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

The following is the Accepted Manuscript of an article in the Journal of North African Studies, published 2024. . The accepted and published article is titled: "Gavin Maxwell in Morocco and Algeria with Margaret Pope and Ahmed Alaoui: Public relations networks, anti-imperialism, and travel writing in the era of decolonization." This article asks how the anticolonial activist Margaret Pope and Moroccan Minister of Information Ahmed Alaoui recruited Gavin Maxwell, famed Scottish nature-writer and otter-keeper, author of Ring of Bright Water, to become a 'secret agent' (Botting [1993] 2000, xxi) 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 Using published writings and unpublished archival documents, this article examines Maxwell's career as a travel writer, in Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria, in the context of recent historiography on the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 (Stenner 2019; Byrne 2016). 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 emerged from a background of European colonialist adventure-writing and became, if only briefly and partially, a part of North African networks of 'transnational activism' (Stenner 2019) 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.