In short
The episode covers Algeria’s post-independence transition from 1962’s mass liberation celebrations to authoritarian rule under Houari Boumediene, and how Algeria became a global “third world” revolutionary hub.
Key claims
the FLN fractured immediately after independence; Boumediene’s 1965 coup created a military one-party state; Frantz Fanon predicted that post-independence elites would replace colonial apparatus rather than transform society; Algeria’s revolutionary prestige was undercut by censorship, secret police, and dismantling worker self-management.
Notable examples
the 1969 Pan-African Festival of Algiers (Maya Angelou, Nina Simone, Black Panthers’ Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver); Timothy Leary’s LSD-era asylum and later “protective custody” by Panthers; and the 1962 exodus of pied-noirs and massacres of Harkis. Guests/featured figures: Anita Arnand and William de Rimpel (hosts); Frantz Fanon (author); Houari Boumediene and Ahmed Ben Bella (leaders); Elaine Klein/Alain Moktefi (memoir author); Timothy Leary; Rosemary Leary; Stokely Carmichael; Eldridge Cleaver; Huey Newton; Fidel Castro, Indira Gandhi, Muammar Gaddafi; Amílcar Cabral; Maya Angelou; Nina Simone; plus delegations like ANC, PLO, Viet Cong, Polisario Front.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Chapters
Tap a time to open that second in VOSetting the Scene in Algeria
0:30 to 1:21
Exploring Algeria's transformation after independence
“Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.”
The Role of the FLN and Boumediene
1:21 to 1:54
The fracture of the FLN and rise of Huari Boumediene
“and enormous crowds have gathered in Algiers, people who have waited eight long years, who have survived some dreadful conditions, bombing, torture, forced relocation.”
The Aftermath of Revolution
1:54 to 3:49
Discussion on the authoritarian nature of the new government
“Now, Huari Boumeddin is a man who is determined that this new state is going to be under his control.”
International Revolutionary Influence
3:49 to 5:38
Algeria's role as a revolutionary model for other nations
“And, you know, you immediately get that sense, Willie, don't you, that dissent is not going to be tolerated?”
Boumediene's Military State
5:38 to 8:08
Overview of Boumediene's military coup and governance
“And Algeria now hosts the leaders of every liberation movement that could get on a flight to Algiers.”
The Non-Aligned Movement and Global Influence
8:08 to 9:32
Algeria's hosting of the Non-Aligned Movement summit
“non-aligned movement is, it's something that sprung out of the Bandung Conference in the 1950s.”
Introducing Frantz Fanon
9:32 to 10:06
Background on Frantz Fanon and his significance
“Eugene Rogan was so good about that moment of disillusion that comes in 1967, but we're what now in 1965?”
Fanon's Impact on Liberation Movements
10:06 to 14:00
Fanon's writings and their influence on independence movements
“And anyone that's ever read anything about postcolonial anything would have come across at some level Frantz Fanon.”
Fanon's Predictions on Independence
14:00 to 16:55
Explore how Fanon's insights predict the failures of newly independent states.
“It's not specific to Algeria, but it does indeed predict what happens.”
Fanon's Predictions on Independence
17:01 to 17:53
Explore how Fanon's insights predict the failures of newly independent states.
“You get an extra 20 % off annual membership.”
Show all 17 chapters
The Glamorous Side of Post-Independence Algeria
17:53 to 21:40
Discover the unlikely gathering of celebrities and revolutionaries in Algeria.
“We'd love you to become a member of our club, and it's brilliant even if we say so ourselves.”
The Clash of Revolutionaries: Black Panthers and Timothy Leary
21:40 to 28:00
Examine the dramatic interactions between the Black Panthers and Timothy Leary in Algeria.
“So, I mean, we should say that Pan-Africanism is a relatively new movement, and it has come into existence to unite the people of African descent worldwide.”
Eldridge Cleaver's Controversial Journey
28:00 to 30:16
Explore Eldridge Cleaver's complex political transformations and his impact on the Black Panthers.
“Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you know, you can understand where that thinking comes from, because the Black Panthers are all about, you know, Black emancipation.”
Algeria's Internal Struggles
30:16 to 32:53
Understand Algeria's post-colonial challenges and the governance under Boumediene.
“He establishes a clothing line called Eldridge Cleaver Company, designing trousers for men with a special penis pouch, stating in the press release that we've been castrated in clothing.”
The Fate of the Pied Noirs
32:53 to 36:25
Learn about the exodus of the Pied Noirs and their struggles in post-colonial France.
“is that the Islamic religious establishment is also excluded.”
The Harkis: Loyalty and Betrayal
36:25 to 42:02
Delve into the plight of the Harkis and their harsh treatment in France after the war.
