The Exiles
An Interview of
Kathleen Cleaver
The rooster crow in Algiers at five in the morning is more like a wail than the familiar "cock-a-doodle-doo." It reflects the eerie sound Arab women emit by pressing and wiggling their tongues against the roof of their mouths in spontaneous exclamations of joy, or grief, or anguish. I awoke on the first day of September at 5 a.m. in Algiers, not so much because of my sensitivity to the sound of the unfamiliar cock crow, not because of the brightness in the room (the sun rises abruptly at 5:30), for I am a sound sleeper, but because the breath-taking tropical smells from the hotel garden forcefully invaded my subconscious.
Our fourth floor balcony overlooked the lush palms, gnarled eucalyptus and ancient olive trees of the international garden of Hotel St. George, which boasted plants and flowers representing all nations. I could see oversized split leaf philodendrons, their green stamen-like flowers blooming sensuously, huge yucca plants, their white bell-like blossoms reaching to the sky, and towering cacti of all varieties.
In the distance the Mediterranean’s gray-mottled indolence was soon to give way to changing, glittering blue /green jewel tones—from dark to light, from pastel to true color. On the horizon, the fire-ball sun rose quickly in full view shocking the sea into a dazzling brightness of its own reflection and turning the cool dawn into the heat of a mid-summer’s day. The added excitement of the purpose of my trip could neither be brushed aside not wasted in one moment of tourist weakness—the urge to sleep and be lazy.
Despite the fatigue of the trip to Algiers, the exotic sights, scents, and sounds were unrelenting in their fascination and in their hypnotic attraction. I had come to Algiers especially to interview Kathleen Cleaver. It had been difficult for me to find her, yet I finally had a lead: 9 Rue du Traite, El Biar section. My husband and I had planned this trip carefully. He was returning to the place of his army service in World War II. I came to explore the mysteries and complexities of the exiled Black Panther community.
Yet, when we had registered for our room the day before, we had been tersely informed by a hostile concierge that our reservations were good for only one night. In a strange land unable to speak fluent French, the isolation of being a tourist was frightening. The indifferent attitude of the concierge reaffirmed not only the typical foreign resentment that here were the usual opulent, arrogant American tourists, but also the cool diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Algeria. The U.S. maintains a consulate and not an embassy in Algeria. Algeria’s President, Colonel Houari Boumedienne, intent upon developing Algeria into an independent, solvent, socialist country has continued to gain government control of natural resources and seeks to trade with other nations where his country can obtain the most benefits.
Thus, Algeria is more aligned with countries of the Soviet bloc: Mainland China, North Vietnam, Arab Socialist Union, and the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Algeria is the “Mecca” and asylum for liberation groups and exiles from countries such as the United States. President Boumedienne was elected president of the OAU when Algeria played host to its fifth summit conference in 1968, and the first Pan-African Cultural Festival was held in Algeria the following year.
The fact that on the surface we were Afro-Americans required closer scrutiny as to our political stance. Algerians are wise in the game of U.S. deception. Indeed, this was not the best climate to seek two additional days lodging or to make my mission easier—finding 9 Rue du Traite. To complicate our position, the Algerian International Trade Fair was in progress, causing hotel accommodations throughout the city to be overcrowded. There are few hotels in Algeria, and with the language barrier, it seemed unlikely that we would be able to fend for ourselves.
Adding insult to injury, the hotel had had no running water during the past four days and the electricity only worked sporadically. We freshened up with “tote towels” as best we could and decided to get something to eat and to worry about our plight on a full stomach. Our isolation became more apparent as we sat in the hotel terrace dining room, for we were surrounded by the counterpoint of murmurs, the strange language of the trade fair visitors from Europe, Mainland China, the USSR, and Africa.
