Mobutu's Rumble in the Jungle

by Cliopatria

ESPN Classic has been all about Muhammed Ali for the last month or so, but really at any time of the year there is a good chance that you'll be able to catch The Greatest on the Classic. This is a godsend for those of us just young enough never to have been able to see Ali live or in his prime. One of my favorite documentaries of all time is When We Were Kings, an inside look at the epic"Rumble in the Jungle," Ali's 1974 fight against the seemingly indomitable George Foreman. Beneath the surface of the fight there was always a political subtext. One of these was a dictator’s attempts to use the fight for his own, and putatively his people’s, glorification.

Today's Boston Globe has an interesting piece on the legacy of that fight in the Democratic Republic of Congo, then called Zaire. The legacy is, at best, a mixed one. Of course the Congo has pretty much gone to hell in the years since 1974, when Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku wa za Banga (Translated: “The all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and flexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake.” Ronald Reagan, whose administration’s judgments on Africa were almost unfailingly wrong, more prosaically called the murderous kleptocrat “a voice of good sense and good will.”) was able to lure the fight, largely by using public monies that could have gone to far better purposes in Zaire. In the short-term the fight was a rousing success, at least as an athletic spectacle. In the long run, the stadium stands as a symbol of the ruin of postcolonial Congo, a vast expanse that has known little but hardship and chaos since Leopold, King of the Belgians, sunk his tentacles into it well more than a century ago.

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Derek Charles Catsam - 6/1/2005

Chris --
You've been consistent on this last point; i just wonder if it is not something of a foolish consistency. As I'vesaid in the past, I am not much concerned whether this is an According to Hoyle genocide; once things reach the point where you are nitpicking, something must be done.
dc

chris l pettit - 6/1/2005

It is a new series...2004 production date.

You are right about Kristof's good intentions...and I made sure to mention that he is doing what most are not. However, the idea that the end justifies the means in terms of his misuse of a term, political manipulation of it, skewing of legality, and misconception of a situation that he has never seen more than a biased side of is rather harmful in the long term. The means he uses are ends in themselves and can set a harmful precedent, cultivate ignorance that is already highly existent in many people (even while opening their eyes to the situation), and cause a lot of further problems. WHy not do things the right way? he can make just as good a case without getting all emotional and misusing terminology. It is not as if genocide is worse that any other crime against humanity in international law terminology...it is simply a specific type, like ethnic cleansing or forced evictions and mass migration. Again, he is doing a great job keeping our feet to the fire, but one has to question his methods, if not his motives.

CP

Derek Charles Catsam - 5/31/2005

Chris --
On balance, Kristoff has done more good than harm in trying to keep our feet to the fire. In fact, I think he has been the single best person on this issue in using his profile to try to draw us into a deeper commitment to the Sudan.
I am, alas, not surprised by the Discover Channel's snafu. I wonder when the show was produced. It could not have been a decade ago, could it? in any case, whenever South Africans wanted to make fun of me as an American they used a bad texas accent and asked about cowboy hats, so no one's hands are clean, though obviously Africans know a lot more about the US than we do about Africa.
dc

chris l pettit - 5/31/2005

Discovery channel, of all places, made an egregious error and referred to DRC as Zaire the other day in a current program. A housemate loves a show called "Battle of the Beasts" where they pit unlikely adversaries against one another. THis show was a Bull shark (called Zambezi here for its propensity to swim up the brakish water of the Zambezi RIver...the only shark to be able to do that by the way...but I digress) against a hippo. And they set it in "Zaire." Needless to say, the Africans in the room couldn't understand the ignorance of the people who wrote the program. That being said, I am not sure whether they were Americans or British, the profs involved were American, but it just proves your point once again about the ignorance regarding Africa.

And if I have to read one more Kristof article misusing the word genocide and completely misunderstanding the SUdan situation, I am going to throw him off a cliff. i know he means well and is trying to do a good thing, but the man is daft when it comes to legal definitions and is causing more harm then good...another instance of ignorance that AFFECTS Africa, although not directly dealing with it.

CP