Three nights in Kinshasa before the Rumble in the Jungle

Zaire 74 was built as the opening act for Muhammad Ali against George Foreman. The promoters flew a planeload of Black American and Latin stars to Kinshasa for a three-day festival at the Stade du 20 Mai: James Brown and his band, B.B. King, Bill Withers, the Spinners, Miriam Makeba, Manu Dibango and the Fania All Stars, with Celia Cruz singing in front of a crowd that knew her records better than she expected. On the same bills stood the giants of Congolese music, Franco and TPOK Jazz, Tabu Ley Rochereau and Abeti Masikini, whose rumba had been shaped by Cuban 78s decades earlier.

Days before the festival Foreman cut his eye in training and the fight slipped to 30 October. The concerts went ahead on 22, 23 and 24 September without the boxing crowd, in front of an audience that was overwhelmingly Congolese. Celia Cruz's Quimbara, driven by the Fania rhythm section, is the clip most often shown: son and guaguancó being sung back to the continent they came from.

The film footage was tied up in legal disputes and sat in vaults for more than twenty years. It surfaced first in When We Were Kings, the 1996 documentary about the fight, and then in full in Soul Power in 2008, which is why a festival that almost nobody outside Kinshasa saw at the time is now one of the best-documented concerts of the seventies.