“Bigger than basketball”: After qualifying for the Olympics for the first time, South Sudan’s basketball team are on a mission to make their troubled young country proud.
The players come from the United States, Australia, Canada, some starting out life in refugee camps.
They know little about their country, as their parents fled during the Sudan conflict of 1983-2005, one of the longest civil wars on record, that eventually paved the way to South Sudan’s independence in 2011.
But this “bunch of refugees”, as Wenyen Gabriel describes them, is determined to write one of the rare positive chapters in the history of the youngest nation in the world.
Just two years after the heady days of independence, South Sudan was plunged into its own catastrophic civil war from 2013-2018 that killed about 400,000 people and displaced millions.
Today, the country of about 11 million people is still plagued by political …