Can basketball heal South Sudan?

THE PEOPLENBANBA of South Sudan are among the tallest in the world. That helps explain why several of them have had stellar careers playing basketball abroad. One is Luol Deng, a former all-star in America’s National Basketball Association (). Mr Deng, who retired in 2019 after 15 seasons on the hardwood for the Chicago Bulls and other teams in the , took over as coach of South Sudan’s national team in November. Now he is using the sport to try to mend his war-torn motherland.In December, for the first time in its history, South Sudan won enough games to qualify for the African basketball championship, known as AfroBasket. That is no small feat for a team that is relatively new to international competition. For five of the ten years that South Sudan has existed as a country, it has been beset by civil war. Of its 12-member squad, all but one player grew up abroad.