As we scanned the clusters of talking, gesticulating diners, we recognized a "Soul Brother." There he was seated in the corner. Our eyes met, first without recognition, then a quick “double-take”—Stokely Carmichael. Mutual joy. Beckoning to him and with broad grins, we invited him to join us, whereupon he crossed the terrace with long strides, obviously happy to greet "home folks." (I later learned during this short visit, that exiles, expatriates, have a longing, a nostalgia for Americans, not so much for the country, but mostly for the ease of communication with Afro-Americans, for news of home, a need to be current, a real "What’s happenin’ man?" communication.) Thus began an encounter that relieved our fears of estrangement, hostility, and helplessness. It reversed this uncertain, three-day sojourn. This chance meeting turned out to be the most interesting, rewarding visit of a lifetime.
* * *
Stokely quickly took us in hand. He was on a brief holiday and business trip from his adopted country, Guinea. His wife, Miriam Makeba, was fulfilling a concert engagement in Denmark. He was waiting for her return so that they could take their first real vacation since their marriage two years before. Stokely speaks fairly good French and is loved by the liberated Algerians. A quick request from him to the concierge and, voila, our reservations were extended (for as long as we wanted to stay). Pails of water were delivered to our room, the dining room was open to us any hour of the day or night . . . only the electrical problem was beyond his control.
Miriam Makeba and Stokely Carmichael 1968
A few phone calls and Kathleen Cleaver’s whereabouts were confirmed. In spite of the fact that the former friendly relationship between the Cleavers and Stokely had been severed, true to his creed, he made no vicious statements, had no recriminations, and did everything possible to help me locate them. Stokely was, however, a bit nostalgic for old time’s sake, since Kathleen and he had worked closely together during the early days of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
By noon of the next day, a mini-taxi was careening us up the winding hills of Algiers, swerving through marketplaces, tree-lined streets of the embassies, skirting the old city and its Kasbah. We reached a small park—Place Kennedy—and upon inquiring directions three or four times, we finally found a back street lined with small stones, which led to yet a narrower street. There, facing a neglected vacant and hilly lot, was the Black Panther Party International headquarters. The rather attractive two-story white adobe-type building with brass plaques on both sides of the wrought-iron gated entrance proclaimed in both English and Arabic that this was indeed the International Black Panther Party headquarters. The building, given by the Algerian government, was walled in by a four-foot natural stone wall. Wrought-iron grilling was interspersed proportionally along its fifty-foot frontage. Arab children played, ran, and yelled along the sidewalk.
Across the street a man was sitting sideways, feet on the ground in the open front door of a car, leisurely eating his lunch. (He was there three hours later. Who knows whether he was watching me, the Panthers, or just unemployed?) After knocking, ringing, and calling, I was admitted by a young man into the patio of the building. The gate entered into the patio and to the left of it was a cement staircase leading onto a narrow balcony that fronted the house. The young man led us up these stairs and to the front door.
The first floor housed a general purpose room. To the left of a long hallway on the other side was a dark empty room and further down the corridor on the right were the kitchen and dining area. On the left, a very steep, narrow concrete stairway led to the second floor. At the rear of the house was the bathroom. Another entrance to the second floor could be gained from an outside curved stairway, which afforded access to a balcony and entrance into well-appointed office. I was ushered into the 9 x 12 all-purpose room of the headquarters, and a little after noon Kathleen, with her two-year old son Maceo, entered.
Because of all the rampant rumors about Eldridge and Kathleen, the split between Eldridge and Huey P. Newton, it was with apprehension that I began the interview. I feared there would be hostility and wariness—a guarded atmosphere. Quite the opposite was true. As the interview unfolded with Kathleen, there seemed to be a need for her to talk, to unburden herself, to set the record straight. Each time I would suggest that I was taking up precious time, she would say she had 15 more minutes to the interview, and I wound up with two and a half hours.
The constant blaring of the stereo with rock and jazz music, only indigenous to the States, seemed to be the security blanket wiping out alien language and customs—a link with what Kathleen termed, “the day-to-day involvement of the struggle—everyone misses the States.” She began to talk. Maceo, leaning against his mother’s knee, drowsed and drooped and nodded. It was time for his nap. Kathleen picked him up, took him into the dark bare adjoining room across the hall, and laid him unceremoniously on a blanket on the floor and closed the door.
