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Books by
Adeyinka Makinde
Dick Tiger: The Life and
Times of a Boxing Immortal
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Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring
Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s
Review by
Adeyinka Makinde
The written word is a most powerful
tool. It has the capacity to mould, shape, build and
destroy the reputations of both the living and the dead.
But if there is any grain of truth to the cynical adage
that historians are granted a power denied even to the
gods; that is, to alter what has happened, then it is
perhaps also true to aver the inverse proposition that
historians are invested with the power to re-mould the
distortions and alterations of the past. Such was the
task faced by Peter Benson, an American academic, in his
work on the first African to win a world title, Battling
Siki.
Born Amadou M’Barick Fall of the
Wolof people in the French West African colony of
Senegal, Siki made history when he mauled the world
light heavyweight champion George Carpentier to defeat
in 1922. He would continue to make headlines in the
three years that remained of his life, many of which
were not for the right reasons and many of which were
manipulations of the facts. The story of Siki,
transmitted through the pens of contemporary journalists
and echoed through the decades by essayists, may in fact
be one of the most troubling misrepresentations in the
history of the sport.
The commonly held perception of Siki
has persistently alluded to his been a ‘child of the
jungle;’ a feeble minded and uncivilized interloper
unable to properly comprehend and adjust to his
existence in a ‘civilized’ environment. This is the man,
after all who defended his title against an Irishman on
St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland and promptly lost. The man
who only beat Carpentier in a freak explosion of
primitive inspired fury. A man, who was overly fond of a
drink and by virtue of his uncouthness, facilitated his
own death in a Hell’s Kitchen gutter in 1925.
But Benson’s research challenges
this. Far from being the uncultured ‘child of the
jungle,’ Siki was a man who spoke several languages
including French, Dutch and English. And contrary to the
postulated naïve buffoon who unwisely put his crown on
the line in Ireland, Benson depicts Siki as a fighter in
need of a healthy fight purse which was denied to him
after he upset Carpentier. Indeed Siki’s excursion to
the troubled and battle scarred environs of the newly
independent Irish Free State was done under the
desperate plight he found himself in because of the
racially motivated backlash which saw him banned from
fighting on the European continent and on British soil.
Benson’s work also confirms beyond doubt that Siki’s
apparently sudden destruction of the ‘Orchid Man’ was
based not so much on a fluke, but was down to Siki’s
decision to abandon a script which had been designed to
assure Carpentier of victory.
When he came to fight in America
after losing to Mike McTigue, the perception that he was
overanked gained credence with his points losses to Kid
Norfolk and a rising Paul Barlenbach. Yet, the evidence
appears to be that Siki’s career derailed not so much
due to the paucity of his pugilistic skills as it was to
the ineptitude of his American manager.
Of course, Siki played a part in his
own downfall. He liked to party and he often neglected
to train, but he persevered on more than natural talent
having learned his trade as a pre-World War One fighter
in the sporting halls of Marseilles and Toulouse,
beginning when he was barely into his teens. He was a
highly skilled operator with a penchant for what
contemporarily would be termed as showmanship on par
with the antics of Muhammad Ali, but which was
misconstrued in his day as a manifestation of his
primitiveness.
His courage was undoubted; winning
the Croix de Guerre and Medal Militaire when fighting in
the battle trenches of France, Turkey and Romania.
But while Siki was able to survive
fighting in a war in which tens of thousands of his
fellow Senegalese laid down their lives on behalf of the
French empire, he was unable to avoid a brutal death,
persuasively argued by Benson to have been the likely
work of the Hell’s Kitchen Mob who may have had him
murdered in retaliation for his not going along with a
fix in one or several bouts.
There is much to marvel about in
relation to Benson’s book, not least of which are the
depth and breath of his research and his eloquent and
engaging style of writing. It is less of a rebuke and
more of a reminder to note the author’s error in
referring to the ‘Rumble in the Jungle,’ Muhammad Ali’s
1974 heavyweight title fight with George Foreman as
having been the first of its kind on the Africa
continent; that honorific, of course, belongs to the
world title bout staged eleven years earlier between
Nigeria’s Dick Tiger and the American Gene Fullmer in
the city of Ibadan.
That, however, is but a minor blip in
this authoritative and incisive book. Peter Benson’s
achievement is to empirically question and re-assess the
interpretations of the past and in so doing has cast a
light into the dense and dark labyrinth of obfuscations
and distortions, whether deliberate or unconscious,
about the life and significance of the man Louis
M’barick Fall; the boxing pioneer, Battling Siki.
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Peter Benson.
Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring
Fixes, Race, and Murder in the 1920s (Arkansas
University Press)
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posted 24 July 2006 * *
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* * * posted 2 November 2007 |
