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Ali’s race issue lives on

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By Farayi Mungoshi

MUHAMMAD Ali’s journey on earth is one worth studying as it shows the journey of an innocent black child growing up and being taught that everything black is evil, to that of a young man who later discovered the machinations of the whiteman.
And when the revelation came to him through Islam, he understood that in order for him to be truly free, he had to denounce everything negative the whiteman had told him, showed or fed him.
He started by denouncing his birth name, Cassius Clay, a slave name associated with his past and a reminder that as a slave, he and his parents were nothing but the slave master’s property.
It is not difficult to observe that something is just not right with the order of the world today.
One of the most common examples is that of the supposed ‘dark continent’ (Africa) which has more wealth in its soil than any other continent on the face of the earth and yet it is the poorest.
That just does not make sense; yet this is the life we are living and some of us take it for granted, going through life without asking questions why and how this is so.
Instead we prefer to sideline the race issue as a ‘tired topic’, yet whites have not forgotten how it was hundreds of years ago when they swore they would never allow Africa to rise again like in the days when Egypt was the world’s number one superpower.
And they sat down to devise ways and plans to turn this truth around into a myth.
Today, Egypt’s history is so mixed up people even engage in long arguments about the true Egyptians of the pyramids; whether they were Arabs or blacks, something alike a topic we are all too familiar with, that of the Great Zimbabwe – how they tried to sell to the world the idea that Arabs built the Great Zimbabwe.
The only problem is that, like most great stories of inventions done by fellow black people, we (blacks) choose not to believe we are capable of doing such great things.
No wonder Ali had to constantly remind himself and the world that he is the greatest.
In the end, his own fans and haters alike ended up calling him the greatest and indeed he became what he spoke, because he believed it.
It doesn’t matter anymore if at first he didn’t believe it, because by the time of his death, he surely did believe it and so did the rest of the world.
While it is sad that the world has lost one of the most inspiring boxer ever, if not the greatest, I cannot help but smile and laugh at the same time when I recall his television interviews and several televised platforms from which he spoke.
Very few men have been able to make jokes out of such weighty, controversial issues as race and still manage to get away with it; whether they are talking on television or on other media.
These are the kind of serious matters (total liberation of the blackman) the likes of Martin Luther King Jr and Malcom X died for.
I have come to the understanding now that, for Ali, boxing was only a means to get himself to a higher platform from which he could air his views.
It was a platform from which he could speak out against racism in the US and the world over and people would listen because the world boxing champion would have spoken.
It is therefore important for us to draw lessons from this man’s life and learn how to use our God-given talents.
King Solomon once said: “A Man’s gift makes room for him and brings him in the presence of great kings.”
Boxing was Ali’s gift.
Through his gift Ali declared: ‘I am the greatest’ despite the fact that even after winning his Olympic gold medal while representing the US, he was still having problems accessing restaurants in racially segregated areas in his own neighborhood.
Yet his influence spans all races and not just blacks.

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