Ali, Foreman, and that sound in the jungle

The rumble in Kinshasa 1974

When reading a novel, I’m always delighted to see a good fight break out. Westerns and sea novels can offer rousing glimpses of what boxing was like before it assumed its modern forms. Some of Patrick O’Brian’s Napoleonic-era sailors, for example, have boxing backgrounds that come in handy on deck.

Occasionally I get more than I bargained for. I had given up hope for boxing in Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood  Bible (1998). The novel is a hair-raising account of a mission in the Belgian Congo, a destination to which a violent and delusional Baptist preacher drags his wife and four daughters in 1969, when the Congo was just becoming a republic. Kingsolver was not able to travel to Zaire (as the country is now called) when she was researching and writing the book, but she read widely and already knew something about other parts of Africa. She includes a bibliography of her sources, listing books about everything from snakebite to butterflies and the CIA’s covert operations in Zaire and Angola.

The fifth of the novel’s seven sections is called “Exodus.” Here—as elsewhere—Kingsolver draws on scripture for resonance. At this point I was hoping for my own deliverance from this grim tale, a parting of the waters and safe passage to the last page. But before that happy moment, boxing appeared.

After her father’s mission collapsed, Leah, one of the pastor’s now-adult daughters, chose to stay in the Congo. She married Anatole, the Congolese man who had translated her father’s sermons. Leah and Anatole live in Kinshasa (K on map above). She comments on the corruption of the Prime Minister, Joseph Mobutu, who ruled a country full of poverty and cardboard houses and without decent roads. He built himself a castle with a moat near Brussels, however, and huge mansions elsewhere, including  one 700 airmiles from Kinshasa in Gbadolite (a trip that takes 57 hours by car; its ruins seen below).

Leah continues: “The latest news from Mobutu is that he’s bringing two great American boxers, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, to the stadium in Kinshasa” (p. 448). In addition to the $10 million going to the two fighters is an equal sum for security and “a festival air for the match.” Then Leah talks about what is under the stadium. “Hundreds of political prisoners, shackled,” she says. “It’s one of Mobutu’s most notorious prisons, and we’re all aware that Anatole could end up there, any day.”

Someone suggests that “the prisoners might make a lot of noise during the boxing match,” but Leah thinks that this is unlikely. Instead, people everywhere “will come watch this great event, two black men knocking each other senseless for five million dollars apiece,” and the visitors will go away not knowing that “not one  public employee outside the goddamned army has been paid in two years” (p. 451). The public employees are kept in financial straits, another form of prison Mobutu built.

Ali arrives in Zaire

Having never heard about the prison under the stadium, I set aside The Poisonwood Bible and dug out Jonathan Eig’s biography of Ali, which describes the genesis of “The Rumble in the Jungle,” the playful title given to the 1974 fight in which Ali defeated Foreman and regained the heavyweight title.

Blackness was key to the creation of the fight and to Ali’s comeback. He had lost his title because he refused induction into the Army during the Vietnam War. According to Eig, Don King, who promoted the fight, said that others “failed to understand Ali’s blackness, failed to appreciate how much it would  mean to people of color all over the world for Ali to regain the championship that America’s racist white government had stolen from him” (p. 362). Africa was the right place for the contest.

King promised each fighter $5 million, twice what they had been paid for their first fight three years earlier. There turned out to be only one source for money like this, and that was Joseph Mobutu. Eig describes Mobutu as “the murderous despot who ruled Zaire and who possessed ill-gotten billions in Swiss banks after years of blurring the lines between Zaire’s treasury and his personal accounts.” If the fight could be held in Zaire, Mobutu would pay all the bills.

No one had any illusions about Mobutu himself. But King and his partner, Hank Schwartz, neither a stickler for ethics, went about organizing the finances. Regarding Mobutu’s reputation, Schwartz said that he “didn’t give a shit.” Eig adds: “didn’t give a shit that he was dealing with a financial advisor representing a homicidal dictator.” As Eig puts it, the promoters “didn’t care that a heavyweight championship fight in Zaire would strengthen Mobutu’s hold on power and cause more suffering for 22 million Zairians, who were already suffering plenty” (p. 367). So much for blackness and black brotherhood.

Mobutu was one thing.

Then there was everything else. The stadium in Kinshasa seated only 35,000 and had no parking lot. The city, with a population of 1.5 million, had about 500 decent hotel rooms. (The population of Kinshasa is now estimated at between 10 and 12 million; by the end of the decade it is expected to surpass Paris and become the largest francophone city in the world.) Fans would be staying on ships many miles away and flying to Kinshasa for the fight, provided they had survived the list of vaccinations needed to get into the country.

As for Ali, Eig writes, again with refreshing honesty, he “didn’t care either.” After all, “He was Ali; the normal standards of conduct did not apply.” He was a world-famous rebel, and, “in that  way, fighting in Africa made sense.” King called it “a symbolic black happening.” According to Eig, “that vague glorification resonated with Ali.” Two black men fighting for the world championship in Africa, “the continent from which their ancestors had been sold into slavery,” was thought to be a powerful image.

Eig traces the sad history of the Belgian Congo, which became the Republic of the Congo and then, under Mobutu, Zaire. The US was Mobutu’s patron. Eig notes the CIA’s interference, including the murder of Patrice Lumumba, who was the first prime minister, and U.S. support for Mobutu. Eig writes that Ali’s presence  “would boost the reputation of Mobutu” and “show the world that at least some degree of order had been delivered to what had long been one of the most chaotic and dangerous nations on Earth” (p. 369).

