THE Dikebe Mutombo he moved to the USA at the age of 21 in 1988 on a special university scholarship aimed at refugees, without speaking a word of English. But he spoke five other languages and dialects, he had lived in poverty in his dark skin and felt at the service of his fellow men. He enrolled at Georgetown College in Washington to study medicine, but his tall boy (2.18m) quickly sent him to the basketball court, following in his footsteps Patrick Ewin and side by side with him Alonzo Mourning.
The Hoyas, coached by John Thompsonwas the “great school of centers”. The young Congolese excelled early on in rebounding and blocking, but did not care much for the ball. His mind was turned to the black shadows of the black continent and his special homeland, then called Zaire.
Once Mutombo signed his first professional NBA contract, worth €12.4 million, to wear the jersey of the Denver Nuggets from 1991 to 1996, he set about planning a better future for the community where he was raised. The Democratic Republic of Congo is plagued by corruption, poverty, illiteracy, hunger, disease, and civil strife that often starts with illegal mining of precious metals. According to a recent survey, the country ranks 179 out of 191 on the UN Human Development Index. Congolese refugees who sought a better life in third countries exceed 600,000.
The institution
The giant athlete was 31 when he cut the ribbon on the newly formed Dikebe Mutombo Foundation, aimed at improving living conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 1997. His first concern was the foundation of a €26m hospital in the capital Kinshasa. He offered 3 million euros from his personal fortune, but local bureaucracy blocked the project for three years and the government threatened to confiscate the land. Mutombo assured the worried paper-collars that he had no political ambitions and paid out of his own pocket to evict encroachers who had rushed to cultivate the plot.
The modern hospital was finally opened in 2007, ten years after the original announcement, after Mutombo first donated 13 million euros for its completion. The Biaba Marie Mutombo Clinic, named after the benefactor’s forgiven mother and has 300 beds, was built in an impoverished area of Kinshasa, where 2 million people live in conditions of absolute poverty. Of all the countries on the planet, only Chad has a worse child mortality rate than the Democratic Republic of Congo. The vast central African country has a population of 110 million.
In 2020 the Mutombo Foundation started the construction of a modern school to honor the memory of the basketball player’s father who passed away in 2003. The Samuel Mutombo Institute of Arts and Sciences is located in the town of Buji-Megi. Working-age literacy is estimated at 76%, but those Congolese who grew up with guns in their hands during the civil wars of the late 1990s remained illiterate. They were trained only in the use of machine guns.
Out of the NBA after 2004 and rich, having made 115 million euros from basketball in an 18-year exciting career with eight All-Star Games and four Defensive Player of the Year titles, Dikebe Mutombo devoted more and more time to charity. He became a global ambassador for Special Olympics and a member of the international board of the organization for children with mental retardation. He actively participated in the polio vaccination campaign and helped in the care of the sick. He took over the global campaign of the Ask the Doctor platform to provide medical advice and care for patients from all over the world. He joined a Washington foundation to defend the US constitution, of which he became a citizen in 2006. He participated in US State Department peacekeeping missions in war zones in Africa such as South Sudan. She created a cooperative through which Congolese women trade the coffee they grow in foreign markets.
The cancer
Dikebe Mutombo, recipient of countless awards and honors for his philanthropic and basketball activities, holder of university degrees in linguistics and diplomacy, was diagnosed with brain cancer in October 2022 and died last Monday at the age of just 58. The NBA community and democratic America as a whole with him first Barack Obama they bid him farewell with deep emotion. And they shared stories that remind us of the greatness of the man.
In 2016 a destitute woman in the Congo gave birth to triplets prematurely and the family desperately asked to be put in touch with the Mutombo Foundation, hoping it would save four lives. Mutombo ordered that the hospitalization be completely free and that the unemployed father be hired at the hospital. When the mother was later asked what name she gave the babies, she answered with three words: “Mutobo, Mutobo and Mutobo”. The memory of the superman Dikebe Mutombo Bolondo Mukamba Jean
-Zac Wamutobo will be immortalized in the slums of the entire world.
He raised seven children
In his personal life, Mutombo adopted four nieces of his wife who had been orphaned, while he also had three children of his own. “My father will forever be my hero,” Mutombo’s son Ryan wrote in his emotional farewell post. “Not because he helped millions of souls, but simply because he cared. He was the purest soul I ever met. He loved his fellow men with every cell of his being. I came to think of him as superhuman. My father was salt and light and it’s time for him to rest.”
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