"Why? I'm black; blacker than Ali!"- George Foreman

The title of this blog is an apt quotation to frame the question I'll be posing today: what did it mean to pick a side in 1974's "Rumble in The Jungle"? Unlike our theme regarding sports this week, which dealt with cricket, the colonizer's game and beating him at it, this fight ostensibly has nothing to do with black vs white, with ex-slave vs. ex slave-master. In fact, in the documentary "When We Were Kings", artist Malik Bowens said, "George Foreman? We didn't know who he was. We knew there was a heavy-weight champion. We thought he was white.Then we realized he was black, like Muhammad Ali! Still, for us, Foreman represented America". This begs the question, "what did Ali represent? What did it mean to choose Ali in this fight of black vs black?" To this, I would argue that what the fight, and the overwhelming support for Ali can show us, is a matter of  choosing representation. As is often the case with sport, the real battle transcended the plane of the physical brawl entirely. Why did Foreman represent America? To our knowledge, there's no evidence of him internalizing racism the way Ali accused so many other African-Americans of doing. In fact, he echoed the view that Africa was the "cradle of civilization". In fact, as he said, he was "blacker" (darker-skinned). So where did this antipathy emerge from, and the answer, though nothing ground-breaking is simply that it didn't matter who Foreman was. He didn't represent Africans, African-Americans, or even himself. By virtue of being Ali's opponent, he had only one identity, and that was, "not Ali". No wonder then, that so many assumed beforehand that he was white. If Foreman represents Ali's negation, Ali is the resounding affirmation of black identity. He is defined positively, representing a quintessence that appealed to Africans in Zaire (DRC) and African-Americans alike, a unique consensus on what it means to be black, or more accurately, what African Americans and Africans alike can agree they want it to mean. I take this a step further, and recall Fanon:

"I said in my introduction that man is a yes. I will never stop reiterating that. Yes to life. Yes to love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to scorn of man. No to degradation of man. No to exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom" (BSWM 173)
With the same trajectory, I argued previously that Ali is defined positively in terms of quintessence, but what is this quintessence of black solidarity that cuts across oceans? I argue that it is in fact this resounding "no", no to white supremacy, no to white music, no to fighting a white war in Vietnam against "enemies" of white America. In fact, not to take away from the necessarily "black" aspect of Ali's legacy, I'd also like to draw attention to how he became a hero symbolizing dissent to remote contexts as well. when I mentioned that I was watching a documentary on Ali's 1974 fight in Zaire, my father readily exclaimed, "The Rumble in the Jungle! I remember that day, we skipped the first two classes of college that morning to watch the fight. Jab Ali ko maar parti thi, lagta tha khud ko par rahi hai, and when he won, that was one of the happiest days of my life". When asked where the support for Ali came from, it had to with his rebellion, his resistance to the draft, his association with the Nation of Islam.

I circle back to the question I asked at the beginning. What did it mean for a black person to take sides in this fight? I argue that if Ali was a "no", Foreman was silence. A silence that was readily filled by the audience as representation of white America, as subservience, as acquiescence. And regardless of his actual political inclination and ideas, if there's one thing the near universal support for Ali showed us, it was that the time for silence was over. Supporting Ali was an impassioned "Yes" for his steady "no".