“VOODOO – you know, the word voodoo,” says Jeamie TKV, when I ask him to spell what he’d just said.
No, it wasn’t a word that sounded like voodoo. It was voodoo. It’s not a word you tend to hear very often when conducting boxing interviews with blokes from North London. Nor would you expect, when sitting down with the British heavyweight champion, to end up discussing military coups, murder plots and Congolese wrestling.
Not Congolese voodoo wrestling, anyway.
“In Congo, they do voodoo wrestling; it’s a bit different,” says TKV, with more than a dash of understatement. “They do witchcraft.
“In boxing, you have your trainer in your corner; in wrestling, you have a witch doctor. Whoever’s is more powerful wins the fight.”
But this is wrestling – it’s not a real fight… right?
TKV says it is. Congolese wrestling, he says, is a real sport; a variant of the freestyle amateur wrestling in which he participated when growing up in Tottenham, just with some black magic rituals, trances, chants and spells thrown in.
“It sounds like bulls**t, but people believe it,” says TKV. “And I’ve seen it happen. It’s crazy, but I’ve seen it. If I tell you half the stuff that happens, you’ll think ‘this guy’s been watching too many movies’.
“All of this, I studied in university. I made a documentary about it, called The Story Behind Voodoo Wrestling. It’s really bad in Africa – people use it for bad reasons.”
Like winning fights. Does it happen in boxing, too?
“My teammate was doing witchcraft when I boxed [amateur] for Congo,” says the London-born TKV, who holds dual nationality and wore the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) vest in qualifiers for the 2020 Olympics.
But he doesn’t dabble in the dark arts himself. As a Christian, he prefers the power of prayer.
“My dad was very famous in Congo in the late ’80s for wrestling; wrestling is huge there,” he says. “He brought a pastor to pray in his corner to counteract the witchcraft.”
Whoever was in his corner, and whatever the forces at play, Makasi Tshikeva – father of Jeamie Tshikeva, to give TKV his full surname – was a wrestler of high enough pedigree to turn pro in the UK and later set up Haringey Wrestling Club.
Makasi had moved to London, seeking asylum for himself and his family after two generations of persecution from the military and government, in 1991, a year before Jaemie was born.
And while it was wrestling that occupied TKV’s childhood, it is boxing in which he has now made his name – and for which the man behind the persecution of his father and grandfather is well known. Mobutu Sese Seko, the then-president of Zaire (now DRC), was the dictator who bankrolled The Rumble In The Jungle in 1974.
But when he wasn’t helping Don King to bring Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to fight in Kinshasa, Mobutu was notorious for running a totalitarian regime defined by corruption, nepotism and the use of deadly force against threats.
One such threat was TKV’s grandfather, a Congolese army general who had at one point been a friend and ally of Mobutu, and in 1960 helped him lead the coup that deposed prime minister Patrice Lumumba and eventually put Mobutu in power.
But the further Andre-Bruno Tshikeva rose through the ranks, the more this concerned Mobutu.
“Mobutu killed my granddad because my grandad helped when the Cubans went into Angola,” says TKV, referring to when, in 1975, Cuba intervened in the Angolan civil war, sending troops to support the communist president against a pro-western opposition coalition.
Andre-Bruno helped the Angolan forces defend against the Cuban intervention and restore control. His part in the victory impressed the pro-Angola United States, who lined him up to lead the self-declared Republic of Cabinda, an Angolan exclave.
“The CIA [which supported Cabindan independence] were so impressed with him, they offered him to be the president when it became a country,” says TKV.
“They informed Mobutu about that and he felt my grandad was a threat now, because he’d helped him to overthrow Lumumba. But he couldn’t just get rid of him – he had to do it in a smart way.
“He sent him to protect a base in a town where the French and Belgians and Americans did a lot of business, and then paid rebels to go and kill some civilians, to make my granddad look bad.
“Then he sent soldiers to arrest my grandad. He said to them: ‘How can you do this? I put you in this position.’ They said, ‘Mobutu said we have to.’
“My grandad was security for King Baudouin, the King of Belgium. King Baudouin told Mobutu: ‘I don’t believe General Tshikeva would do that – if you arrest him, you’re not allowed to kill him.
“So, my grandad got sentenced to life in prison, but there were a lot of attempts on his life. He got poisoned several times, and one night someone put a letter under his door saying at such-and-such a time, the doors are gonna open and you can escape. He knew something was off, so he stayed in his cell. When the time came, the doors opened, and all the other prisoners started running, and he just heard the gunshots outside.
“Eventually his sentence was commuted. He did six years and was released, but because he’d been poisoned, he died soon after.
“My grandad was a very powerful man. He had 10 wives, multiple houses, a lot of money. But after he died, some family members took everything and didn’t leave nothing to his wives and kids, so my dad ended up going in the army to make ends meet.”
Dad Makasi Tshikeva became a commando, but once Mobutu learned who he was – that the son of a man he’d had killed was rising through the military ranks – he attempted to put an end to him, too.