While she was gone, I became acutely aware of my concern as a wife and mother of five about how exiled children managed. How does a revolutionary mother feel about rearing her children, especially in exile? How does she manage about food, clothing, shelter, and money? What are her problems as a wife and activist in the International Black Panther Party (IBPP)? As if she were reading my mind, and to forestall any intrusion upon her relationship with Eldridge, Kathleen quickly volunteered: “As to my marriage, in terms specifically, it’s no one’s business. I don’t ask others about their personal lives.”
But, as to the institution of marriage, she dubbed it, "A brutalizing institution as far as women are concerned." "Marriage for us," she averred, "is a 20th century Afro-American anachronism, especially for the revolutionary movement, since the way people should live their lives in the revolutionary movement conflicts with the institution of marriage: irregular hours, impatience with the day-to-day ‘woman’s work’, shackled to a role of subservience. You’re a subordinate, you are secondary," she declared.
"It is known," Kathleen continued, "that engagement in the revolutionary struggle is very difficult for women. Therefore, it becomes more difficult to be a wife, mother, and worker, and to decided at any given moment which has priority."
* * *
I could see in her loss of weight, that gaunt look, the nervous chain-smoking, that these difficulties were taking their toll on Kathleen Cleaver. She is the only one in the exiled community who speaks French. Therefore, she acts as interpreter, troubleshooter, writer, chauffer, and manager for the eight Panther families and seven children who comprise the exiled community.
When I asked about the specifics of money, Kathleen replied, "We are debt-ridden. Our telephone bill from February to April was $5,000 and from April to June was $3,000. We can’t pay these bills. We rent four houses and the rent is overdue. All the funds are eaten up for seven kids, eight families, clothing, hospital, doctor bills and food. You can imagine what it costs."
She explained, "Most funds came out of Eldridge’s royalties. When he was declare a citizen of North Korea, Mainland China, and Vietnam, the U.S. Treasury applied the Trading with the Enemy Act to his royalties—the funds go into a block account. He received an advance for a book to be written, but with conditions not conducive to just getting around to writing, the company took back the money."
The U.S. has been very deceitful. We went to these countries with delegations, all of whom were different, but none of them had theTrading with the Enemy Act declare against them. . . . There is a tax lien on his money when he left the U.S., December 1968, until after May 1969. The U.S. uses its power to freeze us out. . . .We don’t get any reports on royalties accumulated from the sale of Soul on Ice and the other book, Eldridge Cleaver. They’re all part of the power structure—publishers—you can see what they’re doing: "You’re not getting any of that money, niggah!" Because they know what we are using it for.
Even though the stress and strain of those role changes can surely be brutalizing, Kathleen spoke in a pleasant, deep voice, with strength, resoluteness and discipline. Her direct, unflinching, gaze indicated more than anything else that Kathleen was staying with it. In speaking of her children, she was resigned to the fact that they will not be like ordinary children. Yet, though she knew this fact had to be, Kathleen exhibited ambivalence about her role as activist and mother, she seemed to want her children to be ordinary children.
Yet she pridefully stated that her daughter, Joju, born a year ago in North Korea, and Maceo, are really not allowed to be children, for as she says, "This is not the atmosphere that pampers them, though they are welcome and related to the work, they are viewed as revolutionaries and are motivated with a view toward a revolutionary war." To bring home the point and to dispel any illusions, she reiterated, her cold gray eyes flashing, "Children here are looked upon as fighters—oriented toward becoming revolutionaries." Kathleen’s intensity and belief in what she is doing can be attributed, in part to her unusual childhood. She was living outside the U.S. with her parents during childhood and adolescence. She was engaged in revolutionary work before marriage and had, as she admitted, “no intention of getting married."
Marriage to Eldridge Cleaver has not prevented me from taking the course I took. It is difficult with two kids: it’s hard to continue the work—in exile—being physically separated is a painful situation. In the case of exile, it is a form of imprisonment. You leave to avoid going to prison to continue to function, to struggle, but this makes it more difficult to communicate on a mass level.
