Elaine Mokhtefi

Elaine Klein was born on 10 December 1928 in Hempstead, New York. Her family was secular Jewish; she described facing antisemitism in the small towns of her childhood and said her mother was especially anti-racist while her father had at times attended Socialist Party meetings.

At sixteen she entered Wesleyan College in Georgia, a Christian school whose segregationist environment she fought. She was expelled after a year. Returning to New York, she studied languages and joined the United World Federalists before sailing to Paris in 1951 to work as a translator.

The 1952 May Day parade in Paris, where excluded Algerian workers surged into the march, pushed her into anti-colonial organising. At the 1958 All-African Peoples' Conference in Accra she met Frantz Fanon and Mohamed Sahnoun and committed to the FLN. From 1960 she staffed the GPRA/FLN bureau in New York, lobbying the United Nations.

After independence in 1962 she settled in Algiers for twelve years as a journalist for Algeria Press Service and an administration fixer. In 1969 she organised aspects of the Pan-African Cultural Festival and helped install the Black Panther Party's international section, interpreting for Eldridge Cleaver and liaising with Algerian officials. She refused a 1974 order to spy on Zohra Sellami and was deported.

She married Mokhtar Mokhtefi, a former National Liberation Army member and writer she met in Algiers in 1972. After her deportation he joined her in Paris; they later moved to New York in 1994. They co-wrote history books for young readers. Mokhtar died in 2015. Public sources do not list children.

In later years she also painted, including portraits connected to her Algerian and Panther years, and remained a familiar presence at New York protests.

Mokhtefi described herself as a militant rather than a self-styled revolutionary, while believing firmly in Algeria's revolution and in colonial emancipation. She argued that Algeria's war had been understated in the United States even as it shaped African decolonisation.

Late interviews stressed antiracism rooted in her own experience of antisemitism, solidarity with Black liberation, and Palestine as an urgent cause. She praised street protest from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and warned that militarised policing made organising harder.

Her forced departure from Algeria in 1974 followed her refusal to inform for Military Security on Zohra Sellami, wife of the imprisoned former president Ahmed Ben Bella. She called the deportation a rupture in her life and said Mokhtar treated it as a final disillusionment with undemocratic rule under both Ben Bella and Boumediene.

She was denied return for more than four decades, a ban that framed her memoir as both testimony and unfinished argument with the country she still called her heart's home.

As an APS journalist she covered Third World politics from Algiers. With Mokhtar she later wrote history for young readers in France.

Her principal book is Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers (Verso, 2018), published in French as Alger, capitale de la revolution: De Fanon aux Black Panthers (La Fabrique, 2019), which she translated herself, and released in Algeria. The memoir blends Fanon, Ben Bella, Castro, the 1969 festival and the Black Panthers' Algiers years.

Mokhtefi died on 11 September 2026 in a New York hospital at the age of 97. Filmmaker Ahmed Bedjaoui announced the news; Algeria's ambassador in Washington, the Minister of Mujahideen and APS issued tributes. She had been naturalised Algerian by decree in July 2026 and was expected in Algiers on 10 October to celebrate. The cause of death has not been made public.

Obituaries across Algeria called her a friend of the Revolution and an exemplary patriot. Her memoir remains a primary English-language witness to Algiers as a hub of liberation movements and to the Black Panthers' international section. Naturalisation in 2026 closed a circle she had lived since the 1950s: an American who chose Algeria, was expelled, and was finally claimed as Algerian.