Order delivered? As if, I must add. The fight made Zaire even more dangerous than it already was, as the story about the supposed prison under the ring suggests. There is nothing in Eig’s book about the prison, and when I read about it in The Poisonwood Bible  I wondered if Kingsolver had added this detail, rather unnecessarily, to darken an already disheartening account of Zaire.

I have found little to support the claim, but there is a 2014 essay from The Guardian called “Forty years on from the Rumble in the Jungle, Kinshasa is a city of chaos” (URL below). Here is what The Guardian reports about the preparations for the fight.

“A huge image of President Mobutu, who had offered an extraordinary $10m to bring the fight to Kinshasa and put the country he had renamed Zaire on the map, joined the stadium’s four distinctive banks of lights in towering over the crowd. Mobutu had left little to chance. He allegedly rounded up 1,000 of Kinshasa’s leading criminals before the fight and held them in rooms under the stadium before executing 100 of them to make his point. Unsurprisingly, the city was virtually crime-free for the event.”

History does not offer more support than this allegation. Reading some of the scholarship written about Ali and his success at connecting sports (not just boxing) to politics, I find that Mobutu’s $20-million PR stunt worked. The fight in Kinshasa is widely celebrated as a turning point in sports history and in U.S. history, thanks to Ali’s ability to capitalize on  political unrest and on the contrast Ali posed to the traditional patriotism associated with Foreman. Some writers see the fight as having taken place in “civilized Africa,” not an expression that many would associate with Mobutu or with the condition of his people.

I cannot support the allegation of a prison under the stadium, but anybody can see that there are both visible and hidden parts to Ali’s triumph under Mobutu’s watchful gaze. (Below, Ali slipping Foreman’s punch.)

International sporting events are the modern version of bread and circuses, excitement whipped up around national contests that are at best vicarious experiences for the fans. We know that fans can, through “covert experience, share the feelings of the athletes they are watching. We see boxers watching other boxers in the ring and throwing their own punches, as if it were also their fight. “Covert experience" is what fans have. Fans can be stimulated by what they see to imitate the actions they observe: even sitting still, the observer experiences in his brain the action he looks at. This is the work of mirror neurons. Fans not only identify with the players but also mirror their experiences. There is joy in this, if the players win. In large gatherings with thousands repeating the same cheers (as before the fight between Foreman and Ali), the observers feel that they have won too.

This is, of course, an illusion, however real it is as a psychophysical experience. The hormones are flowing, but nothing has been accomplished. Throwing fake punches when you watch a fight does not win the fight for you, but it is a much more vivid experience than sitting in a chair and observing.

Remember now that Ali was greeted in Kinshasa as a revolutionary hero who would deliver freedom to residents of Zaire, many of whom believed, until they saw Foreman, that Ali’s opponent was white and even from Belgium (a  confusion that Ali promoted). When Ali won, his supporters felt that they had won as well. This was a complete illusion and a stunning triumph for Mobutu and his backers. Those who cheered were, literally, in the stadium experiencing a victory. Economically and psychologically, however, and in every other figurative sense, they were in the cells underneath the boxing ring.

Few of those who came to see Ali’s victory remained behind as Kinshasa and Zaire returned to normalcy. Ali and Foremen flew away with their money, as did their managers and handlers. Reporters, photographers, and tourists likewise returned to the comforts of home and to lives of luxury that residents of Kingsolver’s Congo could scarcely imagine. In 2014 the rebuilt airport was in ruins. The Guardian reported in 2014:

“Mobutu’s image is long gone now, of course, but the four light towers still dominate the low-slung neighbourhood of Immocongo in the Kalamu section of the city. The grassy verges that used to border the venue have given way to houses and dusty, litter-strewn lots. The stadium, once one of the largest and grandest of its kind in Africa, is slowly rotting, its concrete stained with streaks of black and grey. Renamed Stade Tata Raphael in 1997, it is still used for football matches – but in between the irregular fixtures, weeds and waste litter the interior, and groups of people doze in the stands where the crowds once cheered for their hero, Muhammad Ali.”

Actually, images of Mobutu are still to be found (as we see in this picture from the ruins of his mansion in Gbadolite).

The rumble in the jungle was something other than the famous fight (one meaning of “rumble”). The “resonant, continuous, deep sound” (another meaning of “rumble”), the rumble that mattered, was the bass note of Mobutu’s dictatorship, the sound at the very foundation of Zaire. “Ali, boma ye!” the crowd shouted, “Ali, kill him.” After Ali won, the whole city chanted that chant and celebrated for two days, a witness said. Kill whom? The person with his foot on the throats of the citizens of Zaire was not George Foreman. True, he made a  useful scapegoat, bearing the burden of hopes for freedom that could not be realized. But the hopes left town with him. The scapegoat escaped.

Mobutu did better than escape. He prospered. “The Rumble in the Jungle” was an expensive public relations gimmick that enriched those who, like him, were already prosperous (King, Ali, Foreman, hangers-on) and provided a glamorous, dramatic distraction from the evils of a murderous tyrant. The rumble began long before Ali arrived. It continued long after he left. Mobutu was exiled in 1997 and died of prostate cancer that year in Morocco.

The Guardian on Kinshasa

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/oct/15/-sp-forty-years-rumble-in-the-jungle-kinshasa-muhammad-ali-george-foreman