In reminiscing about her early life, Kathleen revealed, "I grew up in a peculiar way in college towns. Mother and father were either students or teachers at the University of Michigan, the University of North Carolina, Bishop College, Tuskegee. Father worked in a community development program in India with the State Department. From age 9 through 16, I was living in Asia and Africa—Sierra Leone—from boarding schools to college. I took one year at Oberlin College. Then I quit college and started working. College to me was abstract, unrelated to the way people lived their lives. Separated from it by having lived abroad, I felt college programmed me into an abstract, artificial state of mind. My parents wanted me to have an education to live a better life. They struggled for it. I had definite ideas. College does not correspond to this educational process."
Yet I went back to Barnard College. I received a worthless education, especially because it was a woman’s college. Education should allow me to think. American education is a program. It doesn’t stimulate. It only presents you with information which doesn’t allow you to think and it stifles creativity. American education is a factory system. Take Liberal Arts—you come out with a degree, and can’t get a job, which is a ruling class device to play at education on a mass basis with no use for it. Black and white schools separated are a rotten thing, also. I do recall doing my last high school years in Baltimore. I had relatives there. I had come to D.C. when my brother was brought home. He was ill with leukemia and subsequently died. I was so anxious to go to high school in the U.S. My mother wanted to study music, so she took time to go to Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, while I went to Edmondson High School.
Mother’s dream was to become an opera singer. She was a soprano. You see, she had finished college at 16, started to teach to support her four brothers and sisters, and she never had time before to fulfill her dream. I never particularly like Baltimore. It was the first time I lived in a city—usually we lived in college towns which were small. I had never seen row houses before or ever lived in a ghetto. Though I miss the States, I sort of am accustomed to being outside. I have been in Algeria since May 1969, and it isn’t as hard for me. But everyone misses the States.
Though nostalgically repeating herself, Kathleen added, "Yet here, you see a broader scope and how we are part of the international picture." Warming to the subject of the international picture, Kathleen developed the subject of imperialism by saying,
As the U.S. becomes more involved in its own internal war, it will cease its imperialism, interfering with struggle and ideas by superimposing the U.S. ideals. The U.S. infiltrates, uses sabotage, doesn’t relate to peoples’ rights to decide what their own lives should be. They support armies, air forces, businesses, to further the aims of the U.S., forcing their economic, social, and political ideas on Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, Israel, South Africa. They have two spearheads directed at Africa in maintaining, through a base in South Africa, bootlickers, to mess with all peoples in South Africa, Black Africa. They use blatant exploitation, yet offer no technology, no education, no medical care. All that wealth and no help for the people. All that wealth being developed and exported to Europe.
"For example," she continued, "you can’t fly from East Africa to West Africa. The U.S. and European control direction and air routes. Phone calls to Nigeria from Algeria must go through England, mainly to benefit Europe. Europe and the U.S. join hands to exploit Africa. When I went to Mali on the way to the Congo, in the main city I saw the central marketplace where there were artisans making shoes, handbags, but the physical condition of the people was horrible. They are poor and tired. There is no happy, healthy, bustling atmosphere. It reminded me of scenes of black Afro-Americans in slavery. There is no excuse for this with advanced technology: no reason for the people to suffer as a colony of France. You can’t find anything resembling these conditions in France."
Maceo’s environment, his whole way of looking at the world is technological. An African child has no concept of this. The level of resources in the U.S. is more advanced. Yet the brothers and sisters of Mozambique, Angola, and South Africa, with so few exceptions are waging war. They know they are waging war. They really have got nothing to fight with. When you see this in comparison to the U.S., the struggle of black people in the U.S. should be moving at a more rapid pace.
When I asked Kathleen how this struggle could be accelerated, she rattled off the following as if by saying it faster, liberation would come about: “Especially at this time, the element erupting is the intensity of the liberation struggle. More and more explosions, black convicts inside the penitentiaries being killed for radicalizing prisoners. George Jackson is the best example. [In 1972, racial tensions combined with frustrations of imprisonment produced many prison uprisings. In August 1971, George Jackson, best known of three black convicts, The Soledad Brothers, was shot and killed as he tried to escape from San Quentin Prison, California, author of Soledad Brother.] There have been prisoners with less political understanding than he, less following, who have been murdered."
