A Tragic and Sinister Boxing Tale

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Peter Benson’s “Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race and Murder in the 1920s”

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.- The full story of one of boxing’s most enigmatic and mysterious fighters has finally been told. The University of Arkansas Press has just published Peter Benson’s “Battling Siki: A Tale of Ring Fixes, Race and Murder in the 1920s” (Hardback, $29.95).

Siki (1887—1925), whom novelist Henry Miller called “that extraordinary Sengalese,” was once one of the most recognizable black men in the world. One can find his legacy in the name of a popular rock group, one of Che Guevara’s lieutenants, and a character on “Xena, Warrior Princess.”

Benson’s biography of the first African to win a world championship in boxing delves into the complex world of sports, race, colonialism and the cult of personality in the early 20th century. In 1908 when he was 10 years old Siki was taken to Paris by a French actress and shortly thereafter probably abandoned. He fought with distinction for France in World War I, and upon his return began his boxing career. A large, powerful man with huge shoulders and a devastating “windmill” punch, Siki was dubbed the “pugilistic King Kong of Paris” by “Ring” magazine.

On Sept. 24, 1922, at Paris’s Buffalo Velodrome, before 40,000 stunned spectators, including a young Ernest Hemingway, who wrote about the fight, Battling Siki fought and defeated the reigning world and European light heavyweight champion, Georges Carpentier. It remains one of the most spectacular upsets in the sport.

His success led to an extravagant lifestyle. The colorful Siki spent a fortune partying and carousing, was arrested for firing a pistol in the air, and was frequently seen on the streets of Paris, dressed in flashy clothes, walking his pet lion cubs on a leash. But he also provoked a scandal by exposing the corruption of the fight game in France, spoke out boldly against racism, and was arrested for deliberately defying the code of racial segregation in the American South. His career was closely followed and written about by such prominent figures as George Bernard Shaw, Lincoln Steffens, Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, Westbrook Pegler, and a young Ho Chi Minh when he was living in Paris.

Siki eventually came to the United States and had a number of undistinguished bouts. On the evening of Dec. 15, 1925, at the age of 28, he was shot and killed in Hell’s Kitchen in what some claimed was a gangland execution. Rev. Adam Clayton Powell gave the eulogy at his funeral: “No man ever came out of Africa who had a more dramatic life or had a more tragic ending.”   

Peter Benson’s biography beautifully captures not only Battling Siki’s amazing boxing career, it sheds new light on the scandal surrounding his marriages and public behavior, his alleged participation in ring fixes, and the mystery surrounding his death. Thomas Hauser, author of “Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times,” describes “Battling Siki” as a “Shakespearean tragedy set in the Roaring Twenties.” And Randy Roberts, author of “Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes” says Benson puts “you into the skin of the age, permitting you to see Siki as his friends and enemies saw him and to sense the anger, frustration, and fear Siki engendered. As much as Dempsey and Ruth, Siki was a man of the 1920s.”

Peter Benson is associate professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the author of “Black Orpheus, Transition, and Modern Cultural Awakening in Africa.” He first learned about Siki when he was teaching in Senegal in the 1990s.