“My dad was invited to a private meal and the chef said, ‘I’ve been told to poison you.’ So, he took a different plate and when he didn’t die, Mobutu was angry.
“Later, he was doing a climbing exercise and they loosened the rope he was supposed to climb, so he’d fall. A friend warned him, so he used a different rope.
“He knew his life was at risk, and he had just had my elder brother, so he decided to leave and come to the UK.
“He was famous in Congo but came here with nothing. He likes to say, ‘I went from having cleaners to becoming a cleaner.’ He didn’t know no one, didn’t speak the language, and had to find a way to bring his wife and kids over.”
Once he did so, and had learned to speak English, Makasi resumed his wrestling career.
No voodoo was involved this time, but he embraced the spectacle and ceremony of professional wrestling under the monicker Big Papa T, winning several regional championships.
As he did so, he started training young Jeamie in freestyle amateur wrestling, leading to an early introduction to competitive fight sports.
“All I knew growing up was wrestling; I grew up competing,” says TKV. “I won the junior world championships in Amsterdam when I was 10. I was too young to enter but my dad put me up as a 12-year-old. I was a national champion, too, and had a four-five-year winning streak in freestyle wrestling.”
But as he went from boy to man, and a very big man at that, another sport emerged as a more attractive proposition: boxing.
“When I was 18, my dad was doing a youth programme, with all the coaches from the area doing their respective sports,” he says. “My dad was coaching wrestling, but he said ‘why don’t you give boxing a try?’, and I said ‘yeah, why not.’
“The coach said: ‘You’re a natural – you can make millions!’ He made it sound so easy, and there’s no money in freestyle wrestling – you have to either turn pro or you try MMA.
“I became addicted to boxing from that day on; from the first session, really. It wasn’t just the [prospect of] money, it was just really good.
There followed a claimed 72-bout amateur run, including two national titles, five London championships and an African Games silver medal in 2019.
The coronavirus pandemic delayed his pro career, which didn’t start until March 2022, when he was 28. But the man born Tshikeva, and rebranded TKV “to stand out”, has moved quickly, and last time out – in November, in just his 11th pro bout – he was crowned British champion.
Frazer Clarke, his co-challenger for the vacant title, was favoured to win, but TKV tapped into the psychology of pro wrestling to unsettle the Olympian.
“The first presser we did, we were very nice to each other. I gave him a lot of compliments, there was no back and forth; it was very respectful. But then the fight got postponed when I picked up a [rib] injury.
“He made a few comments I didn’t like, saying it was a fake injury, so the second presser, I put it on him. I pretended to be upset; I was teasing him, teasing him. From then on, he was upset – I’d never seen Frazer stick the middle finger up before.
“So, I knew when we got into this fight, he’d start off fast – and I knew he had no stamina. People watching were worried, but when I went back to my corner after the first round, my trainer [Barry Smith] said: ‘Brilliant! He’s thrown the kitchen sink at you.’ After three rounds, he had nothing left.”
Even so, Clarke lasted the distance, but only after an extremely rocky 11th round.
“He was lucky to survive that,” says TKV, “but to be honest with you, I don’t know how I did 12 rounds either.
“I really had a bad camp – I had a bad back, in the middle of camp I got cut in sparring, I pulled my intercostal muscle, and then I had that flu that was going around. A week before the fight, I couldn’t even do two rounds on the pads.”
Both men went the full 12 in a hard-hitting, physically draining brawl that served as an appropriately exciting main event to mark the BBC’s return to televised boxing after a 20-year absence.
“It was a big deal,” says TKV of the opportunity to perform on the national broadcaster. “I’m all about making history, and I made history.”
Winning British boxing’s flagship prize gives him a platform to make more, especially with so many domestic rivals jostling for the Lonsdale Belt and world honours.
One obvious challenger would be David Adeleye, who thwarted TKV’s first title shot with a controversial sixth-round stoppage last April and then vacated the belt rather than accommodate a mandated rematch.
“He was holding my arm, the ref said ‘break’, and then he hit me,” says TKV of the circumstances behind the first knockdown of his career and which led to the second defeat on his 9-2 (5) record.
“He knew what he was doing; it was deliberate. But yeah, I’ll take it [a rematch] any time, even if I’m entitled to give him the same energy he gave me [by not taking the fight].”
The big dream, though, is to tread in the footsteps of giants and fight in the former Zaire. “That would be the greatest thing,” says TKV of the prospect of taking big-time boxing back to Kinshasa.
“Imagine me and [Martin] Bakole – he’s a huge star there. That would be such a big, big, big card – The Rumble In The Jungle 2.”
The long-term goal, unsurprisingly, is “to fight for the world title and win it, with God’s grace”.
And if a world title fight is to take place in the Congo, TKV may indeed need God in his corner – because he’ll be back in the land of his fighting father, where witch doctors decide outcomes just as routinely as coaches.
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