Gavin Maxwell in Morocco and Algeria with Margaret Pope and Ahmed Alaoui: public relations networks, anti-imperialism, and travel writing in the era of decolonisation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article asks how Gavin Maxwell, famed Scottish nature-writer and otter-keeper, author of Ring of Bright Water, emerged from a background of European colonialist adventure-writing to become a clandestine agent for the FLN Algerian independence movement in 1961, and then, in The Rocks Remain (1963) and Lords of the Atlas (1966), to advance a positive portrait of the newly independent Moroccan monarchy and, in the latter work, a condemnation of French colonialism. Using published writings and unpublished archival documents, this article examines Maxwell’s career as a travel writer in Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria, in the context of recent historiography on the global public relations networking of Moroccan and Algerian anticolonial movements. Through his relationships with British journalist-activist Margaret Pope and the Moroccan monarchy’s press services head and Minister of Information and Tourism, Ahmed Alaoui, Maxwell became, if only briefly and partially, a part of North African anti-imperialist outreach networks developed to cultivate global public opinion. In Maxwell’s case, his recruitment as a literary supporter was more of a success for the Moroccan monarchy than for the Algerian FLN.