Mokhtar Kalem was a great scorer in the Algerian championship in the 1960s, just after Independence.
With 39 goals he is still the best scorer of the Algerian national team history.
Type
audio
Production companies
COPEAM - Coproduction
Algerian radio - Coproduction
Primary theme
Sport and games
Credits / Cast
Boucherkra Djamel - Journalist
Period of events
1962
Map locations
Algeria - Centre - Algiers
Original language
French
Media running time
5m0
Additional information
Context
Context
Mokhtar Kalem
Stéphane Mourlane
During the 1960s Mokhtar Kalem was one of the leading football players in the newly independent Algeria. Always playing at the highest level, he spent his entire career in the leading club of the era, Chabab Belouizdad Riadhi (CRB). Based in the Belcourt district of Algiers, the club was founded in 1962, at the moment of independence, by the merger of Widad Riahdi Belcourt and Chabad Athletic Belcourt. Kalem was one of the players recruited by the CRB’s Chairman, Boukida Djeloul, as a player with star potential. With Kalem, a small but lively forward, and other talented players such as Hassen Lalmas (top scorer in the history of the Algerian championship and in 1993 voted best player in Algerian history), the CRB became the dominant national club, with four league titles (1965, 1966, 1969 and 1970) and three national cups (1968, 1969 and 1970). It also won the North Africans Champions Cup twice (1969 and 1970).
Kalem's international career began when his country was affiliated to the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA) in 1964. In the national team, he played alongside some of the “Independence Eleven" including Rashid Mekhloufi and Mustapha Zitouni who, during the War for Independence, had fought with the FLN [an Algerian revolutionary independence party]. His first match was against the Soviet Union in 1965. This match, like Algeria’s other first internationals against Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Yugoslavia, was a clear sign of the attraction the new Algerian political leaders felt for the Socialist model. West Germany, one of the few non-Communist opponents this time - perhaps because the Bonn government felt a certain benevolence towards Algerian nationalists during the war - was defeated, the pride of Algeria. Chabab players, including Kalem, played a huge part in putting the Algerian national team on the map: at the African Nations’ Cup in 1968, played in Ethiopia, Algeria’s first major international competition, there were nine Chabab players. Kalem's scored a record 39 goals during his international career, the highlight being his hat-trick against Morocco on 10 December 1970. That match was not only a sporting challenge (Algeria qualified for the African Nations Cup against a team that has just played the World Cup) but also political statement. Since 1963 the two North African neighbours had been fighting over their mutual frontier, known as the Sand War. A treaty of friendship and good neighbourliness had been signed in Ifrane in January 1969, but as the two national football teams prepared to meet, the dispute was still simmering. Public opinion was volatile and in Algiers stadium, an obvious place to stage a symbolic confrontation, the atmosphere was electric. The Algerian President’s visit to the players in the dressing room, urging them to victory, was highly significant in this context. By scoring three times, sweeping Algeria to victory, Kalem became a national hero for all time.
Bibliography:
Fates Youssef, Sport and politics in Algeria, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2009, 346 p.
Nait-Challal Michel, dribblers of Independence: The incredible story of the football team of the Algerian FLN, Paris, OT, 2008, 241 p.