“They're greeted with suspicion and condescension and this sort of inability to acknowledge what has actually been lost.”
Contemporary Relevance of the Algerian Issue
42:02 to 43:11
Learn about the ongoing significance of the Algerian issue in France today.
“And we're going to talk a bit more about that next time.”
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00William:If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to Empire Club at www.empirepoduk.com.
0:30Anita:Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand.
0:33William:And me, William de Rimpel. We have a cracker of an episode now. I have enjoyed so much the reading and research for this whole series. But nothing surprised me more than the story of what happens in Algeria after independence arrives. So we pick up the story in 1962 as the newly liberated Algeria transforms into the rather surprisingly glamorous revolutionary capital of the third world. And we ask what happens after a bloody revolution is won.
1:11Anita:Now, we sort of teased you about this in a previous episode. This will be a star-studded episode of the podcast. But let's take you back to this day, which is very important. It's July the 5th, 1962.
1:22William:and enormous crowds have gathered in Algiers,
1:26Anita:people who have waited eight long years, who have survived some dreadful conditions, bombing, torture, forced relocation. Basically, they've lost everything. And now you've got hundreds of them in the streets, actually hundreds of thousands of them in the streets, I should say. You know, just as it looks like you've got Algeria at the height of its powers, the FLN, the organization that brought this to be, fractures. It just completely disintegrates. So, you know, why? Why did that happen? Well, you could say the exterior army forces that had been training in Tunisia and Morocco, you know, largely untouched by the war inside Algeria, they marched on Algiers under the command of a man called Huari Boumeddin.
2:13Anita:Now, Huari Boumeddin is a man who is determined that this new state is going to be under his control. And we should describe what he looks like. I mean, he sort of looks like a thunderstorm made flesh, I think, you know, sort of quite frowny. He's got that sort of long stern. He's definitely on the frowny side. Yes, I mean, sort of Easter Island-y kind of face, you know, and he doesn't look like, you know, laughter comes to him very easily.
2:36William:He's even got the Easter Island haircut.
2:38Anita:Yeah, I mean, there is something granite-like about him. And little is known about his early life, but I can tell you that, you know, his father says he was born in 1932. And he should know, his mother would know better, in a religious rural family. And this is a family, interestingly, that doesn't speak French. So in 1952, Bawari goes to Cairo to study at university. And he meets a very important character, Ben Bella. You remember we talked about Ben Bella, Willie, in the last episode.
3:07William:He's the guy that gets abducted, isn't he, when he's on his plane. This was a big crisis in the last episode.
3:12Anita:Exactly, because he's seen as a nascent uprising leader. And so he just gets whisked away to some black site. And, you know, hopefully they, the French, they've never seen again, but they're wrong about that anyway. So this man, Boumediene, decides that this new state is going to be under his control. That's what's going to happen. That's what it's going to look like. And you know what? He takes on Ben Beller. He takes on the new president, who is very popular, and he wins. He does install Ahmed Ben-Bella as president, but this is a shaky relationship because you've got these two massive egos who are looking to build themselves some kind of legacy.
3:49Anita:And this revolution that has been fought for, so much blood and coin has been spent on it, liberty supposedly in the hands now of the Algerians, immediately turns into something that doesn't feel very liberated at all, a one-party state where you have the military holding on to all the power. And, you know, you immediately get that sense, Willie, don't you, that dissent is not going to be tolerated?
4:11William:You do. And yet there's this sort of strange paradox, because alongside this sort of depressing feeling that it's every bit as authoritarian as it's always been, despite the new rulers. Algeria has this significance and this prestige way beyond its size or its wealth, or indeed, it's sort of, you know, how nice it is to be living in Algeria at this point. because the fact that it had won independence at this moment in the early 60s with all this revolutionary fizz going around the world from Latin America through the PLO right through to Vietnam. This is very much the kind of late 50s, early 60s dream of throwing out the colonial overlord by revolutionary power.
5:04William:They have defeated France after eight years of really tough guerrilla war. Everyone is now studying the FLN's method. How did they achieve independence? How did they get rid of the French? And everyone's looking at it in terms of guerrilla tactics, also its political program, and the way that they got the whole Arab world on side and internationalized the struggle also to the UN through disciplined violence and a media strategy. And this becomes the template for the next range of liberation struggles from Vietnam to South Africa and also to Palestine. And Algeria now hosts the leaders of every liberation movement that could get on a flight to Algiers.
5:44William:And the city becomes for a decade this, I mean, it's something that I certainly don't have fixed in my head as an image of Algiers, but the city becomes the revolutionary capital of the world. You know, within that moment of 1960s revolutionary chic, it is the chicest place to be.
