KIGALI, Rwanda – On June 1, African basketball fans packed DK Arena in Rwanda’s capital city to witness the apex of the sport on their continent.
It was the championship game of the Basketball Africa League, a league established by the NBA as a part of their mission to prioritize growing the game on the African continent.
The league is spearheaded by Amadou Gallo Fall, president of the BAL and one of the most important sports officials on the continent. That’s the same Amadou Fall who was a standout center for the University of District of Columbia Firebirds from 1989 to 1993.
“I often refer to Amadou – and many others refer to him – as the godfather of basketball in Africa,” NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum said. “From the very beginning his story is so inspirational.”
Basketball in Africa has deep connections to the DMV. In addition to Fall, others with ties to the area include Roland Houston, Technical Director at NBA Academy Africa in Senegal who previously coached at George Washington and George Mason universities; Joe Toumou, Assistant Technical Director at NBA Academy Africa; Sidy Sall, a coach at NBA Academy Africa who recently joined the men’s basketball coaching staff at Mount St. Mary’s University in Emmitsburg, Maryland; Godwin Owinje, co-founder with Toronto Raptors president Masai Ujiri of the non-profit Giants of Africa; and Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, head of operations for the BAL.
Owinje, Boumtje-Boumtje and Toumou all played college basketball at Georgetown University.
Fall, who was born in Senegal, began his journey to the DMV as a teenager. He attended a basketball camp that was run by a Peace Corps volunteer. The volunteer, from the D.C. area, quickly noticed Fall. He introduced him to George Leftwich, then UDC men’s basketball coach. Eventually, that led to Fall joining the basketball team and graduating magna cum laude from UDC.
“In a nutshell it all started there [DC], it really opened my eyes to the power of sport and basketball,” said Fall, who was inducted into the UDC Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019. “You have generations of people who have come from Africa living in the area. So definitely a place we’re proud to have experienced.”
Georgetown University’s men’s basketball team is at the center of many of the connections between African basketball and the DMV. John Thompson, the Hoyas’ famed head coach from 1972 to 1999, was a pioneer in bringing African players to his team.
“I really forged a strong relationship with [Thompson],” Fall said. “In so many ways the pipeline started” at Georgetown.
One of those early Georgetown players was Godwin Owinje who grew up in Nigeria and began his college basketball career at Bismarck State, a junior college in North Dakota. After two years, Owinje moved to Georgetown for the 1995-96 season.
“The only thing I knew about Georgetown was watching the basketball team on television. I thought it was an all-Black school, everybody on the team was Black,” ” Owinje joked. “That was the biggest shock when I came to Georgetown.”
After leaving Georgetown, Owinje played six seasons of professional basketball overseas. Later, he returned to Prince George’s County near Washington DC, where he and his childhood friend Ujiri were roommates.
In their apartment, Ujiri and Owinje hatched the idea for Giants of Africa, a philanthropic organization that has worked to inspire and empower African youth. From its start in 2003, Giants of Africa has grown steadily and now operates basketball camps in 17 African countries and is building 100 outdoor courts throughout the continent.
Owinje, now a scout with the Brooklyn Nets, recalls that in the early days, “ It was kind of rough. We were determined to get something going. We used to do shoe drives to raise money. We called a bunch of college coaches to give us old shoes, that kind of stuff.”
Several of the former players interviewed for this article recalled the challenges that they met when they moved from Africa to the DMV to pursue their basketball dreams.
“The first [culture shock] was the food, obviously very different from what I grew up with,” said Boumtje-Boumtje who grew up in Cameroon. “I had an American host family. The first meal [they served], half of it was sweet and the other half was salty.”
Owinje recalled that in his home country of Nigeria, basketball shoes were a luxury. ““Growing up, I played in slippers. I played basketball barefooted,” he said
If he wore a hole in his shoe, Owinje said, he would go to the local mechanic where he’d pick up unused tires, cut out rubber pieces and tape them to fill the gap in the soles.
Ujiri and Owinje are among the players who came to the DMV as players and now are in executive and scouting roles in the NBA. A new generation of basketball players is following them. Owinje’s son, Zoje, is a standout junior guard at Clinton Grace Christian School in Clinton, Maryland,
Sall came to the DMV from Africa for a coaching opportunity. Part of his new job at Mount St. Mary’s tasks him with recruiting local high school talent. The players he’s meeting in the US are different from those he coached at NBA Academy Africa in many ways. A notable one is their height. The Academy’s 2023 roster had eight players listed at six-ten or above. In contrast, the Washington Catholic Athletic Conference, the DC area’s premier high school basketball conference made up of eleven teams, currently has just four players in that category.
“The shortest guy we had [at NBA Academy Africa] was six-three. Around this area, probably the tallest guy you will see is six-eight or six-nine,” Sall said.
There are similarities too. “Our guys back home play hard. They all have that chip on their shoulder that they’re trying to make it for their family,” Sall said. “It’s the same thing here. They’re trying to make it to help themselves, get an education in college and help their families.”
Fall, the BAL president, is committed to building more bridges between basketball in Africa and the DMV. His next goal: An exchange program for students with UDC, the university that launched his basketball career.
You must be logged in to post a comment.