Description
Malika Oufkir spent her entire life imprisoned. The eldest daughter of General Oufkir was five years old when King Mohammed V adopted her, and she was raised within his palace in Rabat, rarely venturing outside. At the age of eighteen, thanks to her father’s position, she became one of the most pampered and favored girls in the kingdom.
However, the attempted coup against Hassan II on August 16, 1972, would change everything. General Oufkir died by suicide, and his wife, Fatima, and their six children, the youngest of whom was not yet three, were imprisoned.
From the walls of the desert to the suffocating cells, Malika raised her brothers and sisters with the few resources available, refusing to succumb to despair. They would spend twenty years in detention under appalling conditions.
Like a modern-day Scheherazade, Malika forgot nothing: the anxieties of lonely nights, the hunger and thirst, the disappointments of a woman deprived of love, and even the mockery of a family condemned to the harshest punishment: oblivion. It recounts that incredible escape, that secret journey from Casablanca to Tangier, and from Tangier to Paris, offering a remarkable lesson in courage and resilience in the face of the harshest forms of deprivation.
A harrowing testimony, it was awarded the Press House Prize upon its publication in France in 1999.
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