6:01Anita:I mean, the only parallel I can think of is Moscow after the revolution, where every enemy of any empire goes to be trained and sort of sits and learns methodology. You would have this, you know, these heroes, these poster boys for revolution. And yet the relationship between them is dreadful. So you've got sort of, you know, Bimedien and Benbella pretty much at each other's throats. Ben Bella immediately starts to marginalize the very militaristic Boumediene. Boumediene then says, right, well, I'm not having that and gets closer still to the military. And in 1965, he orchestrates a carefully planned coup.
6:40Anita:The military took control of Algiers. They take Ben Bella, they throw him behind bars. Boumediene then announces himself president. And he decided to run the country through something called the Revolutionary Council. And we've heard this playbook before, and we will hear it again. It's a group of generals who decide without any kind of question from any kind of democratic forum, the fate of the country and the people. So under Bimedienne's leadership, it is a military state. It's basically a military junta that is running a newly born, liberated Algeria.
7:16William:And what makes it important apart from its prestige as a revolutionary centre in the place that threw out the wicked French. At this point in its history, vast oil and gas reserves are discovered under the Sahara. People have been aware that there's oil and gas there, but the full scale of what is sitting under the sand now becomes very clear. And it funds this incredibly ambitious program of nationalization and industrialization under Boumediene.
7:46Anita:Another important thing that Boumediene does, because I guess he must be sensitive to the fact that a lot of credibility has been squandered by suddenly having a military coup and a military junta. He decides to host, carry on this feeling that Algiers is the centre of dissent and freedom. So he hosts the fourth non-aligned movement summit in Algiers. And we should say what the non-aligned movement is, it's something that sprung out of the Bandung Conference in the 1950s. Just to remind you who were the founding members of this, you had Tito of Yugoslavia, Nero of India, Nasser from Egypt, Nkrumah from Ghana, and Sakamo from Indonesia.
8:24Anita:The non-aligned movement is basically based on the premise that in this Cold War, where these giants are going at each other, we will not be the chess pieces in some new great game. We're not doing that. We are non-aligned, and we will make decisions based on our own interests. So Bumidien says, okay, I'm going to host one of these, and then people will still believe we are the center of dissent, and we have that credibility still. And this fourth meeting involves Fidel Castro, Indira Gandhi, Gaddafi. Presidents and prime ministers of 26 countries come to Algeria. And Boumediene addresses these people just as he addressed the United Nations the same year and calls for a new international economic order, a redistribution of global wealth from the industrialized wealth of the developing South.
9:15Again, how contemporary does this sound?
9:19Anita:We have similar speeches given in the United Nations even today. So just for that moment, Algeria becomes genuinely one of the most influential voices in global politics. If you like, the last great assertion of Arab sovereignty before a series of defeats and disillusionments that marks the 20th century.
9:41William:Eugene Rogan was so good about that moment of disillusion that comes in 1967, but we're what now in 1965? This is just two years before. And then woven into this story, which adds a real richness when you're reading about it, is this extraordinary character and a man whose ideas very much shaped the thought of this period. And that's Frantz Fanon.
10:07Anita:He's so interesting.
10:08William:And anyone that's ever read anything about postcolonial anything would have come across at some level Frantz Fanon. He's born in 1925 at the other side of the world on the Caribbean island of Martinique, which is another French overseas territory that's also part of France. It still is. Martinique, you go there, it's French border guards that greet you at the airport. To understand Frantz Fanon, you have to understand that he's a child of the French empire's further streets. He's educated in French schools where the first three words he's taught to spell are, je suis français, I am French. And he grows up, just to add to the complexity of it, under the Vichy regime.
10:50William:But volunteers for the free French forces at 17 fights in North Africa. And he comes back from the Second World War with two things, a croix de guerre, a medal for his heroism, And this big burning question about what it meant to be French and to be black simultaneously, in a sense, inhabit a body that the French education system has made you, to some extent, despise.
11:15Anita:If that wasn't sort of interesting enough, you then have this move to Algeria when he's just 28 years old, Fanon, in 1953. And he goes to run the psychiatric department in Lyon. It's a place called Blido-Joinville Hospital in Algeria. And he studies in Lyon psychiatry. He goes to Blido-Joinville Hospital in Algeria in 1953. And he is the head of the psychiatric department. He's really young. I mean, you just sort of tell how capable he's. He's 28 years old and he's heading up this department. And what really changes him, as if that dichotomy of who he was wasn't enough to sort of mold the new man, he, in his psychiatric position, sees Algerian civilians on a daily basis and treats them.
