The Fight (12 page)

Yes, Congo, now the Zaïre; money of the country, Zaïres; gasoline of the country, Petrol Zaïre; even the cigarettes, Fumez Zaïres. “One Zaïre — one great Zaïre,” country that fighters and press and thirty-five fight tourists (out of an expectation of five thousand) would visit after inoculations
for cholera, smallpox, typhoid, tetanus, hepatitis — take gamma globulin — not to speak of shots for yellow fever and pills for malaria and Kaopectate in the breach of Leopold’s galloping ghost, all titles like “Excellency” or “Most Honorable” abolished, Mobutu known only and modestly as The Guide, The Chief, The Helmsman, The Redeemer, The Father of the Revolution and The Perpetual Defender of Property and People, Mobutu born Joseph Désiré, who now in the deeps of authenticity is called Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga — “all-powerful warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest, leaving fire in his wake” — effective translation: “The cock who leaves no chicken intact. Wa Za Banga is up your hole” — yes, Mobutu with his personal 747 and DC-10, his radiotelephone that can call any official in the country and his political past — in 1961, Mobutu transferred Patrice Lumumba to a prison in Katanga where everybody knew they would kill him, and afterward built the monument to martyred Lumumba, highest monument in all of Kinshasa, yes, Le Guide, Le Chef, Le Timonier, Le Rédempteur, and Le Père de la Révolution “is greeted as a savior (everywhere he goes) by squads of gyrating dancers swinging and stamping, waving and winnowing, and all the time singing the President’s praises,” writes J. J. Grimond for the
New York Times
, and the rich details of his piece will not be quoted in a hurry by the Ministry of National Orientation.
“Foreman boma yé,”
cries Elmo Henderson passing by the patio of the open-air restaurant, and Norman smiles at his guest, a most intelligent American living in Kinshasa
for years, adept at several occupations, who has agreed to try to explain this incomparable country (which Ali will seek to mobilize, all collective n’golo and Nommo, all kuntu and muntu — in all the variations of the two hundred groups of languages plus Lingala), yes, will seek, our Muhammad Ali, to bend all forces of the living and dead into the arena of his great
hantu
, that fearful place and time which will come together on four o’clock Wednesday morning in 62,800-seat Stadium of the 20th of May with ten points to the winner of a round and nine or less to the loser, fifteen rounds, with 2000 premier ringside seats at $250 each, not sold, not nearly, but wait for closed circuit to 425 locations in the U.S. and Canada, together with home television live or delayed to 100 countries — our promoters: the Government of Zaïre, Video Techniques, Helmdale Leisure Corporation and Don King Productions, no fewer. Yes, Norman will listen to his guest and smile apologetically (or is it half proudly at Elmo’s incantation of God knows what fraction of these African facts and forces — Elmo spelled backwards is Omle:
Oyé Omlé
) and the insanity of mood which is also properly part of every Heavyweight Championship stirs in the hot midday air before the reasonable words of his intelligent guest.

“You see, it’s hardly a question of liking Mobutu. No American is going to feel enthusiastic about a man whose head appears out of a cloud every night on national television while the Zaïre anthem is played, but he’s not the man to be embarrassed by himself — if you look closely on TV you’ll see his tribal staff is in his hand, a man and woman intertwined. It’s highly conscious. Africans place
emphasis on humans, cosmically speaking — a tribal staff with a man and woman intertwined is an expression of cosmic completeness like Yin and Yang. Mobutu is there to embody men and women in one Zaïre, one consciousness, one source of power — he’s already allocated sixty-four million Zaïres, well over one hundred million dollars, for a TV complex that is going to link up every village and hidden tribe he can reach. You know whose face will be on that TV. Why, until recently, Mobutu was the only official name you’d ever see in the papers. When a photo was taken of the President with a few bureaucrats, only his face would be identified. Two weeks ago, the first ambassador to come to Zaïre from Cuba arrived. The papers didn’t even mention his name. That, of course, was a relapse to the old methods, but there is no question: Mobutism is Mobutu with all that means, and one thing it certainly means is that unpleasant news won’t get out. They had a bad crash with an Air Zaïre plane a few months ago. No word of it in the papers for several days. Then Mobutu indicated that while the accident need not be described, it would be permissible to list the funerals, an indirect species of press freedom if you will.

