Dominique Malaquais

“Barnburner: Soul of a Fight” explores memories of the “Rumble in the Jungle,” which pitted Muhammad Ali against George Foreman in Kinshasa, in 1974. The story of this legendary fight has been told in many settings, by many people. Some key aspects of the match, however, have been given little attention. First among these are its political ramifications.

For different constituencies at different times, the Rumble has had different meanings. In many instances, these meanings have had profound political implications. At the heart of the match – as it was first imagined, then planned, set in motion and brought into being; as the event itself was experienced by different actors and interest groups; as it was covered, discussed and broadcast, officially and not; as it has been and continues to be remembered and, in the process, thought and rethought – are extraordinarily complex and vexing issues. Concepts of race class and gender; the twinned legacies of colonialism and slavery – wounds left gaping in Africa and the Americas alike; neocolonialism; postcolonialism; state-sponsored repression; mayhem born of late capitalism’s stranglehold on urban economies from Detroit to Kinshasa and Guangzhou; violence visited on bodies and minds in all of these contexts; constructions of identity, ways of doing, seeing, moving, dressing, talking, writing and singing deployed to counter such violence: the Rumble speaks in direct ways to all of these concerns.

“Barnburner”’s focus is on sides of the Rumble story that tend to get elided in mainstream accounts. The streets of Kinshasa three months, three days and three hours before the bout; Lingala and French expressions that appeared there and were honed into proverbs, insults, jokes and cold statements of fact; the way these traveled (to Brussels, Bunia, and Brownsville); songs, poems and raps written and performed before, during and after the match; Ali (and occasionally Foreman) fashions born of the match, from mid-1970s coiffures to baby blue, gold-thread Rumble T-Shirts made in China and sold on the streets of Lubumbashi in 2009; an 8 year old child named Ali who spars alongside his unemployed mother in the remains of Stade Tata Raphaël, where his namesake won the match of the century; Pentecostal churches hailing from Angola, Tanzania, Nigeria and South Africa, whose choirs fill the stadium with haunting melodies and calls for cash; dozens of neighborhood gyms – a courtyard, an unbuilt space between two shops – in Kin, of course, but also in Cairo, Mumbai and Sarcelles, where hundreds of would-be Muhammad Alis train year in year out; back rooms, living rooms and the occasional gym from Chicago to Louisville and the Bronx where memories, takes and countertakes on the match – not only how it was fought, but also how it happened, who paid, who went, who was left out, who gave what to whom and what it all meant – linger… These are the stories of the match that most illuminate its complexity and its relevance, not only (or even especially) as the sports event that it was, but also, and most importantly, for what the Rumble tells us about the political heft of urban lives spanning three decades of a global, headlong hurdle into the postcolonial present-future.

The project is ongoing and spans multiple media. A first series of conferences and seminars, in Paris (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales) and Chicago (African Studies Association), gave rise to a first publication (Africultures 2008) and to a collaboration with Paris-based Congolese-American collage, installation and video artist Kakudji. July-August 2008 brought an eight-week sojourn in Kinshasa, spent in and around the Rumble stadium, the studios of artists engaging with memories of the match, the courtyards of hip hop musicians whose lyrics dance around its protagonists and the homes of persons who were present that night, tried to go but couldn’t get in or simply couldn’t afford to and so constructed a different experience of the event. This in turn led to two further publications – one an essay in Chimurenga Magazine, the other a text-and-image collaboration with artists in several media (Kakudji, Méga Mingiedi, Mowoso, Sadi, Daku Rani) in Transition (forthcoming).

Moving forward, the goal is twofold: (1) to produce a corpus of essays, each of which will be a collaboration with one or several visual and performance artists; (2) to produce three iterations of this compendium: (A) a book that will function as both an object for reading and an object one might want to handle for its aesthetic and ludic character; (B) a DVD; (C) a less-than-classic travelling exhibition.