One night in June 1969, Elaine Mokhtefi, a journalist for the Algerian government news service, received a call from a representative of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, a militant group fighting the white supremacist government of Southern Rhodesia. I needed help. Eldridge Cleaver, leader of the Black Panther Party, had jumped bail on an attempted murder charge in California, fled to Cuba and was now hiding in Algiers, the capital. Could you rely on your contacts in the Algerian government to process a visa? African guerrillas, American radicals, high Algerian officials… Mokhtefi was used to it. The strange thing was how it got there. Born Elaine Klein in Brooklyn and educated in Georgia, she likely became an indispensable mediator for the Algerian independence movement in the 1950s and, after it split from France in 1962, for the young Algerian republic, connecting its leaders with revolutionaries and rebels who saw Algeria as a beacon for freedom movements in the developing world. “In the ’60s, we had the impression that what we did could have an impact.” Mokhtefi told Publishers Weekly in 2018, “We felt like we were on the edge of a new world.” Mokhtefi died on September 11 in Manhattan. He was 97 years old. The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Zeynep Çelik, a neighbor and close friend. After leaving university and moving to Paris in 1951, Ms. Mokhtefi was drawn to the plight of Algerian workers, who faced constant discrimination, and to her country’s fiery campaign for independence from France, which erupted into full-scale war in 1954. By the end of the decade, she was working for the provisional government. Algerian government, first in Paris and then in New York, helping its officials navigate the United Nations and cultivate ties with the United States government. Fluent in French, she proved adept at moving between cultures and causes, helping to link the Algerian struggle to the broader struggle against European colonialism in Africa and Asia. After independence, Ms. Mokhtefi moved to Algiers, where she continued her work as a repairman. He met Fidel Castro in Cuba. He received North Korean delegates in Algiers. She was a close friend of Frantz Fanon, the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer, and in 1961 she cared for his son while Mr. Fanon lay dying of leukemia in a Maryland hospital. In 1969, she was one of the main organizers of the Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers. At one point, she and South African singer Miriam Makeba had to cajole, threaten and ultimately lead a very drunk Nina Simone from her hotel room to the stage, where she sang songs that made Houari Boumédiène, the president of Algeria, cry. Mokhtefi had a cameo in Gillo Pontecorvo’s acclaimed 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers,” a cinéma-vérité depiction of the Algerian war of independence; appears at a press conference held by a French officer.I was in Algeria in 1970 when Timothy Leary, the American psychologist and counterculture celebrity, escaped to the country after escaping from a California prison, where he was being held on a drug conviction. She arranged for him and his wife, Rosemary, to meet with government officials and remain in Algiers. And he was the main point of contact between the Algerian government and Mr. Cleaver, arranging for him, his wife and his associates (eventually about 30 Panthers) to receive something like diplomatic status in Algeria, which included a stipend and the use of a villa outside Algiers. The Panthers contributed to Algeria’s mystique as an international center for revolutionaries, but their flashy American lifestyle raised eyebrows in what was still a conservative Muslim country. One day, Cleaver confessed a secret to Mokhtefi: he had killed one of his closest collaborators, Clinton Smith, known as Rahim. He said the man had been trying to rob the Panthers. Ms. Mokhtefi later learned that Mr. Smith had been seen dancing closely with Mr. Cleaver’s wife at a nightclub while he was on a trip to North Korea, and she suspected the murder had a different motivation. Cleaver was never charged with the murder. By the early 1970s, Mokhtefi had begun to turn against Algeria’s increasingly repressive government. He refused a request from government agents to spy on a close friend, a transgression that led to his expulsion from the country in 1974. He later lived in Paris and New York City. “She remained lucid about the authoritarian nature of the post-independence regime,” Adam Shatz, a writer who befriended her in 2014, said in an interview. “But she retained an abiding love for the country.” Elaine Klein was born on December 10, 1928. Her parents, Charlie and Mildred Klein, owned a dry goods store in Hempstead, a suburb of Long Island, but it failed at the onset of the Great Depression in 1929. The family moved repeatedly, first back to the city from Long Island, then to Texas, then upstate New York, and finally to Ridgefield, Connecticut, an experience that established Elaine’s comfort with a different environment and her affinity for the outsiders. She attended Wesleyan College, a women’s institution in Macon, Georgia, but was expelled after a year for speaking out against Jim Crow segregation and for violating curfew to visit Atlanta on weekends. Back in New York, she studied Spanish and became active in the United World Federalists, a leftist group that advocated for a one-world government. His involvement led to surveillance by the FBI and was one of the reasons he moved to Paris in 1951. There he became familiar with the left-wing political and artistic scene, including the Algerian independence movement. He eventually returned to New York to represent the Provisional Government of the Republic of Algeria, working in a small office near the United Nations. He did not visit Algeria until after its independence. For more than a decade, she was the only American and one of the only women working at a high level within the government. His expulsion in 1974 hurt him. By then she had fallen in love with a former freedom fighter, Mokhtar Mokhtefi, who left with her. They lived for 20 years in Paris, where she sold jewelry, and married in 1991. They moved in 1994 to New York City, where she became an accomplished painter. He also participated in several protest movements and was regularly present at demonstrations against the Iraq war and in favor of Palestinian rights. Mokhtefi died in 2015. Ms. Mokhtefi leaves no immediate survivors. Just after his death, Mr. Mokhtefi’s memoirs were published in French; Mokhtefi translated it into English and published it as “I Was a French Muslim” in 2021. By then, she had also published her own memoir, “Algiers, Capital of the Third World: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers” in 2018. Mokhtefi wrote a memoir and also became involved in several protest movements, and was regularly present at demonstrations against the Iraq war and for Palestinian rights. Credit… Verso Books The book, which Shatz helped arrange for publication, was well received and earned recognition on the left. Despite her age (she was 90 when she appeared), she traveled on speaking tours, including visits to Algeria, whose new democratic government openly welcomed her. He received Algerian citizenship in July this year. At his death, he was finalizing plans to visit Algiers again in October, where he would receive a government award.
