Politics of the Punch: A Zaire Chronicle

The ring tone on Pascal Onema's cell phone is neither a bell nor a song, but the first words of a speech delivered by Mobutu Sese Seko in 1974. An elderly man born and bred in Kinshasa, Onema was Mobutu's official photographer for over twenty-five years. His ring tone choice speaks to an abiding nostalgia for the self-styled leopard king and to widespread interest, in Congo, for a key year in Mobutu’s three-decade reign:  1974. Based on extensive archival research and fieldwork, this paper examines the legacy of ’74, focusing on a cluster of events that took place in Kinshasa that year.  First among these is the “Rumble in the Jungle”, which pitted boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman against one another for the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Long read as a North American sporting event that happened to take place in Africa, the match is analysed, here, as a quintessentially Zairian/Congolese and Pan-African ocurrence and as a fundamentally political phenomenon. The paper examines the central role that the match played in the elaboration of Mobutu’s political agenda, on both a domestic and an international scale, and the powerful effect that it (has) had, as a result, on several generations of his country-men and -women, from the 1970s to the present.

Dominique Malaquais is Senior Researcher at Centre d’Etudes des Mondes Africains (CNRS), Paris, Co-Director of SPARCK (Space for Pan-African Research, Creation and Knowledge), an experimental curatorial platform based in Cape Town and Paris, and Vice-President of ACASA (Arts Council of the African Studies Association). A prolific writer, she sits on the board of several journals (Politique Africaine, Chimurenga Magazine, Art South Africa, Savvy Contemporary, among others). Her work centres on intersections between urban cultures and political and economic violence. Most recently, her research interests have brought her to Kinshasa. Her focus, there, and the subject of her upcoming talk at WISER, is an event that took place in 1974:  the  “Rumble in the Jungle”, which pitted boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman against one another for the title of heavyweight boxing champion of the world. Commonly presented as a North American sporting event that happened to take place in Africa, in the take Malaquais proposes, the match is rethought as a quintessentially Zairian, and in many respects a Pan-African, event and analysed as a political phenomenon first and foremost.