When elephants and rhinos fight, your ass might be grass.
The proper African proverb is a bit more dignified, of course: “When two elephants fight,” it says, “the grass is trampled.” The saying is meant to draw attention to the suffering of the masses when politicians, militaries, and other big men clash. I have uniquely adapted it for the Blogtagon, however, and more specifically in honor of the world’s newest MMA league, the African Fighting Championship.
The AFC came to my attention as a result of this blog - validating what ace anthroscience blogger Kate Clancy once told me: a good blog can become self-sustaining. As people read and comment, new topics present themselves. Although lack of time rather than topic is my persistent problem, I could scarcely contain myself when my friendly fellow anthropologist David O’Kane emailed me from Freetown, Sierra Leone. He thought I might be interested in a newsflash about some upcoming fights. It was reported in the local paper that “Guinean heavyweight boxing champion, Morlai Camara whose height is 12-feet, bodyweight 91kg, age 26 and a soldier by designation” would be competing in the December 9, 2011 bouts of this brand new West African league.
I could find no further information on Morlai Camara, though you’d think a 12-foot, 200 pound dude might draw some attention. I did locate some further details on the AFC, however, starting with a brief reference on an MMA website and film clip from an in-progress documentary entitled “Rougher than Diamonds,” credited to Los Angeles-based filmmaker Dean Mongan. Digging further, and sorting past the obviously well-funded and UFC-modeled South African league called EFC (“E” for Extreme, not for “Efrica,” though I can hear the Afrikaans lilt now), I finally hit on some YouTube videos and the fledging AFC website. In addition to the logo of an elephant and rhino facing off, I was particularly intrigued by the text on the AFC homepage:
“Wars, famines, poverty, oppression and rampant disease and death create a harsh reality many Africans live through on a daily basis. You must fight daily just to survive. It is under these conditions where nature molds some of the world’s fiercest warriors. These warriors are not trained in expensive gyms by world class trainers with top of the line equipment. These fighters have proven themselves in real life and death situations and they are fighting for their very survival.”
While I am anthropologically obligated to question whether “nature” is inevitably molding anyone in some essentialist way, and I’m deeply critical of the ubiquitous “warrior” designation as applied to martial artists, I can certainly see how the co-founders of the AFC and their four member fighters resonate with this perspective. The footage of the fighters training in simply outfitted gyms and fighting in the grass, apparently refereed by soldiers, raises numerous questions worth pursuing in and out of the Blogtagon. (Now officially Facebooked and in communication with AFC co-founders Dean Mongan and Jim McKeon means I am off to a good start. I’ve also asked another friendly fellow anthropologist, Danny Hoffman, for input. He’s written some amazing stuff on Sierra Leone and Liberia).
Sierra Leone, as most everyone knows, has been the site of intense political violence and civil war, drawing especially heavily on young males and shaping aggression in enormously destructive ways. Who are the young men fighting in the AFC? One of them, Alfred Bangora, self-identifies as a “war orphan.” I suspect others are former combatants, a hunch I plan to follow up. There can be no doubt that losing both of your parents in a civil war, or perhaps killing someone else’s parents, would leave you with some anger issues.
So in what ways might the experience of armed conflict, militarism, and violence interface with mixed martial arts? Existing findings, such as those by Loïc Wacquant referenced in an earlier post, indicate that many young men who pursue pugilism as a vocation come from backgrounds shaped by structural and physical violence; however, far from aggravating anomic, destructive tendencies, boxing and martial arts seem to channel aggression into structured forms that take their acceptable expression only in the gym and the ring (or the grass circle, in the case of the AFC). This point was recently emphasized by well-known Albuquerque-based trainer Greg Jackson, who remarked (on a television clip I saw but can’t relocate) that many young men who come to his gym are full of rage due to difficult life experiences and find a critical outlet for these emotions through training. Thus redirected, the aggression becomes a source of self-esteem and constructive purpose. Bruce Lee himself was first a Hong Kong street fighter before he became, well, Bruce Lee. And as Wacquant found, professional fighters actively avoid conflict in any other setting than the ring: their reputation and self-respect comes to depend on exercising “violence” in one context only.
