In 1969, four thousand artists representing thirty-one African nations converged on Algiers on this day for the first Pan-African Cultural Festival. Celebrating a a high point in post-independence Africa, painters, poets, photographers, musicians and intellectuals transformed the streets into a meeting place of creative culture. And one such meeting, between Frantz Fanon and Eldridge Cleaver would change the world forever.
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Decolonising minds, a new beginning for humanityBorn in Martinique, Fanon (pictured) volunteered to fight for the Free French in the Second World War. After the war he trained in psychology in Lyon, where he wrote his radical personal analysis of racism and colonialism, Black Skin, White Masks (1951). "We are still black and we have come back ..". musician Archie SheppIn 1953 Fanon moved to Algeria to work as a psychiatric doctor just south of Algiers. Three years later, appalled by the French use of torture in the Algerian War, he resigned his government post and aligned himself to the Algerian cause. Thereafter, in his writings Fanon analysed with uncompromising rigour the connection between economic domination, racism and the European "civilising mission". Most controversially in his last work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon asserted it was the peasants in Africa and not the industrial working class in Europe who were the standard bearers of world revolution. Through the violent overthrow of colonialism they represented a new beginning for humanity.

Other jazz musicians at the festivaI included the singer Nina Simone and the drummer Max Roach, but in terms of the Afro-American connection, most excitement was generated by the Black Panther Party.Leaders like Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, on the run from the US police, headed for Algeria. Inspired by Fanon, they saw Algiers as the beacon of revolution. At the festival the Panthers were a huge presence. An exhibition tracing the Party's history and including paintings and prints by Emory Douglas, the Black Panthers' Minister of Culture, drew adoring crowds. The radical film-maker William Klein shadowed Eldridge Cleaver for three days. Klein's follow-up documentary, Eldridge Cleaver, Black Panther, itself an icon of 1960s' counterculture, shows Cleaver and Fanon holding forth on what they considered to be the crimes of American imperialism as well as visiting the North Vietnamese delegation; an act that was loudly condemned in the American press.