The author of the book from which the below excerpts are taken, Elaine Mokhtefi née Klein, is a US American of Jewish origin born in 1928 in New York. She became politically involved there in the late 1940s. In 1951, she moved to Paris, where she worked as a translator for various anti-racist and anti-colonial movements. It was in the French capital that she met Algerian independence activists and became involved with the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN), which was founded in November 1954 and started Algeria’s independence war. She participated in the 1958 All-African People’s Conference in Ghana (for which see also the entry on Frantz Fanon’s FLN speech). In 1960-1962, she worked in New York for the FLN. FLN representatives stationed in the United States sought to contact US politicians and officials, and in New York successfully lobbied at the United Nations headquarters during its war against France, as Matthew Connelly showed inA Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). Moreover, already at this time the FLN was deeply involved with various other anticolonial liberation movements, as Mokhtefi’s fascinating book illustrates. When Algeria became independent, in 1962, she moved there. She worked in various official capacities, inter alia for the Algeria Press Service. And due to her New York experience and command of English, she often was asked to work with representatives of foreign independence movements, including the US Black Panther Party (BPP), whose presence in Algeria in 1969 and its effect on the BPP’s take on the Arab-Israeli conflict has been studied in Michael Fischbach’s Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (2018). Many such movements were assisted by the Algerian government, which saw itself as a player in multiple overlapping anticolonial and postcolonial frameworks, including African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism, as Jeffrey Byrnes has shown in his Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order (2016). Mokhtefi was for political reasons forced to leave Algeria in 1974, accompanied by her Algerian husband, the former FLN member Mokhtar Mokhtefi. They settled in Paris, and in 1994 moved to New York.

Overview of meeting with Nkomo and his concerns about the stationing of South African forces in Rhodesia, specifically Beit Bridge. An overview is then provided of the major black parties competing in the upcoming elections.

Description of Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith's new announcement regarding the settling of Rhodesia's nine year old constitutional stalemate. Hostilities would cease and negotiations would be renewed, along with a release of all African political detainees.

A brief overview of the political, economic and cultural relations between Bulgaria and Zimbabwe. Some of the items mentioned are meetings between Bulgarian leader Todor Zhivkov and Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe, the creation of the Bulgarian-Zimbabwean Parliamentary Association, a visit to Zimbabwe by leading Bulgarian politician Grisha Filipov, trade and economic agreements between the two countries, a celebration marking the 100th anniversary of the birth of Georgi Dimitrov (the first Communist leader of Bulgaria), and Bulgarian outreach to Zimbabwean students.

Robert Mugabe - leader of the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and future president of Zimbabwe - visits Bulgarian and meets with Todor Zhivkov. Mugabe discusses the progress of the conflict in Zimbabwe and requests Bulgarian military support for his forces. Zhivkov expresses concern about the division of the Zimbabwean forces into two separate and competing military groups and advises him to unite with Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU).