Saturday morning in South Africa, Portland Trail Blazers forward Al-Farouq Aminu will be one of 19 NBA players playing in the league’s first ever game on the African continent.
“To play for Team Africa and this being the first NBA game in Africa, it’s amazing,” Aminu said in a conference call from Johannesburg on Thursday morning. “You just hear a lot of people saying ‘welcome home’ and ‘this is the motherland.’ I feel like everybody has a different connection to it—to Africa.”
Aminu, the son of a Nigerian immigrant father, Aboubakar and a mother, Anjirlic, from Queens, New York, is making his “sixth or seventh” trip to the continent and his second trip to South Africa.
Aminu also brought Anjirlic with him on the trip and it’s her first visit to Africa. He was there in 2012 and since, the basketball infrastructure has greatly improved.
“It’s so much more infrastructure that is up,” Aminu said. “I think we were playing in outdoor courts last time and now we are in indoor courts that are very nice. It just changed from top to bottom. It’s running like a well oiled machine by now. I guess that’s why they’re able to play an NBA game now.”
“You can just see how it helped all these kids immensely,” he said. “And they’re able to flourish because of it. It’s beautiful to see.”
Aminu will play once again for the Nigerian National Team later this summer in Afrobasket in Tunisia.
Aminu sees reflections of his father and grandfather all around him.
“Being able to push the basketball in the continent is nice,” he said. “My heritage is from here and being able to grow the game here and help kids that probably come from the same place my Dad comes from and my Grandfather came from realize their dreams, it’s amazing.”
Aminu’s father came to the United States to attend Morehouse College in Georgia, he met Aminu’s mother and he eventually stayed.
His father wasn’t much of a basketball fan, he preferred soccer. But there was always one player he hoped that his son would emulate on the court.
“He would used to say, ‘you have to shake like The Dream when I was younger.’,” referring to the Nation’s most storied basketball player, if not their most storied athlete, Hakeem “The Dream” Olajuwon.
Being Nigerian and Muslim, Aminu saw in Olajuwon a player he could identify with. And after he and his Dallas Mavericks team were eliminated from the playoffs in April by the Houston Rockets, he met his idol for the first time.
“It was crazy that The Dream knew exactly who I was,” he remembers. “For him to recognize me, he said my last name. After the playoffs were done he came on the court and I was able to shake his hand.”
Aminu is also a descendant from a line of Nigerian kings.
“My grandfather and my great grandfather were both kings,” he said. “Last year I was able to go to the city in Nigeria where my Dad is from. And I was able to see the mosque that they built where my grandfather was buried.”
During the week the group is doing far more than just basketball related activities like clinics and camps before the game on Saturday. He’s looking forward to visiting an orphanage in Johannesburg and one later in the month when he visits Ethiopia.
“I’ve been wanting to do that for a moment now,” he said. “I want to see how the infrastructure is and how it is ran.”
Basketball brought him to the continent of his father once again and he’s not taking the experiences off the court for granted.
“It’s just a lot of good things that people are doing and you just can see it,” he said.
