The Boxing Match.
(aired on All Things Considered October 20, 2003)

 

The night I went to see Mzonke Fana fight, it was Madiba's birthday. Madiba is Nelson Mandela's clan name, a name for him that South Africans use with a combination of respect and fondness. Mzonke Fana is a boxer fondly known as the Rose of Khayelitsha.

Khayelitsha, where Mzonke Fana grew up, is a township outside of Cape Town. Its residents are almost all black and mostly speak Xhosa. Hundreds of thousands of people live in Khayelitsha, many in shacks of tin and cardboard and some scrap wood, and some in new cinderblock houses that the government is building.

It also happens that a lot of great AIDS activists live in Khayelitsha. And so my AIDS activist friends and I were therefore pro-Khayelitsha. With the enthusiasm of people new to a country, some of us decided that we were therefore fans of Mzonke Fana. Five of us went to Khayelitsha's Oliver Tambo Hall to watch Mzonke Fana fight a boxer from Ukraine.

There were some white people in the hall, including the blonde ring girls; the man who frisked me for weapons when I came in; the announcer who introduced the boxers; and most of the camera operators for the TV broadcast.

But at least in our area of the hall, the audience looked to be 100% people of African ancestry except for us. Everyone around us was speaking Xhosa, except a couple of guys who were schooling us about boxing, and a boy of about 8 who pointed to his buddy and told us proudly, "He's going to be a fighter!" The future fighter started blowing on my friend's straight fine hair and watching it fly around.

In my group of friends, two of us were Canadians, two of us were Americans, and just one of us was South African. But if you couldn't hear our accents, you could see that one of us had ancestors from India, one of us had ancestors from Southeast Asia, and three of us had ancestors from Europe. And each of us could be as South African as anyone else.

Before the main event, the announcer told us that when we went live on TV he would cue us to all stand up and sing Happy Birthday to Nelson Mandela. I was happy, because I had so long hoped for him to be free, and then so long hoped to come to his country, and here I finally was, and it was Nelson Mandela's birthday.

And suddenly I realized something exciting and perhaps also a little sad. "We're going to be on TV," I said to Justin. "How do you know?" Justin asked me. I said, "We're the picture of the new democratic multiracial South Africa." Showing any other part of the audience, the camera would have seen only the faces of Khayelitsha. As an American, I knew that whenever TV producers in a racially divided society want to produce a patriotic image, they need to find the picture of diversity, the picture of unity, even if there is only one such picture to be found.

A lot of guys around us also quickly figured out the inevitable politics of the image. So when we went live on TV, we had new friends crowding around us. They put their arms around our shoulders and we put our arms around theirs. When we finished singing, the guy next to me headed back to his seat, and said with a smile, "Thanks buddy." By standing with me, he got to sing Happy Birthday to Madiba on national television.

Afterwards, the Rose of Khayelitsha beat his opponent in a close bout.

 

copyright 2003 joe wright