Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization, and the Third World Order by Jeffrey James Byrne (review)

In late July 1969, Algiers hosted Le Festival panafricain d’Alger (Pan-African Cultural Festival), an event organized by the Organization of African Unity to mark a decade of anti-colonial struggle that brought independence across the continent, from Abidjan to Nairobi and from Kigali to Algiers. This melting pot, mixing hope, optimism, and resolve saw Nina Simone singing Ne me quitte pas (Don’t leave me), Black Panther Party activists meeting their African counterparts, and Leopold Sengor discussing the continent’s past, present, and future. The festive spirit, engulfing African revolutionaries, politicians, thinkers, and artists alike, prompted the leader of the liberation movement of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, Amilcar Cabral, to make a dramatic proclamation captured in William Klein’s contemporary documentary: “Pick a pen and take note: the Muslims make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Christians to the Vatican and the national liberation movements to Algiers!”

Cabral’s emotional assessment paid a fitting tribute to Algeria’s elevated status across the continent for its nearly decade-long war against French colonialists, acting as an inspiration to a host of revolutionaries who were also searching for independence and emancipation from the European colonial empires. Chronologically, the hugely symbolic Pan African festival sat somewhat uncomfortably between the terminal point of Jeffrey James Byrne’s Mecca of Revolution in 1965 and Algeria’s Islamic revival two decades later, personified by the advent of the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique du Salut). It therefore signified the nadir of an era that started with the ecstatic exuberance of decolonization, arguably forgoing in the process the woes of the Post-Almohad Man by breaking loose the enslaving shackles of colonialism.

The kernel of Byrne’s narrative ranges from the rise of the National Liberation Front (Front de Libération Nationale, or FLN) in the mid-1950s to Houari Boumédiène’s coup in June 1965, tracing Algeria’s metamorphosis from a French department into an independent state with a strong internationalist tint. Byrne’s account is chronologically defined by the heightened spirits of Bandung and the falling promise of the never materialized Bandung II, which, initially aimed as a showpiece of Ahmed Ben Bella’s influential standing in the nonaligned world, crumbled into the crack opened between Third Worldist pull from above and the nation-state’s drag from below. The thin line binding together the five chronologic chapters in Byrne’s decade-long story is the way Third Worldism was transformed from an anticolonial “transnational mode of cooperation” into an international collaboration that “legitimized and zealously defended the authority of the postcolonial state” (p. 10).

The narrative developed within the book conceptually extrapolates the experience of Byrne’s Algerian lead actors by turning to two stylistically distinct but thematically linked accounts that have simultaneously played a vital role in reshaping the understanding of the Third World during the Cold War; namely, Vijay Prashad’s The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007) and Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). To this end, one cannot help but also refer back to Matthew Connelly’s A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post–Cold War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), which shows how the FLN defied nation-state sovereignty by extending its leverage onto the international stage. By means of departure from Prashad’s seminal work, however, Byrne argues his book is not “a eulogy for the Third World” but is rather “motivated by the conviction that the tenets of Third Worldism and the normative framework of ‘South-South’ international relations at the height of the Cold War are more influential in the early twenty-first century than ever before” (p. 12).

By attempting to address the above, Byrne seeks to contribute to...