12:03Anita:And these people are broken because they have been broken by torture and loss and grief. and in the same wards he's also treating French soldiers and police officers who carried out the torture just I mean just imagine the discomfort and again you know that kind of fracturing of two different identities rammed into one you know sort of asylum if you like
12:25William:extraordinary moment isn't it absolutely extraordinary here he is at this moment looking after both sides in a psychiatric ward
12:33Anita:but what he what he takes away from it Willie which I think is just again really interesting about Van Orme he comes away with this thesis it is disillusioning. And so he resigns from French government service. He's not going to work for them anymore in 1956. And this act of defiance, if you like, leads to him being expelled from Algeria. So he joins the FLM, their external apparatus in Tunisia. So Willie, then he writes this key text, which is still taught in every colonial history module, even today, the Wretched of the Earth. Just tell us what the Wretched of the Earth is all about.
13:08William:So I'm sure many people listening to this have come across it at some point in their education, but it's published in 1961 and it makes two principle arguments. And they really burn themselves into the consciousness of people engaged in these liberation movements in the 1960s. And the first is the idea that colonial violence is not an anomaly, but it's the system's essential mechanism. That's how it works, that the colonized man is kept in line by violence from the metropolis. And the only way he can reclaim his humanity is through counterviolence. And this is the first time it's really expressed in these terms, because this is very much how people think of it today.
13:55William:But this is the first time that it's framed in this way. And the second which leads on to that is a very prescient warning about what is likely to happen after independence. It's not specific to Algeria, but it does indeed predict what happens. And he predicts that the new national elite in newly independent states will not build a new society. They will simply take over the old colonial apparatus and replace European metropolitan white faces with the local version, with African or Asian ones.
14:35Anita:Dare I say four legs good, two legs better. You know, the end of Animal Farm where the pigs are just as bad, if not worse.
14:43William:I wonder whether he'd read Orwell. Do you think he had? I wonder.
14:47Anita:Well, somebody read somebody. Because, you know, Or it's just a prevalent insight of the time. You see this going on around you in the world. I mean, of course, there's going to be this zeitgeist thing.
14:57William:And it's sort of just beginning now, obviously, but throughout the 70s and 80s, we see it happening all over in Burma, in Mugabe, in Zimbabwe, or to a certain extent, India, where, you know, certainly the new rulers of India today, Modi India, very much beats Nehru with the brush. They're just a brown face on the British system with a British accent.
15:23Anita:Well, I was going to say Pakistan is an even more pressing example where you have Zia al-Hak. You know, a country gains its independence, has freedom, talks about being founded on freedom. And then you have a military coup and a general who hangs opposition leaders. It is something that we recognize through history. And he recognised it, Fanon, the thing is that he recognised it right before anybody else and wrote this really rather extraordinary book about it. So what in effect he does is, you know, he doesn't live even to see this. He described Algeria's future because Fanon dies of leukemia in Bethesda Hospital in Maryland in December 1960.
16:06William:Of all the places for Fanon to die, he dies in America.
16:09Anita:So three months before the independence of the country, whose revolution he'd served, whose broken people he tried to put back together, he didn't even see it breathe its first liberated breath. And he was only 36 years old. After the break, Willie, shall we talk about this star-studded side of post-independence Algeria? Because it is quite the most unlikely gathering of people and celebrities flocking to the country. Yeah, let's get to that. Join us then.
16:42William:A quick word for our Empire listeners. For a limited time only, we are running a discount on the Empire Club.
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18:03William:Welcome back. So we are now going to deal with, I mean, we had this depressing story of Fanon in his psychiatric ward in the first half, and then the sort of, you know, the false dawn of Algerian independence, which turns out to be just as authoritarian as what preceded it, as predicted by Fanon. But we've now got the very jolly other side of the same picture. And I have to say, this book here is one of the most amusing books I have read in the whole of doing the Empire podcast. It's by Alain Moctefi, and it's called Algiers Third World Capital. Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries and Black Panthers.
18:46William:And it is a completely bonkers memoir.
18:49Anita:Just a quick observation. Moktefi wasn't born Moktefi, was she? I mean, she was born... No, she's Elaine Klein. Elaine Klein, a Jewish radical from New York. Yeah, I mean, that's who she is, but that's what she becomes. Anyway, on you go. Just wanted to make that little observation. And she's not alone.
19:05William:She's not the only New Yorker or American who will end up in Algiers at this period. And I have to say, I had no conception of this. I knew about having revolutionary movements, but I had no idea that, well, we're about to be all sorts of characters. Nina Simone, the father of LSD, and the Black Panthers. So, Alain's memoir, which is just wonderful reading, she writes very well, brings this world, the revolutionary glamour of Algiers. And Algiers, for those who haven't been there, is an incredibly glamorous city. It's a wonderful place to go. It's a bit like sort of being in Cannes, only a bit more Islamic.
