Mokhtefi’s activism eventually led her to work for the Office of the Provisional Government of Algeria. After Algeria won its independence in 1962, she moved to Algiers the same year and became a civil servant in the new government. During this period, a number of anticolonial organizations set up shop in Algiers as well, and Mokhtefi once again found herself involved in various national-liberation struggles. After stints in several branches of the new government, she became a trusted aide to Eldridge Cleaver and the growing number of Black Panthers who had moved to the city and established the International Section of the Black Panther Party there.
As an observer and participant, Mokhtefi occupied a unique position in the world of black and anticolonial liberation struggles of the 1950s and ’60s that enables her to offer a rare chronicle of the intersection of these movements. In Algiers, Third World Capital, she captures the camaraderie, shared ideals, and frequent miscommunication among the various struggles for liberation in these heady and ultimately frustrating years, and in particular the conflicts that emerged between the Panthers and the Algerian government in their competing visions of emancipation. The Panthers sought to run their organization in the city with as little official oversight as possible, and they struggled to reconcile this with their dependent position on the Algerian state. Meanwhile, the Algerian government sought to assert its sovereignty over the newly independent country and likewise struggled to come to terms with the tensions between its own nationalist and internationalist projects. Both groups also struggled to address contradictions within their movements, especially between their tendencies to reassert hierarchies and authority and their desire to be free of earlier forms of them. By focusing on these tensions, Mokhtefi tells several richly layered stories at once—her own and those of several intersecting groups of people who hoped to forge a new kind of internationalism out of the antiracist and anticolonial struggles of the 1960s.