On the NBA | Africa gains attention around the league

With the NBA season over, players, coaches and administrators who aren't obsessed with the June 28 draft have scattered to the four winds. But a new breeze is sending many from around the league to Africa, a continent long neglected, for both humanitarian missions and an increasing emphasis on potential player development.

The National Basketball Players' Association announced Wednesday that it will send a 10-player contingent to Kenya next month, partnering with Feed the Children, to help distribute 11 million pounds of rice to try to feed 1 million people. The league's Basketball Without Borders program will once again be in South Africa in late summer, where it has sent players to clinics for many years.

And the continuing efforts of Cavaliers forward Ira Newble to draw attention to the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan will continue, with Newble traveling to that area next month.

The union has made humanitarian trips to Kenya - where, according to Feed the Children president Larry Jones, unemployment runs at 50 percent, and about 500 people each day die from AIDS - for the last couple of years, working with former NBA player Kermit Washington's Project Hope. This distribution, an in-kind donation from the Republic of Taiwan, is its biggest endeavor to date.

"We do a lot of events during our season that, a lot of times, are either required by the NBA or through our teams," union president Derek Fisher said. "And an event of this magnitude is something that we're choosing to do separately from our teams. . . . To do this type of event is refreshing to us."

The union did not specific dates of the trip or names of the players who will be going because of the unstable political environment in Kenya, where a bomb blast in Nairobi last week killed one man and injured 37.

Billy Hunter, the executive director of the Players' Association, said that the union might expand its efforts to other countries such as Angola in the near future.

Newble got the signatures of 11 of his Cavaliers teammates on a petition last month calling attention to China's role in supplying economic aid to the Sudanese government, which has been killing and uprooting the non-Arab farming populace in Darfur for the last five years. China's policy has added resonance given that that country will host the 2008 Summer Olympics.

NBA commissioner David Stern said during the Finals that he would not discourage players from taking more active roles in political issues, saying there is "a proud tradition of people being encouraged to speak their mind, unless they're criticizing the officials or the commissioner."

But Newble's efforts could cause problems with his union, which is establishing business ties in China. The union recently made a deal with one of that country's largest conglomerates, China CITIC, to serve as a conduit to bring African American culture to that region.

Hunter said he supports Newble's efforts but has no plans to sever the union's new economic ties with China.

"With a corporation as large as CITIC, one would be foolish not to look favorably on that relationship," Hunter said. "I think what happens is, sometimes it's more important to be inside the tent than to be outside. We're sensitive to what's happening in Darfur, but I'm not so certain you can lay it all at the feet of the Chinese. One has to understand the geopolitical issues that are occurring.

"When it comes down to it, in Sudan, it's about oil. It ain't about nothing else. It's about who controls the oil. So sometimes I think we have to be careful when people kind of raise the flag."

But the new news about Africa, to paraphrase longtime reporter and activist Charlayne Hunter Gault, is not just about suffering and deprivation.

Native Africans such as Dallas Mavericks director of scouting Amadou Gallo Fall are gradually raising the profile of the continent as a potential hotbed of NBA players, with the hopes of giving African players the same chances to use basketball as a way out as European, South American and Asian players have had in recent years.

Fall developed the SEEDS Academy in his native Senegal in 2003 to provide educational assistance to boys whose basketball potential could land them athletic scholarships in the United States. Senegal has already produced three NBA players, including Mavericks center DeSagana Diop.

SEEDS has already helped place a handful of young African players in U.S. high schools. The academy is the subject of an forthcoming documentary film Hoopland, coproduced by Anne Buford, sister of Spurs general manager R.C. Buford, a champion of the program, along with Cavaliers assistant GM Lance Blanks.

"We realized we were not going to have a meaningful impact until we created something over there," Fall said. "We tell the kids that 99 percent of them will not be in the NBA or any professional league. But they can guarantee they will be successful in life. . . . We just want to create opportunities. . . . I really think that when the infrastructure is just at a somewhat acceptable level, the sky's the limit."

Talent pool:

The Mavs' DeSagana Diop is from Senegal, one of three NBA players from that country.

Standing firm:

Union boss Billy Hunter supports Ira Newble, but says business with China will continue.

Speaking up:

Ira Newble of the Cavs has alerted fellow players to China's role in the Darfur genocide.