19:45William:You see what I mean?
19:47Anita:Cannes smash together with Marrakesh. It's got that kind of vibe going on, doesn't it, really? Yeah.
19:53William:Cannes, Marrakesh, and a little bit of sort of revolutionary Tehran somewhere between us. It's got all these different sides to it. And it's still a fantastic place because you're walking on the Mediterranean. You've got all these Corniche. You've got these glamorous buildings. And into this world, at this period, in the 1960s, all these guys turn up. Anita, tell us who's there.
20:16Anita:It's like a roll call of everybody who's going to give the CIA a headache, as far as I can see, because you've got the Viet Cong, the ANC, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, the Polisario Front. All of these organizations have delegations of revolutionaries who are sort of milling about and basically swapping tips with each other.
20:40William:Have you heard about Semtex? It's really cool. It sounds ridiculous.
20:45Anita:But these things are really important. To have these revolutionaries all together, they're not just comparing nodes, they're forming networks. And that's something that London also saw. I think in the 1930s in particular, there was this one place in Muswell Hill, a house, which all revolutionaries were welcome into. And it was the communists, It was the Guthers. Gandhi went in and came straight out because he thought it was just too rich for his palette. You know, and they start forming these brotherhoods.
21:19William:You have other moments that you with sort of Geneva, all that world of under Western eyes, Conrad in the 19th century. You have these moments with all these revolutions, Vienna and another point in history, you know. But anyway, Algiers is definitely where it is. And 1969, tell us what happens there, because this is the moment when the festival, the Pan-African Festival of Algiers. Anita, tell us.
21:40Anita:So, I mean, we should say that Pan-Africanism is a relatively new movement, and it has come into existence to unite the people of African descent worldwide. So, 1969, over 5 ,000 people travelled to Algeria for what was known as PANAF, the Pan-African Festival of Algiers. And again, I mean, you've got sort of this who's who of people who, you know, were just completely every colonial power's nightmare. So you have Amilcar Cabral. If you do post-colonial studies, you'll know the name because he, again, is one of those bedrocks of the study. And he is the kind of man who will stand up in a press conference and say that, and this is a direct quote, Christians make pilgrimages to the Vatican, Muslims go to Mecca, national liberation movements go to Algeria.
22:30Anita:You know, put that on the poster.
22:32William:But the more familiar ones is going to be the American delegation who turn up. And you get Maya Angelou, the author of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She comes, Nina Simone performs at the festival. She debuts her famous version of Numa Kipa. Numa Kipa, Numa Kipa, Numa Kipa. We all know that, which she later puts into her album, I Put a Spell on You.
22:57Anita:You've got a delegation from the Black Panthers, not as serene as Nina Simone. The Black Panthers send a delegation as part of the festival. And the leader with the name that is always associated with the Black Panthers, Stokey Carmichael, a Trinidadian American who had been on the original Freedom Rider in 1961, getting on interstate buses to protest against segregation. He is now the man of black power, inspired by Malcolm X. And he also washes up in Algiers. And Eldridge Cleaver as well. You know, this is the man who escaped to Cuba after fleeing an arrest warrant in the United States after a police shootout.
23:35Anita:He, too, arrives in Algeria. So it is honestly a who's who. I mean, it should be reminded that Cleaver was convicted of rape in 1958. Here is this nexus of people that's building up. That's the point.
23:52William:And then as if that wasn't a rich enough cast list, along turns up Timothy Leary, the father of LSD. Now, his story is terrific. So he, for those who don't know the story, he's an American psychologist who teaches at Harvard and establishes the Harvard sort of LSD lab. Is it the psilocybin project? Is that how you pronounce it?
24:14Anita:Yeah, psilocybin. Yeah, exactly. But it's a tune in, drop out kind of movement, which is sort of take these psychedelics and you will have a much higher plane of thinking.
24:24William:He's had his life transformed by taking magic mushrooms in Mexico. And all he wants to do after that is experiment with hallucinogenics. And he reads Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, and he goes all out with psychedelia. He is the father of psychedelia. and before long Nixon is calling him the most dangerous man in America but of course to many counterculture hippies who are at Woodstock and so on he is a complete icon and he's arrested with multiple drug offenses and finally in 1970 he's put in prison in California for the possession of marijuana this is the same sort of time as the stones are being bust in England on the same sort of and the famous Mars bar moment, he breaks out.
25:12William:He flees to Algeria and he seeks asylum there. Tell us what he does, Lita, once he gets to Algeria.