But there’s no doubt that MMA fighters perceive their art as akin to warfare. This has been illustrated in the handful of qualitative studies done with MMA fighters (e.g. Milton 2004 a,b). It was later backed up by a study conducted by Peter Jensen, an active duty serviceman, sports psychologist, and MMA practitioner who occasionally sat in on my Anthropology of Warfare, Violence, and Peace class. Jensen (2012) found that while the warfare metaphor is frequently invoked by fighters, another key element is how fighters view their opponents as respected peers. “Participants valued their opponent as a fellow athlete within a unique competitive experience,” he writes. “They viewed the physical sacrifices and dangers of the sport as an inevitable aspect and did not specifically assign any malice to the actions of an opponent or fault their opponent for injuries they incurred through competition.” This is a key departure from a common, well-known dynamic in actual warfare, wherein one’s opponents are not particular individuals but rather any interchangeable number of people who fit the common category of “enemy.” Far from “peers” in any sense, opponents in war – even when they are members of one’s own social group – are reduced to a depersonalized and typically dehumanized and despised “other.”
In the mainstream MMA context, while fighters may talk about taking on “anyone” or invoke metaphors of war, perhaps even denigrate their opponent with some trash talking, anyone who has watched the countdowns or paid any attention to what takes place before and after a bout knows that the fighters are hardly dealing with one another as undifferentiated categorical representations. They become intimately – if antagonistically – involved in one another’s personal psyches, physical characteristics, and fighting styles. They train in ways specifically designed to overcome an opponent’s strengths using a combination of cognitive and combative abilities. And they are always evenly matched in skill, if often unique in style. Witness Carlos Condit’s victory over Nick Diaz in UFC 143. Aside from Nick Diaz being a good example of a guy whose evident anger and aggression might have landed him in prison or the morgue were he not channeling himself in MMA, the interim welterweight championship bout was a beautiful testament to how fighters adapt to their individual opponent, rather than to any number of possible opponents in general.
I’ll be honest here: I was pretty sure Diaz would win. But Condit’s ability to consistently evade Diaz’s relentless forward march, punching and kicking as he moved backwards while filtering out the psychological pressure of Diaz’s trash talk in the ring, was clearly because Condit prepared to fight no one other than Diaz. And when Diaz actually embraced Condit after his win, rather than flipping him off or trying to tear his head off ex officio (he saved this for a diss on the UFC in general), it was obvious that a measure of respect was the final outcome. So while similarities between MMA and warfare might present themselves on the surface, a bit of probing suggests a very different dynamic. I can’t think of a single war with these ingredients: evenly matched opponents engaging with full consent and preparation, motivated by the specific and very human characteristics of the Other, who ultimately emerge from combat not just alive but actually respecting – perhaps even liking – each other a little bit more. And liking themselves. This is one reason why I object strenuously - although I get it logically - to the US military's usage of MMA as a "hook" for recruiting soldiers and glorifying nationalism. (I reiterate my promise to blog on that another day).
All of this is to say that it is intriguing to think about what young men (and young women) in places like Sierra Leone make of the MMA experience. Is the African Fighting Championship a potential resource for reconciliation and peacebuilding? Does it represent a mode through which people damaged by warfare might rebuild respect for themselves and for others, (re)humanizing opponents through the individuation and structure inherent in the sport? Or are these hopelessly ethnocentric and intellectual questions for something far more raw than I want to admit? Stay tuned for further investigations. And if you know anything about the AFC, or claim any insight about aggression, warfare, and martial arts cross-culturally, hit me up.
Not literally, of course.
References
Jensen, Peter R. et al. 2012. “In the Cage: A Phenomenological Investigation of Mixed Martial Artists’ Experience of Competition.” The Sport Psychologist, in press.
Milton, M. (2004a). “Being a fighter: It’s a whole state of being.” Existential Analysis. 15 (1):116-130.
Milton, M. (2004b). “Being a fighter II: It’s a positive thing around my male friends.” Existential Analysis. 15 (2): 285-297.
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