(ThyBlackMan.com) For the fifth consecutive NBA season, the Most Valuable Player award was earned by someone born outside the U.S. Philadelphia 76ers center Joel Embiid has emerged as one of the best NBA players in the league and has the hardware to prove it as he was recently awarded the NBA MVP for the 2022-23 regular season. Most sports fans are aware that Joel Embiid was born in Africa, but more specifically Yaoundé, Cameroon, and left home to pursue a basketball career in the U.S. as a teenager. In interviews following his MVP award announcement, Embiid referenced Africa and what his individual accomplishment means for African people on multiple occasions. Let’s contrast Embiid’s references to Africa to those of history-making African luminaries:
Embiid: “There’s a reason why these are the best basketball players in the world. And to be sitting here and feel like I won something as far as the Most Valuable Player is great. But then again, it’s also part of my story because I’ve always felt like I was a role model — especially to my Cameroonian people and my African people — and I feel like, just looking at my story, they can look at it and be like, ‘Wow, he did it.’”
Kwame Nkrumah, former President of Ghana and Co-President of Guinea: “For this end Africa needs a new type of citizen, a dedicated, modest, honest and informed man. A man submerges self in service to the nation and mankind. A man who abhors greed and detests vanity. A new type of man whose humility is his strength and whose integrity is his greatness”
Embiid: “We don’t have a lot of opportunities back in Africa in general to get to this point. But improbable doesn’t mean impossible, and you can accomplish anything you set your mind to. As long as you believe in it, and you know, keep working hard, anything can happen.”
Ahmed Sékou Touré, former president of Guinea: “People of Africa, from now on you are reborn in history, because you mobilize yourself in the struggle and because the struggle before you restores to your own eyes and renders to you, justice in the eyes of the world.”
Embiid: “Being a role model and mainly to my African people, that’s the best of all, because I want us to succeed. For us to usually achieve something, we have to work twice as hard as everybody else, and I want them to understand that we can do it. It’s possible. You just got to be a little bit lucky, but it’s possible. If you get this opportunity, you got to just keep going and believing your goals and it’s going to happen.”
Amilcar Cabral, founder of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde: “We are for African unity, on a regional or continental scale, inasfar as it is necessary for the progress of the African peoples, and in order to guarantee their security and the continuity of this progress.”
It is not surprising that Joel Embiid’s comments after winning a major individual award in his profession would focus on Africa, his home. His words in comparison to legendary African freedom fighters does show the importance of political education and that even if he was born in Africa and spent most of his life there that Embiid has an analysis on African “success” that needs a lot of tweaking. Even with his busy schedule, Joel Embiid would benefit from attending an African Liberation Day event this month as would all Africans to learn and understand what African liberation entails.
Staff Writer; Mark Hines