25:19Anita:Well, so the Algerian government look at him and go, hmm, I'm just not the kind of man who looks like he's leading any kind of revolution we recognise. But they do give him and his wife, Rosemary Sanctuary. And for several months, Leary lives it up in Algiers. And you've got him in a hippy-dippy court where he is issuing communiques and the international press are coming and sitting by his soiled feet saying, tell us more, Timothy Leary, about how to free our minds and the rest will follow. And you've got this image of a Harvard professor who is telling a whole generation, which is why he just gives the heebie-jeebies to people like Nixon, to just not accept the way things are.
26:02Anita:Tune in, turn on, drop out, just don't accept what is here. And it's dangerous. These are all really subversive ideas. So the center of all subversion becomes LGUs.
26:15William:Now, this, of course, is not a city where there is complete freedom of speech, despite all the revolutionaries gathered in it. And there is a lot of very authoritarian stuff going on in the politics, despite all these people coming here as kind of center of liberation and freedom. And it's not long before Tim Leary and his wife fall out with the Black Panthers. And this is one of the crazier moments of this story. So the Black Panthers are operating out of Algiers. And Eldridge Cleaver, who deserves a biography of his own, and I'm looking forward to looking out for one, he does not approve of Leary's love of psychedelics.
26:57William:This is absolutely too wacky and hippie and not nearly disciplined enough for Eldridge. And in 1971, the Panthers take a stand against Leary and the drug culture that they see him promoting. And here is a New York Times article from February 1971. I'm just going to read for it. Eldridge Cleaver says the Black Panthers are so incensed at the, quote, madness of psychedelic culture that they have placed one of its leaders, Dr. Timothy Leary, under protective custody in his home in Algiers. I like protective custody. Cleaver, in a tape-recorded message over the radio station KPFA, said Leary and his wife Rosemary were placed under, quote, revolutionary arrest between January the 9th and January the 13th, then released and placed under, quote, Panther protection at their home.
27:45William:The couple arrived in Algiers last September, claimed their solidarity with the Panther movement. Dr. Leary had escaped from a prison in California where he'd been serving a sentence for the possession of marijuana. Cleaver, who fled the United States after violating parole, said in a message that psychedelic drugs were harmful to our cause and counter-revolutionary. Anita?
28:06Anita:Yeah, I mean, the thing is, you know, you can understand where that thinking comes from, because the Black Panthers are all about, you know, Black emancipation. And for them, they have seen, you know, Black soldiers coming back from wars, completely hooked on drugs with their lives devastating generational poverty that follows. And so, you know, they take a very strong stance. And so, you know, for them, this sort of rich little white boy who's preaching drugs is, of course, an anathema. The fact they think they can put him under house arrest in a country that doesn't belong to them, that's a different matter.
28:38William:It's completely bonkers, but it's what they do.
28:42Anita:So, you know, you've got Cleaver, who I think mistakenly believes Algeria belongs to him. Because the way he puts Timothy Leary under house arrest, he then toured from using Algeria as a base these other socialist countries, and he calls it the US People's Anti-Imperialist Delegation and sort of goes and gives speeches in countries including China, North Vietnam. I mean, his second child is actually born in North Korea, Willie, where his wife, Kathleen and him were visiting Pyongyang.
29:14William:It's a jolly place to have a maternity hospital, I'm sure.
29:17Anita:Well, you know, and he was considering North Korea. And this again, tells you much, I think, about all these hopes and aspirations of freedom and liberating from chains. And yet for him, the model that North Korea was presenting in Pyongyang was for him a model for Black American liberation as well. At the same time, and we're talking about the 1970s here, Cleaver is also battling for the heart, mind and leadership of the Black Panthers against a man called Huey Newton. Now, Newton beat him eventually, you know, and probably a lot of that was down to the fact that he was in the building. You know, Newton isn't in the United States.
29:56Anita:He's not in another country. And Cleaver is somewhere in Algiers. He really didn't think he would lose. Eldridge Cleaver did not think he would lose to Huey Newton. So he's dejected, depressed, and he moves to Paris with his family in 1973, where now fasten your seatbelts, people. Eldridge Cleaver then reinvents himself as a clothing czar.
30:21William:He establishes a clothing line called Eldridge Cleaver Company, designing trousers for men with a special penis pouch, stating in the press release that we've been castrated in clothing. Now, take that as you will. But anyway, he moves back to the US in 75. And inevitably, for a man who's shown such a sort of varied politics, shall we say, he then abandons the Palestinian cause and embraces briefly Zionism, even hanging an Israeli flag outside his Berkeley home. He then becomes a Mormon and later creates a religion which combines Christianity and Islam. Before Jerry on the cake, he joined as a Republican.
31:05William:I mean, can anybody explain to me, Eldridge Cleaver, answers on a postcard, please?
