How Gavin Maxwell Became an FLN Agent and an Advocate for the Moroccan Monarchy, Sort Of: Public Relations Networks, Journalistic Access, and Imperialist Travel Writing in the Era of Decolonization

Analyzing published writings and unpublished archival documents, this poster examines Gavin Maxwell as a travel writer, in Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria, in the context of recent historiography on the global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 and classic sociological theories of news production. In addition to Maxwell’s published writings, the poster makes uses of unpublished sources from Maxwell’s papers archived at the National Library of Scotland, the papers of Kathleen Raine archived at the British Library, and the papers of the Longman Group at the University of Reading.

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, best-known for his nature-writing and animal husbandry in Ring of Bright Water (1960), became, if only briefly and partially, a part of North African networks of public relations developed to cultivate global public opinion. This poster examines how Gavin Maxwell, emerged from a background of European colonialist adventure-writing, to become an 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.

Through critical textual analysis of Maxwell’s writing, the paper demonstrates how imperialist cultures and orientalist tropes of imperialist travel writing could be repurposed in support of nationalist causes, but argues that Maxwell’s recruitment as a literary supporter was more of a success for the Moroccan monarchy than for the Algerian FLN. Nevertheless, Maxwell’s connection to Margaret Pope and Ahmed Alaoui demonstrates that the efforts of North African nationalists to recruit prominent Western supporters, described by David Stenner (2019) continued into the 1960s and extended transnationally across the Morocco-Algeria border. The poster applies Molotch and Lester’s (1975) theory of “news as a battlefield” in which groups and individuals jockey to the needs of writers whose “routines of news production” require proximity to story material to examine how Pope and Alaoui shaped Maxwell’s production of travel writing and historical writing about Morocco and Algeria. This will be modeled visually on the poster. The poster will also visually present Maxwell’s position in relation to Pope and Alaoui in relation to the social network map developed by Stenner.