Birds flit in and out of the cracked windows of the old stadium. On the basketball court below, players’ shouts reverberate off the walls, as a banana vendor ambles along the baseline. But as Wade Deng sprints after a rebound, his attention is laser focused.
Every minuscule movement of his muscles counts. If he can get the snap of his wrist or the arc of his shot just right, he believes basketball can give him everything back in full. More, even, than the 17-year-old refugee from South Sudan dares to dream.
When Wade’s heart rate slows, his mind wanders back to his mother and five siblings, who live hundreds of miles away in a crowded refugee camp. “The moment I make it, I’m going to get them out,” he says.
Why We Wrote This
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The NBA wants to make Africa the world’s next basketball powerhouse. The journey of one Kenyan team shows what that might look like.
He knows it is a long shot. The chances of becoming a professional athlete are slim anywhere. They are slimmer still in a country like Kenya, where resources for sports are scarce. And they are close to none if you play basketball, a relatively unknown sport here.
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But Wade’s dreams have come along at a fortuitous moment. Basketball is on the rise across Africa. Massive investment from international basketball royalty, led by the National Basketball Association, is sparking new interest in the sport. It is also transforming it into a full-blown industry for the first time. NBA Africa, backed by donors ranging from former NBA All-Star Luol Deng to former U.S. President Barack Obama, now runs the first professional NBA league outside North America.
“Ten years ago, nobody was talking about us,” says Ariel Okall, a forward for the Nairobi City Thunder, a professional team managed by the same organization that funds Wade’s squad. “The kids that are coming up now, they know basketball can put food on the table.”
Going pro
Until recently, the Nairobi City Thunder was an amateur team from the low-income neighborhood of Shauri Moyo. Despite having a dedicated fan base, the team barely managed to pool enough of its own money to pay for league fees and traveling costs.
But in 2023, it was bought by Twende Sports, a sports management company backed by investors like Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri, a former professional basketball player whose parents are from Kenya and Nigeria. The company set its sights on getting the Nairobi City Thunder into the Basketball Africa League (BAL), the African pro league organized by the NBA and the International Basketball Federation.
Heading into its fifth season, BAL is part of a wider, two-decade-long effort by the NBA to expand its global fan base and strengthen a growing pipeline of players from the African continent. Around 1 in 10 players in the NBA are first- or second-generation Africans.
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Held in stadiums across Africa, its games offer the look and feel of a North American basketball match, including flashy half-time shows featuring regional pop stars and sophisticated light and camera production.
Getting the Nairobi City Thunder there was, in some ways, a stretch. Before Twende took over, the team practiced twice a week at a YMCA court. With no prospect of earning a living through basketball, players held other jobs. Attendance at practice was spotty.
Twende wanted to make the squad into the country’s first professional basketball team, so it began offering players competitive salaries and health insurance, and recruited some of Kenya’s top talent home from abroad. New coaching staff expected players to treat practices, workouts, and games like their full-time job.
The efforts paid off. In December, Wade was in the stands when the Thunder defeated Uganda’s City Oilers to become the first Kenyan team to qualify for BAL.
“That’s motivation for all of us,” he says. Suddenly, there was a future in basketball not just abroad, but at home in Kenya, too.
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The long game
Like NBA Africa, Twende is not yet earning a profit. Its investors are playing the long game. By laying out a blueprint for how to professionalize a team, “The hope is that we’ll see more investment in the basketball ecosystem beyond us,” says Sandra Kimokoti, the company’s chief commercial officer and co-founder, and a former member of Kenya’s national rugby team. The team’s success is “a Thunder story, but we want it to be a Kenyan basketball story as well,” she says.
During the qualifying tournament for BAL last fall, Twende paid for young people from Shauri Moyo, where the team has its roots, to attend games. When one beloved player from the neighborhood would bound onto the court, the children would scream for joy and chant his name, recalls Nairobi City Thunder Coach Bradley Ibs.
Now, he says, the next generation has “this example of a young man who worked really hard, and he’s getting the chance to make a living by being a sports entertainer.”
Investing in youth is part of the strategy of African basketball’s international investors. Since 2018, NBA Africa has run an elite basketball academy in Senegal to train top prospects. And last fall, the organization, which now has five offices across the continent, announced plans to build 1,000 new basketball courts.
Erika Page/The Christian Science Monitor
Meanwhile, Twende funds multiple youth programs, including a team for teenagers, most of them refugees from South Sudan.
Deng Garang coaches that squad, called Deementor. He says basketball gives his players somewhere to channel their energy and keep them away from drugs and crime. Most were close to dropping out of school before joining the team, but Mr. Garang connects as many as possible to private high school basketball scholarships. That was the case for Wade, who he spotted on a neighborhood court in 2019.
Since then, Wade has been training twice a day, in hopes of one day earning enough through basketball to bring his family back together.
“Anything you want in this life, you have to be consistent. … Fall in love with the process, and eventually the results will come,” he says. “I’ve learned to be patient.”
He might not have to wait long. Two of his teammates from Deementor have already gotten a life-changing call. Now they are playing for Nairobi City Thunder.
