 2017 [1 favorite]