Morocco’s media landscape has lost one of its most respected voices. Hamid Barrada, the Tangier-born journalist, intellectual and longtime chronicler of North African politics, died on Friday evening at the age of 87, closing out a career that spanned nearly six decades and touched some of the defining moments of the modern Maghreb.
Born in Tangier in 1939, Barrada trained in philosophy, law and political sociology before turning to journalism, a path that would define the rest of his working life. He took the helm of the pan-African newsweekly Jeune Afrique from 1974 to 1985, a decade in which the magazine cemented its reputation as an essential reference for understanding the continent’s shifting political currents. He later joined the French-language broadcaster TV5, where he hosted a cultural interview program that became a fixture for francophone audiences across several continents.
Over the course of his career, Barrada sat down with an extraordinary roster of political and intellectual figures from the Arab world and beyond. By several accounts, he remains the only Moroccan journalist ever to have secured an interview with King Hassan II on behalf of a Canadian broadcaster, a rare feat that speaks to the trust he had built at the highest levels. His list of interviewees reads like a who’s who of the era: the scholar Abdallah Laroui, former Moroccan prime minister Abderrahmane Youssoufi, Algeria’s former president Ahmed Ben Bella, Kabyle leader Hocine Ait Ahmed, and Tunisian political figure Rached Ghannouchi.
Alongside his media career, Barrada taught at university level until his retirement, passing on to generations of students his sharp reading of regional power dynamics.
News of his death drew an outpouring of tributes from journalists and intellectuals across Morocco, where colleagues remembered a man who, for nearly sixty years, combined rigorous analysis with a rare talent for the interview format. His passing marks the close of a generation of journalists who helped introduce the Maghreb to the French-speaking world at a time when information still traveled through the pen and the microphone rather than social media feeds.
