Hamid Barrada

Hamid Barrada died on 26 September 2026 in Casablanca after the night of 25 to 26 September, according to Moroccan media. Atlasinfo reported his age as 86; Morocco World News and several other outlets said 87. He was born on 3 December 1939. No cause of death was made public. Morocco World News reported that he was to be buried after the Asr prayer at Arrahma cemetery.

Tributes from Taoufik Bouachrine, Abdellah Touarbi, Hakim El Ghissassi and outlets including Hespress, La Vie Eco, Le Nouvelliste, Yabiladi and Le360 recalled a career from student leadership and exile through Jeune Afrique, TV5 and Mais Encore?. This memorial page gathers that first-day reporting and will be updated if his family releases further details.

Hamid Barrada was born on 3 December 1939 in Tangier into a nationalist family originally from Fez. Growing up in a city that had been an international zone, he came of age as Morocco moved from protectorate to independence and as student politics became a central arena of national debate. Contemporaries and later profiles describe a household steeped in the language of anti-colonial struggle and left-wing politics.

By his early twenties he was already a public figure on campus. In 1962 he was elected president of the Union Nationale des Etudiants du Maroc (UNEM). The role placed him among the generation that expected independence to deliver social justice as well as sovereignty. That expectation collided with the hard politics of the early Hassan II years. In 1963 Barrada was sentenced to death in absentia. The judgment forced him into clandestinity, then exile, first in Algeria and later in France. He would not receive permission to return until 1978, a fifteen-year absence that shaped both his caution and his insistence on hearing every side of a story.

Barrada trained in philosophy, law and political sociology, a combination that later readers of his interviews often recognise in the way he framed questions. Exile did not end his intellectual formation; it redirected it toward the craft of reporting. By the time he joined Jeune Afrique he already had the habits of a close reader of power: who speaks, who is silenced, and what a careful follow-up can reveal.

He later taught at university until retirement, treating classroom explanation and long-form journalism as related disciplines. Colleagues described an interviewer who spent days preparing, sitting with subjects before writing questions, and refusing to confuse speed with seriousness.

Barrada's professional home for much of his life was Jeune Afrique, the Paris-based weekly that covered Africa and the Maghreb for a French-speaking audience. He worked there as a grand reporter, served as editor-in-chief from 1974 to 1985, and remained a contributor long afterward. From that platform he conducted many of the conversations later collected in his Anthologie des entretiens.

He then directed the Maghreb and Middle East division of TV5, bringing the same curiosity to television. Between 2007 and 2018 he presented Mais Encore? on Morocco's 2M channel. The show's unhurried format became identified with his name: guests were given space, and viewers watched an interviewer who did not need to dominate the frame to control the conversation. Episodes featured figures such as Fatna El Bouih, Simone Bitton, Ali Benmakhlouf, Karima Skalli and others.

The 1985 interview with King Hassan II remains the career landmark most often cited in obituaries. Organised for Canadian television and partly published in Jeune Afrique, it confirmed Barrada's standing as a Moroccan journalist able to question the palace on camera. He also spoke with opposition leaders, historians, novelists and African heads of state, building an oral archive of the decades after independence.

Barrada's personal life intersected with Morocco's artistic and activist worlds. He was the partner of Mounira Bouzid El Alami, an activist and psychotherapist, and the father of Yto Barrada, the Franco-Moroccan visual artist who cofounded the Cinematheque de Tanger and has exhibited internationally. Yto Barrada was involved in directing the 2025 Anthologie volume that gathered her father's interviews.

Obituaries described his final years in a modest Casablanca apartment, among books, cats and the company of friends who still sought his counsel. Journalist Abdellah Touarbi wrote that Barrada never grew rich from journalism despite connections that could have made that easy, and that he continued to follow the news closely even when tired. Details of a formal marriage ceremony were not emphasised in English-language reporting; the family relationships above are those documented in Yto Barrada's biographies and in Moroccan obituaries.

Barrada moved from militant student politics to a journalism that kept political memory alive without settling every argument. Atlasinfo's tribute argued that he understood societies must conserve contradictions as well as certainties. In a 2025 Jeune Afrique conversation about his anthology he said he liked to take his time and write long formats, adding that such work was no longer so much in fashion.

He testified before the Equity and Reconciliation Commission in 2004, linking private family trauma to a national effort to name past abuses. His interviews with Hassan II, left-wing leaders and Maghrebi intellectuals were not exercises in reconciliation theatre; they preserved disagreement while it was still living speech. That ethic, listening before judging, became the public meaning of Mais Encore?.

Barrada left three overlapping archives: the Jeune Afrique years, the TV5 and 2M broadcasts, and the printed Anthologie des entretiens. Together they document how Morocco, Algeria and wider Africa argued about borders, democracy, Islamism and Franco-Maghrebi relations before later decades sorted winners and losers.

Colleagues called him the dean of Moroccan journalists. Younger reporters cited his preparation and restraint as a counterweight to confrontation-as-content. His daughter's artistic career and the Cinematheque de Tanger extend a family commitment to cultural memory in the city of his birth. Preserving and digitising his interviews, several tributes argued, is part of Morocco's unfinished media heritage.

Barrada's recognition was professional rather than ceremonial. Morocco World News and other outlets stressed his unique status as the Moroccan journalist who interviewed Hassan II. Taoufik Bouachrine's public tribute as dean of the profession, the CCME-supported publication of his anthology, and continued circulation of Mais Encore? episodes on 2M's channels were the honours that defined his standing. No single state decoration dominated the obituaries; the archive itself was treated as the honour.

In June 2025 Kulte Editions released Anthologie des entretiens, Volume I (1977-2012), more than 700 pages edited with Yasmine Naji and directed with Yto Barrada's involvement, supported by the Council of the Moroccan Community Abroad. The volume includes conversations with Mohammed Harbi, Hassan II, Abdallah Laroui, Jean Lacouture, M'Hamed Boucetta, Pierre Messmer, Rachid Ghannouchi and many others. A second volume drawn from Mais Encore? was announced.

Television work included Maghreb and Middle East direction at TV5 and the 2M series Mais Encore? (2007-2018). Recorded episodes and later interviews about the anthology remain available on YouTube via 2M, Alqarra Tv, CCME and university channels.

The central rupture in Barrada's life was political, not a media scandal. The 1963 death sentence in absentia, issued during a period of intense conflict between the monarchy and the left, made him a condemned man at twenty-four and an exile for fifteen years. He belonged to the same generation of repression that included the disappearance of Mehdi Ben Barka, though Barrada's own path led through journalism rather than permanent clandestine leadership.

His later interview with Hassan II was therefore loaded. Admirers read it as proof that a former condemned activist could return as a professional questioner. Critics of palace media might have asked how free any such interview could be. Barrada's published record treats the encounter as journalism: prepared, partial, historically valuable, and not a blank cheque for either side.