John Matshikiza
WITH THE LID OFF
Everybody’s an expert on racism these days. Even people of historically racist stock (HRS for short) have a born-again take on the subject.
It was supposed to be an easy-going, late-night ramble in Lusaka. I was talking to Sakala, the Nyanja-speaking Danish Viking, about When We Were Kings, the Oscar-winning documentary film about the Ali/Foreman “Rumble in the Jungle”, shot in the 1970s in the now mythical land of Zaire. We were agreeing that it was one of the great films of all time, not least because of its compelling leading actor, the legendary pugilist and in-your-face commentator, Muhammad Ali.
I suppose our enthusiasm was making our voices carry a little further than we realised, because our conversation was interrupted by one of our companions, sitting at the far end of the table.
She was a busty white civil engineer from Texas. Up to that point, she had seemed to have pretty inoffensive opinions about everything that had come up. Now something in our conversation had rattled her cage. The very mention of Ali’s name caused something to snap inside her brain.
She challenged me to explain my admiration for Ali, pointing out that his popularising of the “sport of kings” had resulted in boxing being reduced to a vicious spectacle of black-on-black violence conducted for the benefit of the rich white men and women who flocked to relish the bloodletting from ringside seats. Ali, she was piously admonishing me, had actually transformed subliminal racism into a multimillion-dollar spectator sport.
I countered that, on the contrary, Ali had turned this primitive arena, that had served the same function since the days when the Romans pitted Christians against the lions in the Colosseum, into one of the most potent vehicles for black liberation politics in the Sixties, Seventies, and even into the Eighties. Ali had elevated boxing beyond simple brutality, both in his elegant technique (backed up with a brutal terminator punch, it is true) and in the way he showed that a boxer could articulate a sharp intelligence, and even have exemplary moral and political principles.
I never found out if my argument had any significant impact on the Texan engineer’s world view, because another party suddenly erupted into the conversation.
He was an Australian with a clipped, colonial moustache who seemed to think that he had impeccable non-racist credentials because he was married to a black woman. To tell the truth, I had already observed that she was the most attractive thing about him. His general attitude had so far appeared to be a kind of muted, disparaging attitude to Zambia and Zambians in general. But so far he, too, had not been a major influence on the conversation.
In fact, for the last hour he had been fast asleep at the table. Now the name of Muhammad Ali had touched a raw nerve in him as well. He was wide awake, staring across at me with narrowed eyes.
“They’re all a bunch of animals,” he growled. “Look at that Mike Tyson. Raping little girls, biting off a bloke’s ears in the ring. Are those the kind of people you think are good role models?”
It was getting out of hand. I tried to fight back by saying that I had been talking about Ali, not about all black boxers. Besides, had he seen the film we had been talking about? The point of our conversation had been that both the film and its subject were works of art in their own right. Apart from Ali, there was James Brown, Miriam Makeba, BB King and a host of Congolese children chanting “Ali, boma-ye! Ali, boma-ye!” for their hero. It said something lyrical and uplifting about black people as artists, athletes and strategists – look at the flair of the fearlessly manipulative Don King, for example. That’s entertainment.
The Australian farmer’s beautiful black wife ventured to intervene on my side, but he cut her off with a surprising loud snarl. “Shut up! You keep out of this!” he told her, his head drawn dangerously down between his shoulders.
The whole table was amazed at his intensity. The wife kept quiet.
The man didn’t want to know the details. He knew what he thought about black boxers, especially the ones who could speak for themselves. They were out of order. “What about that other one that killed his wife?” he demanded.
It took us all a second to figure out where he was coming from. Then it clicked. The OJ Simpson trial by television, and the way it had polarised the world once again into a black camp and a white camp. The whole world had lost its head.
I decided that I couldn’t take this crazy conversation any further. It wasn’t even worth pointing out that OJ wasn’t a boxer but a retired footballer. That the conversation wasn’t even about boxing, but was rather about a unique boxer who had changed the world.
The man wasn’t interested. He didn’t want the world to change, anyway. That was the bottom line, which no one was prepared to utter.
And yet my triumph was precisely in the impasse that we had reached. The fact that the fellow didn’t want to know about Muhammad Ali as an individual meant that Ali had achieved precisely that – no one could deny his individuality, or the impact that it had had on the world.
I could afford to drop it. You don’t have to win every battle. Sometimes it’s enough just to draw your opponent out of his comfortable lair – so that he knows that you know what he looks like next time round.