31:11Anita:Because it is like I'm going to try anything, try anything at any point once. But what this does, Willie, is it does sort of, you know, going back to Algeria, which is this magnet for people, you know, like Cleaver and others. It's kind of, you know, look back to what Fanon was writing. You know, this is going to feel magnetic, but beware because you have to heal the country first. This is a wounded country and a wounded psyche. Can we please not give it more oppression? But remember, we still got Boumedien in charge. The guy who is pulling the strings of the military, who will not brook any kind of opposition or any form of democracy.
31:50Anita:Let's not make any bones about it. It's a one-party state. And you've got the secret police to enforce Bermudian's views.
31:57William:No free press.
31:58Anita:No free press, exactly. You know, habeas corpus suspended at the drop of a hat. You know, so that is the country that is on the surface of it, this beacon of anti-colonialism inside people no better off, really. And you had a worker self-management program that began in the early years of independence. It was a really audacious experiment in democratic socialism in a post-colonial world. Algerian workers running the farms, running the factories that the Europeans had abandoned when they ran away. And they were meant to run it for themselves, like a collective in their own interest. All of that gets dismantled and it's all run by the state, a state controlled by a man who does not brook opposition or question Bimidium.
32:45William:Now, the other crucial factor at this time for what will follow a little later in the 80s and 90s is that the Islamic religious establishment is also excluded. Now, they provided a moral backbone of the resistance. As we saw in our last episode, there's a lot of calling for minarets to rise up and the ulema play a major role in the Algerian revolution, but they are marginalized and controlled at this period. This stokes up resentments that will explode in the Islamist revolutions, plural, which plague Algeria more recently and which we're just coming out of now that period. When I visited Algeria four years ago, it was just after the last sort of revolutionary Islamist movements had been put down and excluded.
33:39William:But there's also something else going on, which is that the oil revenues, which could have provided a genuine transformation of Algeria and Saudi, these guys have got huge fortunes in oil under their sand. This is a major opportunity to completely change the way that the very poor rural bit of Algeria, which has been left out of the French prosperity in this country. And you have a real opportunity of a country which has oil revenues, which has fertile soil, which has everything going for it, in a way, great potential for tourism. There's so many ways in which Algeria should and could be flourishing at this moment.
34:25William:And instead, it's channeled into sort of, you know, Stalinist prestige industrial projects, just like we saw in our Mao series, steel mills, petrochemical plants, big sort of shiny factories producing steel. And this very much over things like education, housing and healthcare for ordinary Algerians, which is sort of the thing that could actually raise their living standards. And at the end of it, the wretched of the earth, as Fannin put it, are still wretched. They had different masters with different complexions, but they're really no better off.
35:00Anita:But, you know, while all of this is happening, Willie, we've taken our eyes off, really, the seed of the whole anti-colonial movement, the pied noirs. Remember the pied noirs? The Blackfeet, those French who came and settled in Algeria and suddenly have better treatment, better conditions than Algerians in their own country. Well, you know, over a million of them are still in Algeria. And this is a moment where they're going to make a really big decision. And they've got a slogan, Willie, that sort of sums up the choice that they're facing in 1962.
35:31William:Yeah, this is la valise ou le socoy? Are we going to have the suitcase or the coffin? Are we going to leave or are we going to stay and die? And of course, it's not a choice because no one's going to opt for the coffin if they've got the choice. So what you find is that despite the promises which have been made all along, that anyone French who wants to stay and who renounces French citizenship and stays at an Algerian can do so in peace, this goes out the window. Because there are endless revenge killings, both of Europeans and the Algerians who've collaborated with the French. There's just too many people that have been tortured, too many people that have had their lives broken, and there's too much hatred.
36:16William:So very, very quickly, one million French leave Algeria, along with a large number of the Hakis, the collaborators, as they're now thought of, who had fought loyally, as they thought, for the French regime. and these guys in a matter of weeks not months a million people leave algeria they come in to france on ships on planes um some of them have managed to get some money out others are arriving with just a suitcase uh or even even just the clothes uh on their on their back and they've been dispossessed effectively of you know vineyards beautiful estate houses or just little businesses on the edge of Algiers, because many of them are poor whites, they go back to France and they are not greeted warmly.
37:09William:They're greeted with suspicion and condescension and this sort of inability to acknowledge what has actually been lost. And they settle very much together in the South, which has obviously the same sort of climate as what they've left behind in Algeria. They don't want to live up in Atlantic France. They want to be on the Mediterranean. So they settle in Marseille, Toulon, Montpellier, Nice. And politically, they bring their rage and their now hatred of Algerian Muslims with them.
