Remembering The 'Rumble In The Jungle'

By Banji Ojewale

Forty years ago on October 30 1974, the world was rocked by the celebrated fight between Muhammad Ali, ex-heavyweight boxing champion of the world and George Foreman, the title holder. The colorful Ali aptly called the bout the Rumble in the jungle because it took place in thickly forested Zaire, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Muhammad Ali

(pix: Reuters)

It was a huge, larger-than-life affair put together by an imperial president Mobutu Sese Seko with many unprecedented features. It was the first heavyweight championship contest in Africa; it brought together two of the planet’s greatest pugilists; it saw Mubutu budget more than ten million dollars to promote the show; it gave the fighters their biggest ever earnings; finally, it offered Africa the rare opportunity to see two of its eminent sons battle for supremacy on their own soil. They had always been forced to do it away from “home”.

The African leader was said to have traveled this expensive route in order to cover up for years of his corrupt era, egregious human rights abuse and misrule, all of which pauperized the country. He did not succeed. He failed to exploit the potential salutary public relations of the fight to improve the lot of the people. Actually it would appear Zaire got the rough end of the stick, because two years later in 1976, the country gave the international community the dreaded Ebola Virus Disease (EVD).

Mobutu Sese Seko

(pix: mediahex)

Now nearly 40 years after its first reared its lethal head in Yambuku on the banks of the Ebola River in DRC, a resurgent EVD is killing thousands in West Africa and threatening the entire human race.

So what did we celebrate yesterday when we marked the 40^th anniversary of the Rumble in the jungle? Did the world need to remember the fight even as one of the combatants Mohammed Ali lies gravely down with Parkinson’s syndrome?

The point is that when history is made, and in its entrails we identify feats of great men and women who summon elemental prowess to overcome the odds to earn acclaim we should not hold back credit to whom it is due. The Rumble in the jungle goes down in history as one such episode, never mind the angle that one man schemed it to “promote his own image.”

32-year-old Ali was given a dog’s chance in a contest with a lion those small hours in the ring in Kinshasa. More than a year earlier Ken Norton, a tough ex-Marine, had inflicted a disastrous blow on him, breaking Ali’s jaw in the process. It was his second defeat in 43 fights, the brawny Joe Frazier having done the first. There had been a previous setback off the arena. Ali was stripped of his belt in April 1967 for refusing to be drafted into the United States Army, forcing him into boxing exile for a couple of years.

Later the Supreme Court acquitted the boxer of being a draft dodger. Returning to the ring, Ali found out that the world had moved on, with the title in the hands of George Foreman, a man with the punch with a hurricane force. Foreman took the title from Frazier, considered another dreaded fighter in the business.

Until Forman defeated Frazier the latter was said to be invincible. But pundits now gave that respect to the 25-year-old Foreman, whom boxing writers described as “a monster in the ring”. Once Foreman declared; “My opponents don’t worry about losing. They worry about getting hurt.” Foreman was double the danger Sonny Liston in an earlier age posed to those who faced him.

Lithe Ali didn’t worry about the killer punch, which he himself did not process. He admitted Foreman was a powerful fighter. But he said it meant little in the presence of what he would wield. Hear him; “Foreman hits hard, sure. But hitting power mean nothing if you can’t find nothing to hit.”

His ploy-moving with mock dancing steps in the ring to exhaust his opponent and drawing him to the ropes-worked to demolish the bearish Liston who threw murderous punches that never found the fast-moving Ali. Liston’s blows hit the air where a peripatetic Ali had been less than a second earlier!

Will it work against a Foreman whose weight allowed him to move on like the large flat-footed Liston who was hardly mobile?

In Kinshasa, Muhammad Ali made sure Foreman found “nothing to hit”. He threw the hurricane punches alright. But they were nowhere the hurricane could make a landing. A boxing expert who watched the encounter on tape all over again recently said: “Watching the fight through once again… it could be seen that for calculated spells Ali encouraged Foreman to throw scything punches, most of which was deflected by arms and gloves… Foreman grew increasingly confused and unbearably weary…” Ali called part of his strategy rope-a-dope.

Muhammad Ali's daughter, Khaliah Ali, visits the 

Congo, scene of the fight, on October 29, 2009. Here

she is in Katanga (Photo by Jowan Gauthier)

Finally Ali after “soaking up the pressure” for seven rounds and still somehow managing to summon some herculean energy to stay on, applied a sweeping right hand (not the legendary left jab) to finish Foreman in the eighth round. Small David had slain mighty Goliath!

Forty years after the Rumble in the jungle, can Africa package another rumble? Will our continent rumble again via some spectacular accomplishment? We can stir the global scene again if we empower the citizens to dream new dreams that would throw us into the embrace of forward-looking innovations and development strategies. The basic ingredients of this project would be a new-look leadership at the head of a radicalized society of gladiator-citizens steeled in enterprise, sacrificial service fired by patriotic zeal, a determination to take on daunting challenges and dance or skirt round the odds for success even where there are pitfalls.

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*Ojewale, a journalist at Onibuku, Ota, Ogun State, is a contributor to SCRUPLES.