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Ali: The laugh-a-minute boxer who changed the world

Opinion & Analysis
Muhammad Ali was the most remarkable person I never met. With such wisecracks as “You are not as dumb as you look” that he directed at a panellist, how could Ali be forgettable?

Muhammad Ali was the most remarkable person I never met. With such wisecracks as “You are not as dumb as you look” that he directed at a panellist, how could Ali be forgettable?

Conway Tutani

Muhammad-Ali

Going by the spontaneous outpouring of grief and tributes after his death last week at the age of 74, billions around the world also felt the same about this extraordinary creation of God. Such was his universal familiarity and appeal.

Who would have imagined that a person, who initially distinguished himself as a boxer — or, to put it bluntly, prize fighter — would go on to become such an influential and loved global figure, eclipsing politicians and intellectual giants? “Some people are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them,” wrote Shakespeare some 400 years before Ali was born and before his ancestors were captured in Africa, shipped across the Atlantic and sold into slavery by whites — a most horrendous crime against humanity. Ali belonged to the second category of achieving greatness practically on his own. He showed, if you are really determined and focused, nothing can stop you from achieving greatness.

That said, let’s not be hagiographic about Ali. Let’s not make a saint of him by being overly and insincerely flattering. For one to be a boxer, some ruthlessness — maybe even cruelty — has to be there and, even then before the term had come into use, Ali had that brutal streak in his DNA. His Thrilla in Manila fight with Joe Frazier in 1975 was a particularly savage display of raw power, with the victorious Ali describing the bout as “the closest I have come to death”. Boxing is an unforgiving sport, if it may be called that, and there is no reward for coming second best. And us the public feed into that brutality as we egg boxers on because we just love to hate some people. In the build-up to his Rumble In The Jungle fight against fellow African American George Foreman in 1974, as Ali jogged in the streets of Kinshasa in the then Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo) and during the fight itself, adults and children chanted to him: “Ali, bomaye! Ali, bomaye! (Ali, kill him!)” Some individuals, whether they have given us or not any reason to hate them, we hate them anyway. So, in that way, we aided and abetted Ali in pounding some of his opponents like Ernie Terrell in 1967 and Frazier in 1975 to pulp. Do blood sports like boxing arouse basic, animalistic instincts in us because, by nature, we are predators? Does boxing release and channel such feelings with Ali being the outlet of such?

And his private life was not perfect. He had human failures like all of us. But some sage said: “People with no vices have little virtues.” Reminds one of the biblical King David, doesn’t it?

Ali was also a ribald person. He would crack jokes bordering on indelicacy. When, just before his fight with Foreman, a reporter, who had known him from his early days in boxing, suggested that he was no longer the fighter that had sweatlessly defeated his opponents because he had considerably lost his speed and strength, Ali shot back at the now balding and ageing reporter: “Are you still the same man that your wife married?” Yes, he could throw vulgar, but still kind of funny jokes. He was a laugh-a-minute type of person. That you could not take away from him.

But Ali left a much different United States from the legalised racist nation into which he was born — and he played no small part in that transformation. No one is saying America is no more a troubled nation — far from it as seen in the recent killings — or overkill — of blacks in a system where racial profiling is still very much alive. The US, like all countries, is work in progress.

But there is no doubt that Ali inspired change in America and beyond. He caused major shifts in viewpoint. He was indeed a transformative figure. The bold step he took in converting to Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali soon after winning the world heavyweight boxing title in 1964 and his refusal to be drafted into the US Army to fight in Vietnam showed he was not made for the status quo. Said Clark Kerr, an American professor of economics: “The status quo is the only solution that cannot be vetoed,” meaning that the status quo cannot simply be decided against; action must be taken if it is to change. And that’s exactly what Ali did. The system, which thought it had finally fixed him by cancelling his boxing licence in 1967 and sentencing him to five years in jail (which he never served because he was on appeal until his acquittal in 1970) after he refused to be drafted into the army quickly found out this, much to their anger and embarrassment, as his fame and influence grew and grew.

We can say with near certainty that white Christian racism drove Ali to Islam. It’s not to suggest that his new faith was expedient, but that it could have been initially a reaction against appalling racism, which developed into a strong belief, being as spiritual as he was. The same way the white capitalist racist system drove liberation movements in Zimbabwe and elsewhere in Africa to atheistic Marxism-Leninism or communism. But after the end of colonialism, African governments gradually discarded that rabid brand of socialism for more pragmatic policies. Similarly, Ali had considerably tempered his radical brand of separatist Islam over the years, as America moved from legalised racism to a more equal society. Religion can include and exclude. And white America was using Christianity to exclude. The same way Ian Smith used religion, calling it Christian civilisation, to deny blacks political and economic rights.

Thankfully, Americans have largely moved past that because of the likes of people like Ali.

We don’t need Islamic extremism. Neither do we need Christian fundamentalism. Some of our beliefs are entirely due to historical factors or pure accident. Beliefs that we hold dear today were initially brought by our conquerors in the same way we speak English in Zimbabwe today because we were colonised by Britain. Asked in 2002 about how he felt about different religions, Ali replied: “Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams. They have different names, but all contain water. Religions have different names, but all contain the truth.”

With his world champion status, Ali’s refusal to be drafted into the army was revolutionary. US involvement in Vietnam unfolded against the domestic backdrop of the civil rights movement. Those Americans who had the least rights and privileges at home were being called upon to be patriotic the most by a racist system which largely excluded them. Not only that, but in highly disproportionate numbers. Ali could not help, but see through all this hypocrisy. Civil rights leaders, including the formidable Martin Luther King, Jr, described the Vietnam conflict as racist—“a white man’s war, a black man’s fight”.

This has shades of Zanu PF rallies here in Zimbabwe, where the permanently unemployed underclass, the lowest of the low, are unleashed in so-called million-man marches to consolidate the very system that is stifling them, only to go back to their daily grind of poverty and misery in townships and villages. They are as marginalised as the black Americans were in the 1960s when they were only good enough to be used to fight a senseless war in which there was nothing for them, but for the US military-industrial complex — the profiteering by industry from wartime production. These appeals to patriotism are a means for the ruling elite to keep people content within an unequal status quo. The Zimbabwean regime’s values are as distorted and as warped as those of the white racist America that Ali confronted head-on.

Oh, for those exciting, mind-blowing, invigorating, rousing days of youth in racist Rhodesia when the sap was rising with Ali, as our new-found role model, as we were discovering and getting involved in politics! But I am no less optimistic today than I was in those hot, heady days of youth because it’s beginning to look as though a consensus is taking shape that Zimbabwe has fallen into the wrong hands. It might be some way off, but it is building towards that with even war veterans beginning, like the Americans, to question the anachronistic actions and methods of the regime. All indications are pointing to that.

Memorably, Ali was as quick-witted as they come. He rarely paused to think to deliver a punchline, that part of a joke that makes everyone laugh. This week in Parliament, Agriculture minister Joseph Made was caught off-guard when he was asked why the Grain Marketing Board (GMB) was refusing to pay those farmers who had lost their receipts for grain delivered more than four years ago. Retorted the minister with a straight face: “Why did they lose their receipts in the first place?”

Well, the whole House erupted in derisive laughter, because it goes without saying that the GMB must keep its record of receipts even more meticulously. From their expressions, it’s like the MPs were saying to Made: “Surely you can’t be as dumb as you look?“ — sort of courtesy of Ali.

Because of Ali, America and the world at large will never be the same again.

Rest in peace, the one and only Muhammad Ali!

lConway Nkumbuzo Tutani is a Harare-based columnist. Email: [email protected]