Off topic: When We Were Kings (1996)

Ali, boma ye!

Director: Leon Gast

Category: I’ve been watching boxing movies lately. Recently, I watched the first and final Rocky movies—Rocky and Rocky Balboa (the former is a brilliant film; the latter…is not). In the process, I thought I’d check out this documentary.

My thoughts: This is a great documentary, because the subject matter is so much more than just a boxing match. When We Were Kings is about the 1974 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, which Ali called “The Rumble in the Jungle.” The fight took place in Kinshasa, Zaire (which used to be Belgian Congo and is now the Democratic Republic of Congo). Ali was previously banned from boxing for three and a half years because he refused to enter the draft and fight in Vietnam. This act of defiance endeared him to those in Zaire, and Ali embraced them in return. Ali got the Zaire people to chant “Ali, boma ye!” which means “Ali, kill him!” Interestingly, George Foreman’s decision to bring his pet German shepherd with him to Zaire did not endear him to the natives—because the Belgians used German shepherds to attach the citizens of Zaire while the country was colonized by Belguim (this fits with what I’ve heard about life under Belgian rule, which was, by all accounts, brutal).

The president of Zaire, Mobutu Sese Soku, is also featured in the documentary. He was a ruthless dictator, and he brings to mind the political situations that occurred in African countries during the 1970s—after all the fights for independence against colonialism had been won across the continent, many countries in Africa had to figure out how to govern themselves. And this was by no means a simple task. Mobutu reminded me of Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda in the 1970s.

Rocky is about an underdog who gets a chance to fight the world champion. And Ali was the “Rocky” of “The Rumble in the Jungle,” if you will. By 1974, many people thought he was past his prime. One person who didn’t think Ali was past his prime was Ali himself. He talked a good (and quite eloquent) game, but he could certainly back it up (it’s like that line in Beyonce’s “Ego”—“I walk like this cuz I can back it up”). During the actual fight with George Foreman, Ali didn’t dance around in the ring, like he might have done in the past. Instead he used the rope-a-dope tactic, in which he made his opponent, Foreman, tire himself out. And once this happened, Ali came out with a vengeance.

There is such a sense of the time period in When We Were Kings—it has a very 1970s feel. There’s a sense that black Americans, like the African nations after colonialism, were figuring out how to exist in the 1970s after the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement. I can’t omit a very fascinating (and very ‘70s) element of this documentary—George Foreman’s wardrobe. It’s funny—Ali was a big talker, but a very conservative dresser, at least in comparison to Foreman. Foreman was very quiet, but his clothes were LOUD. Such intense colors! At one point, he wears this sort of bejeweled newsboy cap…and I just can’t understand why he decided to bring it all the way to Zaire to wear. There was also a concert preceding the fight, featuring James Brown, Memphis’ own B.B. King, and the Spinners. Like I said before, this is a fascinating documentary because it isn’t just about a boxing match. It’s about a legend (Ali) and a country (Zaire) who were both at a crossroads.

Great line (by Ali, who was marveling at how, in his opinion, the people of Zaire are smarter than Americans): "They speak English, French, and African. We can’t even speak English good."

P.S. Did anyone dare tell him that there’s no such language as “African?”