The black populace is in a condition of mass imprisonment. We must break out. We must educate the institutional army, the young blacks recruited, forced to serve, to be sent overseas. Black soldiers in West Germany are moving toward a revolutionary struggle and we are counseling them. This is true of black soldiers all over the world. We want to see the people in the black and white community in a very intense struggle in prisons, in the army, the schools, and in general to take a positive and helpful attitude toward the struggle—not the typical condemnation: to run and tell and sabotage the situations of prisoners and political prisoners caught in court and going to jail.
We must relate in our area in aiding the prisoners railroaded into courts, use it as a test to see how much people will take. We will see hundreds and thousands of Jonathan Jacksons [brother of George Jackson]. We must relate to prisoners as an example of the most extreme form of oppression. We must develop a very high degree of national consciousness and unity. The prisoners have a great need for money for legal defense, reading material to keep them from being destroyed by isolation. This is the transition phase—the need for mass support, mass action, money raising to develop more and more political orientation of the masses.
The ideological split in the Black Panther Party prevents us from having communication. We are reorganizing to develop a communication / information network through the Revolutionary Peoples Communication Network and in a New York paper called Right On. We shall continue to publish our bulletin.
Kathleen stressed, “We, the people, are sympathetic to the revolutionary struggle. Every black person in whatever position she or he was in Babylon (U.S.) must make a contribution with money and work and action.”
Since we had been discussing ideology, black political prisoners, black women revolutionaries, it was only natural to ask about Angela Davis and the Communist Party. Kathleen vehemently scorned the Communist Party and characterized its manipulation, as she called it, in this way:
The Communist Party in France and Italy carry the revisionist line to obscure, to hide anything to do with Jonathan Jackson, to serve their interest. The Communist party in the U.S. has done nothing. It can can’t do anything for black people in the U.S. It is using and exploiting black people to further the aims and objectives that have nothing to do with blacks. Angela Davis is being used as a ploy of the Communist Party and is being used voluntarily to convince people there is some hope in the U.S. judicial process. They don’t even say she is black.Their fighting on a class basis carries no real condemnation of the real revolutionary violence, for there is nothing in their rhetoric which supports Jonathan Jackson and Ruchell Magee. If only Angela Davis would share the attention with the revolutionaries who engage in violence. Not doing so is part of the deception. I am not attacking Angela Davis, just the manipulation being made of her by the Communist party. You see, people are intimidated by the Panther causes of death, blood, and violence. The case of Angela Davis will be able to prove that the state is wrong and that the Communist party supports her in order for them to achieve a higher mass base of support.
Considering her middle-class background and life, my natural curiosity about Kathleen’s involvement in the Black panther prompted this candid response:
I started working in the Civil Rights Movement with SNCC in New York until December 1966, then I went to Atlanta to national headquarters to work from January 1967 to July 1967. I then went to California for a vacation and to see Eldridge Cleaver. I found the Black Panthers to be more advanced than SNCC. SNCC in the South was pretty much exhausted. There was a need for an organizational cadre to work in urban areas. They couldn’t get it together in the Northern cities. The movement with Eldridge dissipated all my earlier apprehensions.
I was impressed with what the Black Panther Party was doing. It was fantastic. I fell in love with the movement, with Eldridge and the San Francisco Bay area. I felt this would be an opportunity for the most positive contribution I could make at that time.
