the last book I ever read (The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage, excerpt thirteen)

from The Rumble in the Jungle: Muhammad Ali & George Foreman on the Global Stage by Lewis A. Erenberg:

Zaire was not the only African nation that reveled proudly in Ali’s victory. After all, throughout black Africa the Reuters news service noted that he was billed as “the people’s choice,” because he was a “symbol of independence and freedom from White domination for millions of Blacks in the United States and elsewhere in the world.” There was no doubt who four thousand fans favored at Nairobi’s Kenyata’s Conference Center: “The entire crowd rooted for Ali and roared excitedly with every blow.” When the knockout came in the eighth round, the audience jumped for joy. In Abidjan, the capital of Ivory Coast, groups of fans expressed their joy by driving around the main avenues of the city and honking their horns in celebration. After listening to the fight over radio, hundreds of fans in Accra, Ghana, “went mad with joy.” One fanatical Ali supporter ran bare chested through the city, waving his white shirt in victory, while many fans were “seen openly hugging and congratulating each other in appreciation of the resounding victory of their idol.”

President Senghor of Senegal, one of the major architects of Negritude as a Pan-African ideology, recognized Ali’s victory as a celebration of African independence. Immediately after the bout he sent a congratulatory message to Ali, “the greatest militant of Black civilization.” Senegal’s Daily Sun added that, ‘in Senegal, Ali’s victory is considered like that of Africa, as the triumph of the oppressed.” One proof of this veneration of Ali as a symbol of black African liberation occurred as Norman Mailer was flying home soon after the fight. His airplane landed at Yoff Airport in Dakar at one in the morning for what was intended as a brief stop, but it was prevented from taking off for several hours because thousands of local Senegalese had received word via a radio bulletin that the new champion might be on board. Surrounding the plane, they demanded that Ali come out to greet them. So insistent were they that they had to see – and believed they had a right to see – their newly crowned heavyweight champion that they refused to allow the airplane to take off until a delegation had come aboard to observe for themselves that Ali was not among them. Needless to say they found no Ali and were exceedingly disappointed. Finally, however, they let the plane take off.