Muhammad Ali

Where you sit when you are old shows where you stood when you were young.

Yoruba proverb.

Muhammad Ali is in the ring for the last time, but he is done fighting. What he will confront now is the record of a life he has left behind, the sum of all the fights he took up or were forced upon him. He had prepared well for this final engagement, mostly by coming to terms with the reality that the final fight has long been chalked off with prolonged illness and the certainty of death. The final judgment on Ali's life will be delivered by the God to Whom Ali had long yielded the title that he had, with some justification, given to himself: The Greatest.

The world has since tallied the points in Ali's life in this world. If our judgments as mortals count, they should see Ali winning the final test with his records, strength and character in his previous life. His life was one of those rare events in human history when particular individuals stand out by defying the limitations of mankind, but not every one of this rare breed will be judged as a benefactor of mankind. It will be a stain on his life to mention Muhammad Ali in the same breadth with those human phenomena at a time the world is mourning one whose existence represents a definite redeeming element of mankind. Humanity will be poorer with the loss of Muhammad Ali, and the world he leaves behind will look back at a time when courage, conviction and compassion pushed a few men to create new frontiers in human history that are not defined by blood, bullets and barricades.

Muhammad Ali was not a boxer. He was a fighter for causes far bigger and nobler than boxing. He was not a black American activist. He was an American who rejected an America that had accepted a stunted character when it could be bigger and better. He was not a civil rights champion. He stood for rights that were as important to white America as they were to black America, and indeed the whole of mankind. He was not a black hero. He was a global citizen who was present in every home;, a reference point in the obstinence and resistance of men, women  and groups who refuse to be bullied and oppressed; in the nightmares of oppressors that the weak can be strengthened to say no; and a metaphor for the enduring human values of reward for hard work and faith over doubt and fear. He was not super human. He was a man full of frailties and weaknesses who taught the world that mankind cannot keep running away because it feared its demons. He showed mankind how demons tremble at a weak mankind that stopped running.

Muhammad Ali died at a period when mankind had lost its bearing. Nations that claim superiority because of the strength and qualities of their values are now in the gutter with much of the rest of mankind. Values and systems they spawned are being trashed by the same nations that conquered others and went to war to defend them. The inherent dignity of the human race, freedom, social justice, equality and progress which people like Muhammad Ali, Nelson Mandela, Dr Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi and Kwame Nkrumah gave or lost their lives to, have lost meaning in the last years of Ali's life. Now strong and weak nations and people fight either to impose their will or to resist in many destructive struggles that no one has powers to stop or mediate. Religion, a major source of personal comfort and inspiration for Muhammad Ali has become a major source of global conflict. Some of Ali's fellow Muslims fight each other and everyone else. Powerful non-Muslim nations make fortunes selling them weapons, or use the fights to strengthen their hands in affairs of Muslims. The world bleeds as Ali's religion of Islam, once the fountain of all that was civilized about humanity is demonized by others, while it struggles to define its essence to itself and defend itself against a world unwilling to scrutinize its prejudices.

Ali's America gave a hint that it can make restitution for history and live in contemporary realities, when it elected a black President in Ali's life. That President recently visited Vietnam, the nation Ali refused to go and fight on grounds that its citizens were not his enemies, losing his championship and being banned from boxing for five years as a consequence. The same America must have worried Ali in the last few weeks of his life when it appears willing to break another new ground by having a woman run for its presidency, and then, in the opposite direction, with its flirtation with Donald Trump, a man who represents all the values and standards that America does not need to assert itself as a leading nation today. There are still flashes of the past in a nation which is notoriously difficult to drag through some its limitations. Young black males are still popular targets for police bullets. Riots which follow shootings of black youth will remind Ali's generation of days they thought will not have a place in today's America. Statistics about black people provide unending sources of dispute over whether their lot is improving with America, or getting worse.

The world changed in many ways in Ali's lifetime, and a few of its turns in a positive direction owed much to people like him who insisted that core principles that gave dignity to people were not negotiable. Africa presented him with a serious challenge. He witnessed a resurgence in the demand and benefits of freedom and progress from Africa, and periodic descent into the lowest levels of existence as leaders led their people to disasters that were completely avoidable. The last few years of Ali's life must have been a mixture of great sources of satisfaction and disappointment. Mandela's freedom and presidency will rank among the most joyful occasions in the life of a man who discovered the value of fighting to win in the ring for name, ego and livelihood, and outside it for justice. But much of Africa has been held back by the absence of visionary leaders and a world that had little room for the weak.

Muhammad Ali's fight is over. Those who see value in preserving and teaching the history of the resilience and triumph of the human spirit will find a very rich source of inspiration in the life and times of Ali. History will record a precocious young man who resisted centuries of debilitating legacy to rise and embody the best in humanity. It will be a tremendous service to that legacy if those who tell Ali's story also say that he was as human as the rest of us, so that many young people today can attempt to meet and even surpass his standards.