Muhammad Ali vs Ernie Terrell 4K Color Highlights: Memories from 50 years ago.

Read Time: 4 minutes

“Putting our French to the test in the rumble in the jungle”

Ekow Nelson

We were in Form Three when the world heavyweight boxing contest between Muhammad Ali and the then undefeated world champion George Foreman, took place in Kinshasa, Zaire. The epic clash between the two notable pugilists of the time, billed as the rumble in the jungle, was no mere boxing match though. It was also a fight about residual political issues that still divided America: The Vietnam War and Civil Rights.

Ali and Martin Luther King Jnr. opposed the War. The legendary African American baseball star Jackie Robinson was, however, critical of Ali’s stance suggesting he was “hurting the morale of a lot of young Negro soldiers over in Vietnam”. Robinson accused Ali of being unwilling to show his appreciation to the American public, from whom he had made millions of dollars.

How was an African, and indeed an African American, unrelated to either fighter to choose between them? Ali was the loudmouth champion who had slain the great white hope of Sony Liston; the conscientious objector of a failed and discredited war who had been unfairly stripped of his title because of that.

Despite the stature he gained over time, manifested in the emotional reception accorded him when he lit the torch with those trembling hands at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, Ali was not universally loved when he started out. His dalliance with the separatist Nation of Islam led by Elijah Mohammad added to his notoriety.

If you were anti-establishment, you were more than likely on Ali’s side. George Foreman’s supporters on the other hand, were difficult to characterise but he was clearly the choice of the mainstream establishment and a mélange of detractors who found Ali’s cockiness and defiance rather hard to swallow.

Foreman was odds-on favourite to win in Kinshasa. He came in with a ring record of having knocked out opponents from Joe Fraiser to Ken Norton, both of whom had beaten Ali. He had developed a reputation of a ferocious fighter with a sucker punch that could floor anyone, including Ali.

Regardless of whom you supported, many of us were keen to be part of the unfolding history on our ‘shores’. President Mobutu had put up the sponsorship money for the fight, and demanded in return, that it be staged in the Zairean capital of Kinshasa. Even if Kinshasa was miles away and as far removed from home as Paris, we still felt a visceral connection to it because it was part of our land.

Kinshasa was relatable for other reasons too. It was also where Ghana’s Kumasi Asante Kotoko FC, led by skipper Ibrahim Sunday, clinched their first African Football Cup title when they defeated TP Englebert 2-1, three years earlier, in another epic sporting contest. Centre forward Abukari Gariba and left winger Malik Jabir scored for Kotoko but the real hero of the night was Robert Mensah who frustrated the Zaireans from scoring more than their one goal with dazzling heroics, and emerged Africa’s No. 1 goalkeeper.

After much hype and buildup, the mother of all boxing matches soon got underway. The actual bout itself did not begin until very early at dawn to coincide with primetime viewing in the US. It was well after lights-out at school when we were all supposed to be in our beds. There was no school television then and to the best of my knowledge the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) did not carry a live television broadcast – it was way past the end of their daily (or more accurately evening) schedule. Many of us were nevertheless keen to be part of the events as they transpired.

The resourceful among us in St Peter’s and St. John’s houses found an old crackly transistor radio. Disappointingly, the GBC did not carry a live radio commentary either – or at least we could not find it on our radio set. There were frantic attempts to find any radio station on shortwave with live commentary.

We eventually stumbled on one but had a problem: the broadcast was in French. Given that we all studied French for the first three years at Augusco and a few among us took French to ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, you would think we would all be able to understand the broadcast – passably. We soon found out that the level of proficiency in spoken French that many of us had acquired under the tutelage of the afore-mentioned Monsieur Bart was unequal to the task at hand.

It fell to Senior Amorin to play translator. Holding the transistor radio close to his ear, he listened intently through the static noises from the shortwave frequencies to what the Zairean or French commentator was saying as the two pugilists traded punches, ducked, blocked, and counterpunched. After listening for a couple of minutes, Senior Amorin would translate what had transpired between rounds. While the good senior appeared to be doing a good job, some of us could not help but think he was not translating everything that was being said. This obviously heightened our impatience, but he was all we had.

It all got frantic in the eighth round. We could tell from the commentator’s cadence and the speed and pitch with which he rendered his observations, that we were approaching the denouement of the fight. Suddenly, there was a level of audible excitement signaling something ominous was in the air. We could hear what sounded like a countdown followed by a three-letter acronym that I had certainly not heard before: TKO! drowned out by chants of “Ali, bomaye”, “Ali bomaye”.

Ali had floored the 25-year-old Foreman. He had taken the sting out of his punches with the “rope-a-dope” technique he out doored in Kinshasa and left him discombobulated with a tirade of verbal taunts. Foreman was later to confess: “I hit Ali with everything, and he [asked], ‘is that all you got?’ I said ‘yeah, that’s pretty much it’”.

We were all Ali fans. Against the predictions of the pundits, he had won the contest earlier than expected. He had defied all odds to reclaim the world heavyweight championship for the third time, aged 32. And courtesy of Senior Amorin, many of us remember exactly where we were when Ali floored the giant bear on the African soil from which they were both descended.

I will remember it fondly as one of the defining moments of twentieth century sporting history, experienced in the hallways of St John’s House, Augusco

Excerpted from Look back in hindsight – The Golden Age of an all-round education at St. Augustine’s College, Cape Coast