The Fight Read Free Page B

entrance road. Each return to camp has to remind Ali of these boulders. Once these names were fighters to stir panic in the middle of sleep and a chill on awakening. Now they are only names, and the cabins please the eye, Ali’s most of all. Its timbers are dark with the hue of the old railroad bridge from which they were removed; the interior, for fair surprise, is kin to a modest slave cabin. The furniture is simple but antique. The water comes from a hand pump. An old lady with the manners of a dry and decent life might seem the natural inhabitant of Ali’s cabin. Even the four-poster bed with the patchwork quilt seems more to her size than his own. Outside the cabin, however, the philosophical residue of this old lady is obliterated by a hard-top parking area. It islarger than a basketball court, and all the buildings, large and small, abut it. How much of Ali is here. The subtle taste of the Prince of Heaven come to lead his people collides with the raucous blats of Muhammad’s media sky where the only firmament is asphalt and the stars give off glints in the static.

2. THE BUMMER
    W ITNESS ANOTHER Black man’s taste: It is the Presidential Domain of President Mobutu at Nsele on the banks of the Congo, a compound of white stucco buildings with roads that extend over a thousand acres. A zoo can be found in some recess of its grounds and an Olympic swimming pool. There is a large pagoda at the entrance, begun as a gift from the Nationalist Chinese, but completed as a gift by the Communist Chinese! We are in a curious domain: Nsele! It extends from the highway to the Congo over fields in cultivation, two miles to the Congo, now called the Zaïre, the enormous river here a disappointment for its waters are muddy and congested with floating clumps of hyacinth ripped loose from the banks and thick as carcasses in the water, unromantic as turds. A three-decker riverboat, hybrid between yacht and paddle steamer, is anchored at the dock. The boat is called
President Mobutu
. Next to it, similar in appearance, is a hospital ship. It is called
Mama Mobutu
. No surprise. The posters that advertise the fight say
“Un cadeau de President Mobutu au peuple Zairois”
​(a gift of President Mobutu to the Zairois people)​
“et un honneur pour l’homme noir”
(plus an honor for the Black man). Like a snake around a stick, the name of Mobutu is intertwined in Zaïre with the revolutionary ideal. “A fight between two Blacks in a Black nation, organized by Blacks and seen by the whole world; that is a victory for Mobutism.” So says one of the government’s green and yellow signs on the highway from Nsele to the capital, Kinshasa. A variety of such signs printed in English and French give the motorist a whiz-by-the-eye course in Mobutism. “We want to be free. We don’t want our road toward progress to be impeded; even if we have to forge our way through rock, we will forge it through the rock.” It is better than Burma Shave and certainly a noble sentiment for the vegetation of the Congo, but the interviewer is thinking that after much travel he has come to an unattractive place. Of course, the interviewer is also looking green. He has caught some viral disruption in Cairo before coming to Zaïre and has only been in this country for three miserable days. He will even leave for New York just this afternoon. The fight has been postponed. Foreman has been cut in training. Since it is over the eye, the postponement, while indefinite, can hardly be less than a month. What a bummer! The day he landed in Zaïre was the day he heard the news. His hotel reservations had, of course, been unhonored. There is nothing like failing to find a bed when you land at dawn in an African capital. Much of the morning was lost before he was finally assigned a room at the Memling, famous for its revolutionary history. A decade ago, correspondents lived on its upper stories at a time when protagonists were being executed in the lobby. Blood ran