Sport and Blackness

I will look at the role of sport in the documentary “When We Were Kings”. I will consider the role of the match in this case in uniting the black populations an ocean apart. I will also deal with the concept of enlarged self and the sportsperson with respect to both the contesting personalities.

The primary reason why the boxing match was held in the Congo was economic. It could offer more money for the fight than any other place. However, the fact that it meant an interaction between the black Americans and Africans shed a new light on this match. As Ali says “I live in America but Africa’s the home of the black man”. Going to Africa was a kind of homecoming to these black people. The memory of uprooting could now be soothed, however weakly, by the touch of home. Ali says at a couple of instances that the knowledge of the black people in America is of absolute importance and bewails the ignorance of the majority of them not knowing their “African brothers”. The fact that sports could raise so much money and publicity would make many of them aware to a world beyond the ocean that was once theirs, and was still theirs in spirit. It could thus broaden and strengthen their imagination and the sense of self, and could confer a sense of “somebody-ness” in them. As someone in the film put it, it was the meeting between the people of Africa and the American blacks on a world level. Sport as a plane which could transcend borders was especially pertinent in this case since a lot of black political and spiritual movements in the United States, such as the ideas of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, looked for a global unity of the black people. Plus, the fact that here at last these people could see countrymen who were just like them, and working without any racial barriers, gave them a sense of freedom. Ali felt it when seeing an all-Black crew on his flight to the Congo he felt “the first free feeling I’ve had in a long time”.

The idea of politics at home could not be ignored, and became a part of the boxing match itself. The image of Ali as a resistance fighter by refusing to give into the demands of the coloniser to invade another people appealed enormously to the African people, as Malick Bowens, an actor told the camera. As we discussed in class, sport has the ability to generate an enlarged self. A lot of people could share in the personality of a single person. His dark colour made the “African people” sympathise with Ali, but that was not all. Here it was modulated by sport. Both Foreman and Ali were black, and as someone put it, Foreman was “blacker than Ali”. Here, the characteristic charisma of the sportsman came into play. Foreman, was viewed as the “representative of white America”, and his unwise decision to bring his German Shepherd brought to the Congolese people memories of their colonial masters. Ali, on the other hand, was charismatic, “free”, and “sincere”. He spoke openly of the problems of the black people in America, and was unabashed of his blackness. He refused participation in the Vietnam war and was viewed as the voice of Truth to power. It was on account of this confluence between his individual persona and the broader ideal he was held to embody that the stadium could ring with the chants of “Ali boomaye!” and a boxing contest could become representative of a fight for Truth.

It can be summed up that sport being a mode of expression which transcends the limitations of space, can at the same time help overcome a separation from one’s own people and unify them for a cause. The “Rumble in the Jungle” exemplified all these characteristics.