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The Basketball Africa League’s Maiden Season

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Well, that was fun!

 Sunday the Basketball Africa League finals, held in Kigali, capped off a two-week bubble tournament as the BAL played its maiden season. There was pageantry, entertainment, on-court feats, and more, and I congratulate the entire team for getting this much-delayed first season off the ground amidst the global pandemic.

As many of you know, I’m working on basketball diplomacy in Africa via my role as co-director of the Basketball Diplomacy in Africa Oral History Project at the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (SOAS University of London). In 2020, we were able to publish our first tranche of oral history interview transcripts with some 18 different stakeholders from around the African basketball world. And this year, we’re working to add another trove of interviews (stay tuned!). While this work is pegged to The BAL, it does not focus exclusively on the league, a historic joint venture between a U.S. professional league (NBA) and an international federation (FIBA). Still, the recent BAL tournament proved fertile ground for some of our initial findings and to enrich the conversation with colleagues around the world through a series of informal Clubhouse discussions on #hoopsdiplomacy in Africa.

Its still early days and thus hard to make hard, concrete assessments of The BAL’s impact. But here are the first three of my key takeaways from the last two weeks of basketball in Africa include:  

1. There’s a richness of cultural and technical exchange that occurs on and off the court.

Reading up on the teams, following some of the coaches and other experts in/around African basketball, and discussing the tournament and its implications for the continent’s basketball hopes at large really reinforced this aspect. I’ve created a (growing) Twitter list on Basketball Africa that you can subscribe to for a quick-to-follow feed.

A special note to follow Coach Liz Mills, who heads up the Kenyan men’s national team, and has contributed helpful insights on key African players and different team dynamics – helpful ahead of this summer’s Olympic and AfroBasket tournaments.

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2. Basketball and The BAL are helping to drive a pan-African identity.

This is something that came up during our May 25 Clubhouse chat with Angola Men’s Team Coach Will Voigt, as he spoke to how the game fostered a sense of African community and camaraderie in ways he’s not seen in Europe, Asia, or the Americas. Sixty years after FIBA Africa was established (1961), basketball is demonstrating how it can play a role crafting identity, just as football and the CAF did in the late 1950s, as Dr J Simon Rofe has noted.  

3. Although The BAL’s on-court product right now features men’s professional teams, it is still working to ensure that women are a full part of the league.

As evidenced by the three female referees who officiated throughout the tournament, including Ndeye Aissatou Diagne of Senegal, who was on-court for the opening tip. The tournament DJ who set the tone was Ivy Awino (Poizon Ivy). Surely there’s more on tap as The BAL presses forward into its second year of competition, one that will hopefully be a full season-long competition rather than last month’s compressed BALble tourney.