James Brown spun around in a testifying frenzy of cold sweat, executing splits and turns with gymnastic precision as his rhythm section dug an impossibly hard, percussive groove and his horn section, fanning out across the stage like a swing orchestra, punctuated the music with staccato blasts. Soul Brother No. 1 was in excellent form that night in 1974 when he headlined a bill in the country then called Zaire (and since restored to its previous name, Congo). Brown was on a special mission. The concert he played was conceived as the point where Africa and its Diaspora would harmonize in a festival of shared roots and rhythm.
The festival is documented in Soul Power, a film assembled by director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte from outtakes of his earlier documentary, the Oscar-winning When We Were Kings. Kings was a record of the celebrated world championship bout in Zaire between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman. The music festival was intended as a complementary cultural event, the yin of peace and music to the brutal yang of the boxing ring. The programming was superb. African artists such as Miriam Makeba were juxtaposed with a variety of African-American stars, along with the torrid Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Celia Cruz.
Brown's solid funk assault encouraged the dead to dance that night, but even his mellower countrymen on the bill, the Spinners and B.B. King, shared a rhythmic and tonal sensibility with him and the gravity-free polyrhythms of their African co-stars. Not surprisingly, the many backstage conversations as the three-day festival was assembled at an outdoor stadium in Zaire's capital, Kinshasa, are generally less interesting than the music. Some of the most telling comments on the event came from Muhammad Ali himself as he rapped on the Africa he discovered. "New York is more of a jungle than here," he said. "It's so peaceful over here. The savages are in America."
It seemed peaceful, a poor but not desperate people under the watchful eye of their flamboyant dictator, Mobutu, a strongman with style in his tailored jazzman suit and leopard-skin cap. Dissent was firmly held down under his polished heel. AIDS, Ebola and genocidal civil wars were in the future. And yet by the time he was deposed in 1997, Mobutu had earned the reputation as an especially venal leader for stealing the rich resources of his country, even as he spoke proudly and loudly of "black power." The aspirations of the festival headlined by James Brown, and the hopes of Ali, were embodied in the music of Africa and its children, not in the brutal politics of African despots
