WHEN boxing promoters announced that Muhammed Ali was to fight George Foreman in Zaire in 1974, record producer Stewart Levine says a light bulb went off in his head.

A close friend of South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, Levine saw immediately that the heavyweight contest represented an unprecedented opportunity to put Africa on the music map.

Levine’s dream became a glorious reality over three days in 1974, when a music festival staged at the Kinshasa Stadium brought together a galaxy of black American stars and the cream of African music.

Yet while the Ali-Foreman fight — the Rumble in the Jungle — has become the stuff of legend, the musical sideshow which preceded it had been largely forgotten until the recent release last year of the documentary Soul Power.

The film, released on DVD this month, makes use of previously unseen footage that had been gathering dust for decades, making only a brief appearance in the Oscar-winning 1996 documentary, When We Were Kings.

Levine freely admits that his goals in organising the concert — raising awareness of African music in the United States — were largely unfulfilled.

“It didn’t work at all,” Levine chuckled in an interview with AFP. “In terms of raising awareness about African music, which is what we set out to do, it was a complete failure. Because hardly anybody saw it.”