Kassim "needed to reconcile his past with his desire to move forward", says director

A Ugandan man who was kidnapped from his primary school in 1984 at age five, given a gun taller than he was, and forced to be a soldier for the next 12 years, became Junior Middleweight Champion of the world in 2004. Kassim Ouma’s story, now told in an 86-minute feature film being shown at New York City’s Tribeca Film Festival,” is the most incredible life story of any athlete in history,” says manager Tom Moran, with whom he now runs a small charity called Natabonic that helps Ugandans.

“Kassim desperately needed to reconcile his past with his desire to move forward,” said film director Kief Davidson, who first met the boxer in 2005. “Over the next two years, and across two continents, he would slowly reveal private details of his childhood. And a military pardon, granted by the same men who abducted him, would enable him to return to Uganda for the first time in ten years, and allow the healing process to begin.”

The film, entitled Kassim the Dream, follows Ouma as he trained for the 2006 fight through which he had hoped to regain his title, interspersed with his memories and his desire to return home to Uganda to see his family. In that 2006 fight, he wore the GuluWalk symbol on his boxing trunks and robe. GuluWalk grew from the efforts of two Canadians to draw attention to the thousands of northern Ugandan children forced to become “night commuters” so they would not be kidnapped by Joseph Kony’s brutal Lord’s Resistance Army. The LRA has been kidnapping children and women and killing civilians almost since Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Movement (NRM) took power in Uganda in 1986 by deposing dictator Milton Obote, who in turn had overthrown Idi Amin.

Ouma, seventh of 13 children, was born in December 1978 in Maga Maga, a tiny rural village about three hours' drive from the capital, Kampala, where he lived with his extended family. After his abduction by the National Resistance Army, Ouma did not see his family again for three years. “I was scared to death,” he told novelist Uzodinma Iweala in a 2007 interview. “They told me ‘shut up’. Then they showed me how to shoot a gun in case anything happened so you could shoot a bad guy. Once I started being in the war, I was like ‘this is my side. If you're on that side I'm shooting’."

Conscripted into the new national army, Ouma was chosen for its boxing team. A decade later, he was selected to represent Uganda in the 1996 Olympics but could not attend due to financial problems. In February 1998, he flew to the U.S. after receiving a visa to travel for a military boxing tournament. He knew no one, had no home and no work, and was thinking about going back when a restaurant owner delivered encouragement and a job offer along with a pizza. He soon began training at the neighbouring Alexandria Boxing Club and in March, 1998, won a Golden Gloves tournament in nearby Norfolk after taking the place of a fighter who withdrew.

While this got the attention of a Florida trainer who flew him there as a sparring partner for a former welterweight champion, back home in Uganda he was considered to have deserted the army, and soldiers came to his parents’ home. Ouma says the soldiers harassed his mother and beat his father, who died in hospital.

In 2002, Ouma captured the American junior light middleweight title but later in the year, was shot twice in a drive-by shooting in Florida. In 2004, he won the IBF world junior light middleweight title, but lost the title next year and in 2006, lost a unanimous decision to reigning WBC and WBO middleweight champion Jermain Taylor. Ouma now lives in Florida with his mother, partner, and four children.

Natabonic, originally set up to fund the education of villagers in Maga Maga, is now providing boreholes and pumps to bring clean water to villages, and hopes to ship clothing from the US to refugee camps in northern Uganda. Ouma has supported GuluWalk and lobbied the US Congress about northern Uganda; now, through this film, he has broken his silence about his stolen childhood – a childhood that sadly, says Davidson, is not unique. “Over 300,000 children continue to fight in bloody conflicts worldwide, as oppressor and victim, terrorized into compliance, and trained to become deadly, expendable fighters.” 

This story was compiled from several sources, including the interview with Iweala entitled "I used to carry a gun, now I use my gloves" in the Observer, July 29, 2007; a story entitled Ouma fighting memories as child soldier in Uganda, by Bernard Fernandez, MaxBoxing.com, carried on ESPN.com December 7, 2006; and the synopsis and director's statement by Kief Davidson, all included in the media release on the film website. The film will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival April 21-May 3, 2008.

 


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