One Republican president, George W. Bush, honored Dikembe Mutombo at his 2007 State of the Union address at the Capitol, saying, “Dikembe became a star in the NBA and a citizen of the United States, but he never forgot the land of his birth, or his duty to share his blessings with others.”
It wasn’t just the sports world that mourned the death of Mutombo this week at the age of 58. Mutombo, who had become a U.S. citizen the year before Bush’s public praise, was known for both his unique basketball skills and his humanitarian and philanthropic efforts in this country, and especially in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo. Through the efforts of the NBA’s first global ambassador, a hospital and school were built there.
His obituary in The New York Times recounted that moment when a president recognized the sports star. Mutombo was awarded an academic scholarship to Georgetown, where he double majored in linguistics and diplomacy instead of his original pre-med dream; he spoke French, English, Spanish, Portuguese and five African languages.
What a full life, in just 58 years.
I wonder, though, if another former Republican president gave that stellar American’s death a second thought.
Instead, the current GOP nominee for the office was using Mutombo’s birthplace and the people who hail from that African country as villains at campaign stops on the Donald Trump hate tour. I doubt Trump knows much about any country in Africa, but he’s canny enough to realize conjuring up lurid images he seems to have gleaned from a Tarzan movie would scare up a few votes by stoking fear of the other, particularly if that other consists of nameless hordes of Black people, invading a white, suburban haven.
“They come from, from the Congo in Africa,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Wisconsin this week, repeating what has become a familiar refrain. “Many people from the Congo. I don’t know what that is.” It’s always Scandinavian countries such as Norway and Denmark that draw his admiration, while he heaps insults on the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America and Africa.