“Take the name of the country. Why they picked it, we’ll never know. Doubtless, our Helmsman liked the sound. He would tend to trust his ear. Besides, Z is the last letter of the alphabet. The last shall be first. So it is announced that is what the country will be called. Then they discover that Zaïre is not an African word. It happens to be Old Portuguese. Be certain, he’s not about to admit the error and open himself to ridicule. On the contrary that’s probably
the moment he decides not only the country but the money and the gasoline and the cigarettes and, for all I know, the contraceptives are going to be called Zaïre. The first rule of dictatorship is reinforce your mistakes.

“It is the same with his prerogatives. He does not need houses in half the capitals of Europe, nor a 747 when his family wants to fly from Brussels to London; to us his incredible display of wealth seems wrong, but for Africans it’s another matter. He’s the chieftain of the country and a king should wear his robes. It’s part of vital force to be resplendent. They would respect him less if his expenses were not larger than life. He’s the leader of the nation and so a modern equivalent of president, dictator, monarch, emperor, the chosen of God and
le roi soleil
all in one. Give him the benefit, however, of assuming the chosen of God needs such clout. His problems are beyond measure. Here in Kinshasa itself, the town had three hundred thousand people in 1959, a year before the Belgians left, now the secret figure is a million and a half. The unemployment in this city is forty-eight percent and still people flock in. The reason? Unemployment in rural areas is up to eighty percent. There’s a dreadful drought and a fearful shortage of agricultural equipment. Count on it, no Zairois bureaucrat is going to call this country undeveloped. Rather, it’s ‘underequipped.’

“Add to this unemployment the psychological unrest of thousands of languages, and ten of thousands of tribes among twenty-two million people. All the old traditional ties are breaking up. Everybody is now off the land and off the family. Mobutu becomes the only substitute for the
old tradition, the remaining embodiment of the great chief. That is why he won’t appear in the stadium on the night of the fight but will see it on closed circuit in his home. Not only because he does not wish to show the world how massive police protection would have to be, but because physically he’s not going to be seen under the probe of a TV camera next to Ali and Foreman. God does not stand next to his sons when they are taller.

“But that is the smallest example of his particular sense of how to present himself to his people — if you add up the details, it’s not short of genius. On the one hand he is everywhere, the boldest presentation of ego one can conceive; on the other, he is endlessly cautious. He produces the fight and the stadium as gifts to his people, but will not appear himself. So you will see him on television every night, you will never get a private interview. His pride is to control his details.

“For example, you will hear everywhere you ask that the army is the base of his power, and it is. One reason is that the price of beer is kept low for soldiers, a detail, but he is meticulous about details. He knows where every officer in his army is posted — he is careful that no important officer is ever in command of troops from his own tribe. Soldiers cannot even speak each other’s languages. They must address each other in Lingala. So he insures two things. His power base is not going to be eroded by tribal rebellions, and his soldiers will tend to lose their own dialect and pick up the national tongue. Something similar is done with high government officials. He will take an important man who grew up in Kinshasa and post him as
governor of Lubumbashi — this discourages thoughts of a coup. Of course, Mobutu pays a price. The efficiency of the country is not to be described. It has progressed from the intolerable to the dreadful. On the other hand, he inherited such trouble from the Belgians. The bureaucracy was always a fudge factory guaranteed to slow up every top technician the country imports. Now, with the white man out, nobody is going to leap to obey orders. Moreover, think of the kind of white man who came here from Belgium in the first place, not able to cut it in the mainland and taking it out on the Blacks down here, no, paralysis has always been the rule in the middle of the bureaucracy. Indeed, each little office tends to be a tribe. If I have my small job and need an assistant, I hire my kinsman. To avoid treachery. I do not want the new man to steal my job, and if he is in my family he is less likely to think that way. On the other hand, my kinsman is stupid so I do not delegate authority to him or he will get me in trouble. Everything has to wait until I do it. A fudge factory. Nothing moves in the middle levels of the bureaucracy. All the while there’s talent at the top, real talent, real intelligence. They are the best educated Blacks, back from Europe with good salaries, good homes, European wives — a mark of pride among top bureaucrats is to have white wives — and they are loyal to Mobutu. It’s a good country for them. They can even get things done so long as they are working among themselves. The moment, however, a project has to descend to the middle regions of the administration, we’re back in the fudge. Stasis and chaos.
‘Pas de problème,’
they will dependably say when you ask if
something can be arranged. It is their way of guaranteeing that your request is next to hopeless. Since the solution does not exist, neither does the problem.
‘Pas de problème.’

