Paper short abstract:

Drawing on research centered on the production of an archive dedicated to Pan-African festivals and based on a rich corpus of press archives, the paper considers uses to which a festival held in Kinshasa in 1974 was put to consolidate the power of Zaïre’s then ruler, Mobutu Sese Seko.

Paper long abstract:

Nine years after he took power in a military coup, Mobutu Sese Seko organized a massive festival called Zaïre 74. Today, Zaïre 74 is best remembered for a single event that took place during the festival and was watched on television sets planet wide: the now-mythical "Rumble in the Jungle" that pitted boxers Muhammad Ali and George Foreman against one another for the title of heavyweight champion of the world. Zaïre 74, however, was much more than the Ali-Foreman match. It was a brilliant, nefarious instrumentalization of a concept developed on the African continent and in its diaspora over the course of two decades, from the late 1950s to the late 1970s: the Pan-African festival of culture and arts. Drawing on research centered on the production of an archive dedicated to Pan-African festivals of the 1960s and 70s and examining a rich corpus of press archives from Zaïre, Senegal, Nigeria and Algeria, this paper considers the wide-ranging uses to which Zaïre 74 was put by the Mobutu machine in the construction of its hegemonic project. A core focus of the paper is the relation that Zaïre 74 bears to three other festivals of the period: the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar 1966), the First Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers 1969), and the Second World Black and African festival of Arts and Culture, or FESTAC (Lagos 1977).