It would be a little while after the Rumble that we’d finally begin the travels we were itching to take outside the city. But Kinshasa was providing plenty of intriguing experiences in the meantime. In November 1974, I wrote: “We are becoming acquainted with the city, which is most cosmopolitan in a kind of un-cosmopolitan way. On the one hand, there are scores of sophisticated restaurants. Le Pergola, with its lovely garden and its luscious tournedos bernaise, might as well be in Brussels. There are smoky nightclubs with smooth jazz and gorgeous, sultry Zairoises serving cocktails. On the other hand, the commercial scene is downright strange. You may well see a man’s jacket in the window of a store that is marked florist and has hair driers lined up inside. The Grande Marché is fascinating: a huge and teeming place, dispensing everything from manioc and mangoes to the latest in multi-colored padded bras.

“We are also adjusting to the reality of the rainy season. After one of the torrential storms, it’s so humid that we feel as if we’ve been placed in a pot of steam. (Ah, so THIS is the tropics!) And we continue to try to figure out what is acceptable to do and what is not. We obviously don’t want to tangle with the omnipresent soldiers. We understand that we should not walk along the river road at night, lest we be taken as diamond smugglers. And we know that travel is damned near impossible, though we will be attempting it, thanks to friends with Land Rovers, soon.”

It’s no mystery that the difficulty of travel in Zaire came thanks to the odious King Leopold II of Belgium. Colonialism was doubtless troublesome no matter who was in charge, but the French and the English did pay some attention to roads and utilities. Leopold’s version of investing in infrastructure was a cruel, continual deployment of forced labor to make the mud briefly passable — and also to mine the country’s astonishing riches to line his own already bulging pockets. (This was just one among many of the Belgian king’s atrocities.)

When independence finally came, the country’s one main artery was its mighty river. As a result, travel in this vast and varied country offered boundless natural beauty, artistic riches and cultural warmth — and almost equally boundless logistical challenges. It also offered human encounters to which we were utterly unaccustomed. The logistics required patience. The encounters required remembering that it wasn’t our customs that counted here and that it was both foolish and arrogant to expect them to.

Take the challenging logistics first: To travel almost any road, even in a Land Rover, required sometimes building little bridges over gaping gullies, sometimes barreling through water of indeterminate depth and sometimes waiting a couple of days for a “bac” (ferry) that you’d been told operated daily. It also often involved what we referred to as “calling the tow truck.” There was, of course, no tow truck. But there were plenty of able-bodied men along most roads, and they were glad to be rewarded for helping lift a vehicle out of the mire.

As for the sometimes jarring encounters: Many of the Zairois in remote villages had never seen what they called a “mondele” (the longstanding term for Europeans and thus also for us). Even for those who had, our arrival anywhere rarely went unnoticed. It seemed there was nothing we did that wasn’t intriguing. When nature’s call took us behind a bush, we’d often be accompanied. Commentary from our astonished observers was lively, and almost any move we made might be met with delighted laughter. Was this rude? Where was their sense of privacy? What I came to feel was that there was simply not an ounce of pretense. I looked up “mondelé’” and found, in one source, that its root sense denoted not just a lighter skin, but “that the African perceived the European as someone who is insincere.” I could see that. However crazy it sometimes drove me, I concluded that these folks’ behavior was the very definition of real.

Most of these lessons we would learn in earnest over time, but we got some tastes on our short trips that fall.

“Our first foray out of the city was to a village about an hour and a half away, traveling in our friends’ Land Rover. They had previously visited the family we went to see, and knew that the old woman made pottery, firing her pots in a big pit in the back yard. We had an interesting time with the large family, sitting in their thatched hut, looking at the pictures they had clipped from magazines and mounted on the walls — pictures that seemed to be of Germany, with snowy scenes. Our conversation was limited, since only the children spoke French, having learned it in school, and only one among us spoke Lingala, and that rather limited.

“But we surely comprehended their warm hospitality. When we returned a few weeks later to pick up the pots we had ordered, the family cut down their only banana stalk. We gave them sugar and coffee. They were on the verge of giving us a goat before we convinced them that they should keep it. This was difficult, since we felt it could have represented a great insult, to refuse. They seemed to understand, and we returned gratefully goat-less.

“On a couple of other trips, also west toward the Atlantic, we saw the principal port of Matadi and the immense Inga Falls of the Congo River as well as Zaire’s tiny stretch of coastline. We visited several villages along the way, seeing dancing and hearing drumming and often receiving warm welcomes. Some of the nearby villages look like deserted Grade C western movie sets or little towns in Mexico you pass on the train: hot, dusty, with spots of shade, languorous music and plenty of beer, people taking naps in the shade of buildings made of dusty adobe.

“The earth around the huts is always bare. One villager told us that this is to give the snakes no place to hide. (I find this not a bad idea, having yesterday found a snake curled up in the large planter on our back porch, as I bent to pick off a dead leaf. I grabbed our machete and killed it. Mike, on the other hand, is the one who kills the cockroaches. Huge, and so many of them they look like a rug receding from its center toward the walls if you switch on a light at night. Sometimes they drop off the ceiling while you’re sleeping. Awful.)

“For Christmas, we would really like to go ‘into the bush,’ instead of flying way off somewhere. But this is difficult, as roads toward the east are even more impassable than the ones we’ve been on.”

Happily, there was another way: The great river beckoned.

