Zaire 74 footage from the festival. Zaire 74 Zaire 74 was a three-day live music festival that took place on September 22 to 24, 1974 at the 20th of May Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo). The concert, conceived by South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and record producer Stewart Levine, was meant to be a major promotional event for the heavyweight boxing championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known as The Rumble in the Jungle. When an injury forced Foreman to postpone the fight by six weeks, the festival's intended audience of international tourists was all
George Foreman vs. Ken Norton winning the bout by first-round knockout. For his second defense, Foreman was matched up against Ken Norton for a March 1974 bout held in Caracas, the capital and largest city in Venezuela. Norton was coming off two successive fights against Muhammad Ali in 1973, winning the first fight in March by split decision (famously breaking Ali's jaw in the process), and then narrowly losing the second by another split decision in September. Norton's impressive performances against Ali made him one of the top heavyweight contenders for Foreman's titles, but the future hall-of-famer was installed as a 3–1 underdog against the