37:48Anita:Right. And I just wanted to say something more about the Harkis, because I think they're fascinating and people don't really talk about them very much. Okay. So So these are, again, just to reiterate, the Algerians who fought on the side of France. And there are roughly about 200 ,000 of these Harkis who serve as auxiliary troops in the French military. They are interpreters, they're civil guards, they're the glue that holds it all together. And this really does remind me a lot of what happened in Afghanistan with translators and the police who work side by side with British and American troops, that all of a sudden when the British and American decide to leave, what happens to them?
38:28Anita:Well, they may try and go with them, but are they greeted with open arms? Well, in France, they certainly weren't. The Harkis found that even though they had risked their lives, actually, and torched any chance of going back to homes that they had known for generations, there's not much love for them. And particularly when you've got all this anger and desperation, as Willie was describing, from the Pied Noirs who've been forced to leave with just what they can carry, you know, they are brown faces that are identifiable brown faces. So you've got this really mad situation where Harkis who have lost everything because they were loyal to the French end up in France and end up being treated very shabbily by French who had also sort of faced the same dispossession and come out.
39:17Anita:So it's kind of a bonkers situation.
39:20William:There's orders given not to evacuate them. The French are very keen to cut them loose from the beginning. And there are documented cases of French officers explicitly being given orders to leave their collaborating Harker units behind. And of course, the FLN massacres them in thousands after independence. They're shot, they're tortured. In some cases, they're burnt alive. It's a horror story.
39:44Anita:Well, this is very interesting. Anyone that wants to
39:45William:know more about this, in our bonus episode, join the club because my wonderful friend, Faramandjou who grew up in this world in the banlieue on the outskirts of Paris. And she said that two and a half generations later or three generations later, in some cases, she grew up in a world where every Algerian knows whether which families are Hakis and which ones were part of the revolution. She said that in her class, it didn't matter that you made friends from both sides, of this divide within the Algerian community because the Algerians are now so thrown together by the racism that they suffer. And they're living together, they're intermarrying.
40:32William:You know, there are marriages between Haki families and resistance families. But everyone knows. It's like, you know, being Protestant or Catholic or something 50 years ago.
40:42Anita:A more contemporary example is Iranians who came to London. You know, you sort of had two waves of Iranians. You have those who were for the Shah who left when the Ayatollah gained power and they end up in London. And then you have the ones, the intellectuals who were persecuted by the Ayatollah and his secret police who also come up. So you have these cafes, which are the only cafes that serve Persian food, Iranian food. And at first, you're sort of divided down the middle in these two camps, both eating the same food and then very much mixed together. but everybody knows, even to this generation, who comes from which camp, whose forebears did what.
41:20Anita:I should say actually, it's even worse for them immediately at the Huckys when they come to France because they're put in internment camps. Let's just describe what happens to them as soon as they come back. Again, these are the ones who've served, the ones who are loyal. And there are internment camps set up in the forests around Lozère and in the Ardèche. and they're not lovely at all. They are primitive conditions that they are housed in. And this persists into the 1970s. So you've got children growing up with this knowledge that they were penned for their loyalty. So just imagine that. These are the ingredients for anger and these are the ingredients for dispossession.
42:02Anita:And we're going to talk a bit more about that next time.
42:05William:There are many things I love about this series, many things I learned reading around for it. But it is still a completely live issue in France. This is not 1960s stuff, you know, as old and as passé as Timothy Leary and his LSD hallucinogenics. This is absolutely contemporary because in the forthcoming French election, Marine Le Pen is going to be standing on behalf of the party, which is basically established by her father in the aftermath of the pied-noir having to flee Algeria. And that dark shadow absolutely hangs over the next election in France. It's not just a part of history, it is determining the future.
42:53William:If you want to hear that bonus episode with Farah Manjou, which I talked about, and I have to say it's one of my favorite bonus episodes, she is fabulous. and we don't often have episodes in this podcast which feel as contemporary as this issue is and which are determining not just the present but the future please join our club it's not often me that gets to say this it's usually Anita's wheeze to promote the club but you are missing out if you're not a member because we often save some really really interesting and slightly of beat stuff for the club. And Farrah's interview is definitely part of it.
43:32William:So if you want early access, ad-free episodes and bonus episodes, join the Empire Club at empirepoduk.com.
43:39Anita:Until the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Durrumpil.
From the publisher
How did Algiers become a centre for revolutionaries from around the world in the 1960s? What happened to the “pied noirs” white settlers after Algeria gained independence?
Who was Frantz Fanon, and why did he end up in Algeria where he was inspired to write Wretched of The Earth? Why did the Black Panthers, the Viet Cong, Nina Simone and Maya Angelou all arrive in Algeria in 1969?
In Episode 5 of the series, William and Anita explore the aftermath of independence in Algeria.
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