The Fight, a Fanta with Ali and Advice from Mailer

Within weeks of our arrival, Kinshasa was scheduled to play host to the fight that would become known as the Rumble in the Jungle. The heavyweight championship match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali was set for September 25 — at 4 a.m.Kinshasa time, with American television viewers in mind.

The city, I reported in a letter home, was “in a frenzy of activity in preparation. The post office is being painted, trash has been removed from its portico, lights installed along the streets and the stadium has been renovated. Workmen in new orange suits have taken up brooms in an attempt to slow the encroachment of sand onto the roads. Scores of new buses have been bought to transport fight-goers. Let’s hope they’ll be put into service afterward for the Zairois, who now crush into buses so tightly that an occasional arm or leg is seen out the windows. We often drive by one that has broken down, and stopped for who knows how long. Once, all the people inside it were singing. This too is Zaire.”

Celebrities began pouring into town. Some seemed to have a hard time grounding themselves “in this city that knows no maps, respects no schedules, babbles many languages, delights in surprises but is likelier to laugh than pay respect. Celebrity doesn’t seem to apply here.”

With fame failing to afford its usual distancing, we in the tiny expat American community benefited enormously.

“We could pack a picnic lunch and take It to the presidential domaine of N’sele and, from the front seat of a huge hall, watch Foreman train alongside the reporters and photographers covering him. We had fried chicken with longtime lightweight champion Archie Moore. We met Howard Cosell and Stokely Carmichael, Norman Mailer, George Plimpton and Hunter Thompson. On one glorious weekend afternoon, several of us TASOK teachers spent time drinking with Mohammad Ali around a table on the patio of a Kinshasa bar. We were drinking frosty bottles of the excellent lager SKOL; Ali was drinking Orange Fanta. He was delightful — charming and funny and cocky and handsome.”

When Foreman suffered a cut near his eye in training, the fight was postponed by five weeks. This delay raised fears that the rainy season would begin before the fight’s new date — a disastrous prospect, given the fight’s setting in an outdoor stadium. The pre-fight music festival went on as planned, and those who had come to perform — Miriam Makeba, B.B. King, James Brown and many others — left town soon after. But some of the writers and reporters hung around during the delay and, being in Kinshasa much longer than anticipated, grew bored. They were happy to have local company. Some of us TASOK teachers were pleased to provide it — usually during evenings at the bar of the Intercontinental Hotel. Reading back through my journal, those encounters seem surreal.

One evening, I asked Mailer to read some things I’d written and give me some advice. The next evening he delivered: “You write as if you’re afraid someone will interrupt you. You’re a scanning beam, protean, too young to be patient. You are too arch; you have to write totally WITHOUT personality first. When you can do that, THEN you inject personality.” I needed more focus, he said, and he gave me some “missions: Read Das Kapital, Part 1; take at least 3 months. Spend an hour a day on Latin for the rhythm of it.” (He, having run for mayor of New York City, told me I should become a politician, and that this would enrich my rhetoric.)

We argued about Hemingway, whose entire body of work he insisted I read. I’d read plenty of it, and Hemingway annoyed me. I’m sick of the Hemingway worship, I said. His women do little but sigh. Dashiell Hammett nailed it when he said Hemingway couldn’t portray women. “Dashiell Hammett was an ignorant bastard,” Mailer replied. As the evening wore on, and we drank and thumb wrestled (he dubbed himself the American champion), he talked about each of his marriages. Having so many wives was like living in as many different cultures. One of his wives, he said, was like me: Impatient and wanting to achieve.

On another evening, the AP’s legendary combat photographer Horst Faas told me about working with the columnist Joe Alsop, “one of the few opinion writers who actually got out into the field.” Once, as they flew over a ferocious battle somewhere in Southeast Asia, Faas looked over at Alsop and saw that he was reading a book — and yawning. “I’ve seen so many battles, you know,” said Alsop. “Battles bore me now.”

At last, the Fight arrived. Mike and I sat so close to the ring that the boxers’ sweat fell on our faces. The next day, I wrote of the “huge lights making my head ache and the fat swarm of bumbling photographers. The flags and national anthems and singsong chant of ‘Ali, bomayé!’ (Lingala for ‘Kill him, Ali!’) and the wet, squishing thump of a boxing glove — Ali’s glove, at the start, pushing off Foreman’s face a spray of water, catching the light, mushing up the face, making a dope of a brawny man. Then, leaning back against the ropes, there was no butterfly in this Ali, protecting his face against blow after blow, biding his time. And then: Pow! Pow! Pow! The heavyweight champion of the world staggered and fell clumsily to the mat. Ali had won! And, as if on script, great cracks of lightning split the sky and the rain fell, huge sheets of it, pounding the ground. The rainy season had begun.”

This fight has been called “arguably the greatest sporting event of the 20th century.” Estimates are that it was watched by a billion television viewers worldwide, the most-watched live TV broadcast up to that time. Yet, somehow, the city seemed to shrug it off quickly. I wrote that “Kinshasa has absorbed this huge happening, incorporating it into itself, making one more strange thread in the fabric that is Léopoldville-Kinshasa, a fabric so vari-colored that even this loud new hue has been effectively integrated.” As for us, we went back to our quiet evenings on TASOK’s campus, finding it hard to believe it had all really happened.

Happily, we had an enticing new prospect: We’d made some delightful friends — including friends who owned Land Rovers. Before long, we’d be venturing out of Kinshasa ourselves.