* * *
To be there in Algiers, in the fading light, in the darkened room, making it harder to see the frail young woman whom I had interviewed for more than two hours, not much older than my eldest daughter, a young woman whose kindness and steely resolve had dissipated all my earlier apprehensions, I wondered how Kathleen expected liberation to be accomplished for Afro-Americans. Having worked for five years through the changing modes of civil rights, through the splits and schisms, from demonstrations to political imprisonment, and ultimately self-imposed exile, Kathleen answered my thoughts in this way:
“We want to let the Afro-Americans know that the revolutionary struggle is still going on, that the IBPP needs some indication from them. We want to hear from them. We want them to know they are a part of the world struggle. We want to know ‘Why aren’t you fighting more?’ The hardest thing to do is take some land. You can, however, interfere with the functioning of the apparatus. We see it as a highly mobile struggle. There is yet a vague possibility for holding areas. We see the struggle as highly political, therefore, we must apply force and violence with the strategy of guerillas, guerilla warfare, using small groups with specific tasks.”
* * *
Subsequent to this interview, Kathleen Cleaver has interrupted her exile to return to the U.S. for what the white press characterizes as a “nationwide speaking tour in support of what she said was the urban guerilla struggle.” Perhaps her interview with me was just a warm-up for a trip to the U.S. already planned in September. She had even then intended to return to Babylon to experience again “the day-to-day involvement with the struggle . . . to communicate on a mass level.” A little more than a month after Kathleen returned to the United States, she did indeed communicate the position of the International section of the Black panther Party in regard to the Afro-American national question.
In her appearance before the People’s Center Council, New Orleans November 25, 1971, she reaffirmed the International Black Panther Party’s adherence to Point 10 of the Black Panther Party Program and Platform to seek a United nation’s-supervised plebiscite. Kathleen stated, “We must require the people of the world to recognize the truth of our history, our existence as an oppressed people—a nation trapped and held in bondage inside another nation—our right to be secure in our human rights, and the political nature of the imprisonment of thousands of Afro-Americans held within the confines of the political and military concentration camp prisons of the United States of America.”Concluding that the United Nations is “one of the most important instruments available to us as people at the present stage of our struggle,” Kathleen Cleaver called the present stage of our struggle,” Kathleen Cleaver called for: “A United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held for the purpose of determining the will of the Afro-American people as to our national destiny.
“Also,” she adds, “the stationing of the United Nations observer teams throughout the United states to help halt and check the stepped-up slaughter, political imprisonment and persecution of our people by a racist government and the ruling class of the United States.”
Meanwhile, Kathleen suggests that, “An Afro-American People's Militia be organized immediately, with units wherever Afro-American people are found, for the purpose of securing our people against genocidal attacks.” And she concludes, “That an Afro-American liberation army be organized immediately, openly when we can, clandestinely when we must, to guarantee the implementation of this proposal, and to eliminate obstacles and enemies both within and without our ranks.” Not long after this speech, in Volume One of the IBPP Bulletin, dateline January 22, 1972, Algeria, “Information, Revolutionary Peoples Communication Network,” news of Eldridge Cleaver’s resignation was announced:
On January 15, 1972, Eldridge Cleaver, founder and head of the International Section, resigned in order to concentrate full-time on his work as a member of the Afro-American Liberation Army.
Prefacing the statement of Eldridge’s resignation, the reasons for the formation of the Revolutionary People’s Communication Network were reiterated: “to replace the former Ministry of Information of the Black Panther Party: to provide a new structure for dissemination of information and mass organization in keeping with the new conditions of struggle; and to structurally and organizationally separate the above-ground and underground apparatus of the revolutionary forces fighting inside the United States.”
Announcing that Pete O’Neal, founder of the Kansas City Missouri branch, would head the International Section of the Black Panther Party, assurances were given that “the International Section will continue the work that it has been doing in the past and plans to greatly expand upon it.”
It would seem that Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, disassociating themselves from the static confinement of Algeria, will work on U.S. soil as well as abroad to carry the message that a Black Liberation Army is the most feasible way that black people can gain solidarity and self-determination.
In the madness of racism in the 1970s, one wonders if this is a movement toward self-determination, or rather counter-productive movement toward self-destruction. Only history will record the solution to this depressing dilemma of black liberation.
May 16 and May 27, 1972
Source: Madeline Murphy Speaks (1988), pp. 163-180
