Malika Oufkir has spent virtually her whole life a prisoner. Born into a proud Berber family in 1953, the eldest daughter of the King of Morocco's closest aide, Malika was adopted by the king to be a companion to his little daughter. At the royal court of Rabat she grew up locked away in a golden cage, among the royal wives and concubines.
But when Malika was eighteen, in 1972, her father was arrested after an attempt to assassinate the king. General Oufkir was swiftly and summarily executed. Malika, her beautiful mother and her five younger brothers and sisters - the youngest of whom was barely three years old - were seized and thrown into an isolated desert jail. Innocent of any crime other than of being Oufkir's family, they were kept locked away without any contact with the outside world, in increasingly barbaric and inhumane conditions, fighting a daily battle against malnutrition, disease, loneliness and despair.
Like a modern Scheherazade, Malika kept up the spirits of her younger siblings by telling them stories every night about an epic world of her own invention. Then, after fifteen endless years of imprisonment, the Oufkir children managed to dig a tunnel with their bare hands, and made an audacious escape. Although they were recaptured after five days, the ensuing public hue and cry resulted in house arrest rather than a return to prison. But it was only in 1996 that Malika was finally permitted to leave Morocco to begin a new life in exile.
'La Prisonniere' is a heart-rending account of resilience in the face of extreme deprivation, of the courage and even humour with which one family faced their tormented fate. A shocking true story, it is hard to comprehend that it could have happened in our own times.
