When kings were (anti-?)colonials: black athletes in film

Abstract

This essay offers a broad introduction to the representation of black athletic bodies in film. It explores how black athletes, from Jack Johnson to Jackie Robinson, from Muhammad Ali to Tiger Woods and Cathy Freeman, are depicted – and speak for themselves – in their encounters with the media. The focus of this essay, however, is on the 1996 docu-drama When We Were Kings. It offers a critique of Muhammad Ali's standing as a figure of the global black struggle by juxtaposing Ali's outspokenness in the USA with his too often unremarked-upon reticence in the post-colonial world. This essay explains how Gast's When We Were Kings plays Ali off against his opponent in the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’, George Foreman, while simultaneously denying both boxers the right to speak for themselves in a documentary first screened some two decades after the original event.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Jane Juffer for her critiques of this essay.

Notes

¹ Horatio Alger, Jr. (1832–99) was a prolific American author of popular fiction. Many of his works have been described as ‘rags to riches’ stories, illustrating how down-and-out boys might be able to achieve the ‘American Dream’ of wealth and success through hard work, courage, determination and concern for others. A ‘Horatio Alger story/narrative’ has come to signify someone who begins with few resources and ends with vast riches, although many of Alger's characters did not usually become wealthy.

² See Baker, Contesting Identities, for a critique of this cinematic predilection.

³ The broadcasting of the film of Jeffries's defeat was banned in several US states.

⁴ ‘Papa Jack’ was Johnson's nickname although the origins of this sobriquet remains unknown.

⁵ Yeats, ‘Reconciliation’, 102.

⁶ ‘Uncle Tom’, a term taken from the famous nineteenth-century, Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, refers to African-Americans who are deemed too pliant to white authority. Ali used the term to situate himself, sometimes more expediently than others, as the radical black man in opposition to his more quiescent black opponents.

⁷ Goldberg, ‘Politics & Pugilists’.

⁸ Vietnam, we might say, is the recurring nightmare of the American political. In the current moment, with the misnamed ‘War on Terror’ in Iraq going badly, Vietnam is frequently invoked as both a means to suggest that George W. Bush's is a war that cannot be won, and, by Bush himself, as a caution against ‘untimely withdrawal’.

⁹ Foreman and Engel, By George, 110.

¹⁰ Mobutu, as he was commonly known, began his political career as military officer Joseph Désiré Mobutu, befriending the Congo's first president, Patrice Lumumba, whom he later betrayed to the Belgians before assuming the presidency himself – a rule that was marked by autocratic violence and a pillaging of the nation's coffers.

¹¹ ‘Suharto’ is the president's full name, in keeping with custom in Indonesia. He is sometimes, incorrectly, referred to as ‘Mohammed’ Suharto.

¹² Kelly, America's Tyrant.

¹³ Mailer, The Fight.

¹⁴ Goldberg, ‘Politics & Pugilists’.

¹⁵ In a telling reflection on Ali's conversion, Foreman offers an insight that is distinctly out of keeping with his political character: ‘I'll believe until the day I die that it was a good social awakening that acquainted him [Ali] with the Muslim religion… Young people in particular were tired of walking around with a feeling of inferiority, and some of them were awakened by the call of the Muslims’ (Hauser, Muhammad Ali, 505).

¹⁶ Foreman and Engel, By George, 130.

¹⁷ Foreman and Engel, By George, 130

¹⁸ Oates, On Boxing, 60.

¹⁹ The ‘Nation of Islam’ is a religious organization, grounded in a particular articulation of Islam as a faith that addresses the condition of African-Americans, which was founded by Elijah Muhammad and which Ali joined in 1964; a leader in Elijah Muhammad's movement, Malcolm X was, together with Ali, the Nation's most famous convert.

²⁰ Cited in Farred, ‘Feasting on Foreman’, 52–77.

²¹ Goldberg, ‘Politics & Pugilists’.

²² Spike Lee is arguably the most well-known African-American film-maker working in contemporary American cinema. His movies include She's Gotta Have It, Do The Right Thing and Malcolm X. He also gained fame for his Nike ads with Michael Jordan in the 1990s.

²³ Mailer, The Fight.

²⁴ See my discussion of the Cultural Studies scholar Stuart Hall in Farred, What's My Name?