‘The NBA has come to us’: inside basketball’s $1bn play for Africa

On a March evening at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, an agent beckoned me over to the check-in counter and asked for my passport. As he thumbed through its pages, he paused on the page with a red visa stamp and an imprint of a baobab tree.

“What’s your reason for traveling to Senegal?” he asked in a tone simultaneously neutral and stern.

“I’m attending a basketball tournament there,” I told him.

“Oh, some people flew from here only a few days ago carrying jerseys,” he said, perking up in his chair. He told me he was from Senegal himself. “Basketball is coming up in Senegal,” he said proudly.

I thought of the agent as I watched the the opening ceremony of the second season of the Basketball Africa League (BAL) at the 15,000-capacity Dakar Arena – a spectacle of color, music and dancing against a backdrop of raucously cheering fans. Videos would later circulate on social media of Dikembe Mutombo – the Congolese star who played nearly two decades in the NBA and who is now an investor in its nascent African project – dancing with fans. All around the arena, people sang and waved the green, yellow and red flag of Senegal.

“In Africa, when something special is happening in a family, we need to celebrate,” Mutombo would tell me later in a phone interview, laughing. “It’s always been my dream since I got into the league: I want to see the next Dikembe Mutombo playing in the NBA. I want to see the NBA on my continent. The continent of Africa was a place full of treasure and I was happy to see that taking place.”

Mutombo’s joy reminded me of something similar that the journalist Syra Sylla told me weeks earlier. A French-Senegalese basketball writer, who played basketball growing up in France, she was “obsessed”