What a trip to Africa with Dikembe Mutombo taught me about the importance of hope

On Sept. 11, 2001, I was in Africa with a gentle giant named Dikembe Mutombo, and the heart I saw him pour into building a hospital in his native Congo was the opposite of the hatred that had ignited the monstrous tragedy here.

I was an Inquirer photojournalist and had asked my editors if I could follow the 7-foot-2 NBA star on his quest to establish a new health-care facility in his homeland; he had joined the Philadelphia 76ers a year earlier, and his philanthropy interested me.

I had flown to Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a reporter on Sept. 10. The next morning, we called the office and were told that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center.

While Mutombo was feted by his Congolese admirers later that day, we were too transfixed by the horror back home to attend that party. It wasn’t that the Africans were unsympathetic to our grief; but in a dirt-poor country immersed in constant civil war, their nation had already seen the loss of millions of lives, leaving them with an enduring level of anguish that only those who’ve experienced it can fathom.

When news broke that Mutombo died of brain cancer Monday, my thoughts returned to the week I spent following him around his native land — and watched firsthand as he worked in real-time to leave a legacy for his countrymen that transcended anything he ever accomplished on the court.

From the outset, it was clear that Mutombo recognized that he could use his fame in the NBA as a platform to raise awareness about the many challenges facing the African continent.

He was an unlikely icon on the hardwood — Mutombo had grown up playing soccer and embraced basketball as a teen, eventually studying at and playing for Georgetown, until he was selected with the fourth overall pick in the 1991 NBA draft.

At the time of our trip, he was about to enter the 11th year of a stellar career that would eventually span 18 years and earn him the title of NBA Defensive Player of the Year four times and, years after his retirement, a place in the NBA Hall of Fame.

Some were skeptical of the ability of the 35-year-old athlete’s efforts to establish a hospital in a chaotic country.

It was hard not to wonder if Mutombo’s goal was realistic when we joined him and the nation’s minister of health to tour the skeletal beginnings of a never-completed hospital.

To better understand the health care situation in this war-torn country, I wandered through an existing facility, encountering patients with diseases like lockjaw suffering in squalid conditions.

Mutombo had experienced the need for better care firsthand when his mother, Biamba Marie, died at home after a stroke when a curfew that had been imposed because of civil strife made it impossible for her to get to a hospital.

In Africa, Mutombo was in constant motion, changing his schedule at a moment’s notice. We were not allowed to witness him gifting relatives with thousands of dollars in cash, but we watched him officially break ground on the hospital.

He shook hands with diplomats, government officials, and endless streams of Congolese admirers, and squatted to greet polio-stricken children dragging their limbs behind them at a nonprofit established to help them.

So taken was he with that operation that he immediately pledged to donate $1,000 a month to it indefinitely, telling The Inquirer, “A thousand dollars a month isn’t much…I think I can manage.”

Throughout, he was unfailingly friendly to all. At the end of one exhausting day, I managed to photograph him sprawled on hotel furniture before his handlers shooed me away.

At the end of our time in Africa, the reporter that I was traveling with was happy to be dispatched to Afghanistan for post-9/11 coverage. I declined my editor’s offer to join him there; I just wanted to get home to my children.

Our story wasn’t published until the following year, at about the same time the Sixers traded Mutombo to the New Jersey Nets. I wondered if Mutombo’s dream would ever be realized; he himself had complained that fellow NBA players he expected to contribute had helped very little.

A few years ago, I was watching late-night television when a story about the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital came on, and I got the chills. It had taken six years from the groundbreaking to the opening and $23 million of his own money, but he’d gotten it done.

Ten years after we accompanied him to the Congo, he’d also managed to open a primary school that he named after his father, the Samuel Mutombo Institute of Science & Entrepreneurship. Over the years, Mutombo was recognized for countless humanitarian efforts, awarded two honorary doctorates, and was lauded in the 2007 State of the Union address by President George W. Bush.

I thought about how Mutombo labored to create the hospital when it was announced two years ago that he had brain cancer and hoped that somehow, he would overcome that obstacle, too.

He could not, but instead left a tremendous legacy by helping thousands of his countrymen. I may not have realized it at the time, but that trip offered a bit of hope for humanity at one of the lowest points in my own nation’s history, and I am grateful to Dikembe Mutombo for that.

April Saul, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is a former photojournalist at The Inquirer.