“Yet Mobutu has the country functioning. With waste one does not even wish to conceive and with an official rip-off of natural resources nobody can begin to estimate, the country is nonetheless emerging. Black power is talked about everywhere — it is in some fashion actually being practiced here. Somewhere in the middle of all this, there may even be an idea — the marriage of modern technology with elements of African tradition. This is not because Mobutu is necessarily a wise and profound man — who could begin to know the answer to that when he is not to be approached? — but there may be some instinct in the Congo that technology will never work if it cannot be connected to the African root.

“Still, what a horror,” said the brilliant American, echoing Conrad’s terminal word. “You are going tonight to see the weigh-in. Take a good look at the stadium. It is Mobutu’s gift to the people, built out of their work and their taxes. An amazing structure. The best laborers in Zaïre have been assigned to the stadium. Mobutu has a few skilled cadres of workmen, and he moves them around from one hot spot in the construction of the economy to the next. So we know where they were working these last few months. What a stadium! Do not ignore the design. It is not just a place for receiving people but for processing them, and, if necessary, disposing of them. Late last spring, the crime wave grew so intense that thieves were posing as policemen. The wives of Americans were getting raped. A nightmare for Mobutu
if foreigners should arrive for the fight and get mugged en masse. So his police round up in a hurry three hundred of the worst criminals they can find and lock them in some of the holding rooms under the stadium. Then fifty of the three hundred were killed. Right there on the stone floor under the stadium. For all we know, some of them could have been shot in the dressing rooms of the fighters. The key to the execution was that it took place at random. No one bothered to list them. No one said, “Kill this particular fifty.” No, they just eliminated the nearest fifty. The random destruction was more desirable. Fear among the criminal population would then go deeper. Good connections with the police are worthless in such an unstructured situation. For much the same reason the other two hundred and fifty criminals were let go. So they would tell their friends of the massacre. The crime rate for this brief period is down. Mobutism. Mayor, tycoon and tyrant at once. He’ll spend millions to develop off-shore oil resources where Zaïre has only twenty-three miles on the Atlantic coast, yet he’ll succeed — to everyone’s surprise, he’ll succeed, he’ll develop enough oil for his domestic requirements. Then he’ll pick up the phone and inquire about an increase in taxi fares in some town eight hundred miles east of Kinshasa and tell them they can’t have the raise. Bold, trivial and imperial — an African mind. Africa is shaped like a pistol, say the people here, and Zaïre is the trigger. Enjoy the stadium.”

There were weigh-ins that gave a clue to the outcome, but they usually took place the morning of the bout, and thereby could reveal how the fighters had slept. Tonight,
however, was Saturday — the contest more than seventy-two hours off. The weigh-in would be no more than publicity, a swatch of electronic space for “Wide World of Sports” on late Saturday afternoon back in the States; it had to be intrinsically boring despite the thousands of Zairois invited free to the stadium.