Citizen Akoy Read online

  “I’m convinced that the greatest basketball player in the next one hundred years will be a Dinka tribesman originally from southern Sudan. Size and grace will win the day. Akoy Agau will be mentioned as one of the building blocks in this history. Here is his amazing story. Magic abounds.”

  —Leigh Montville, author of Manute: The Center of Two Worlds and Sting Like a Bee

  “Akoy’s amazing journey from refugee to basketball star isn’t just about sports. It’s a story of growing up, transcending race, and pursuing dreams, and Marantz tells it well.”

  —Henry Cordes, staff writer for the Omaha World-Herald and author of Unbeatable and Devaney

  “The antidote to anti-immigrant rhetoric, Citizen Akoy tells the vivid story of the refugee as the hero of our time, one Akoy Agau, a teenage basketball star who becomes an ambassador for sports-crazy white Nebraska. Thrilling—a must-read for anyone excited by what it takes to be an American today.”

  —Terese Svoboda, author of Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet

  Citizen Akoy

  Basketball and the Making of a South Sudanese American

  Steve Marantz

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln and London

  © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover image © Rebecca Gratz / Omaha World Herald.

  Author photo by Hank Shrier

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Marantz, Steve.

  Title: Citizen Akoy: basketball and the making of a South Sudanese American / Steve Marantz.

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018016699

  ISBN 9781496203229 (hardback)

  ISBN 9781496212580 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496212597 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496212603 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Agau, Akoy, 1994– | Basketball players—United States—Biography. | Omaha Central High School (Omaha, Neb.)—Basketball—History. | Sudanese Americans—Biography. | Refugees—South Sudan—Biography. | BISAC: SPORTS & RECREATION / Basketball. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies. | SOCIAL SCIENCE / Emigration & Immigration.

  Classification: LCC GV885 .M288 2019 | DDC 796.323092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018016699

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  To Alison, my muse and light

  No one wants to become a refugee. No one should have to endure this humiliating and arduous ordeal. Yet, millions do. Even one refugee forced to flee, one refugee forced to return to danger is one too many.

  —Ban Ki-moon, UN Secretary-General

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction: Refugee

  1. Adaw

  2. First Thanksgiving

  3. Street of Dreams

  4. Prophecy

  5. Central

  6. Trust

  7. Stardom

  8. To Absent Moms

  9. “True Faith and Allegiance”

  10. @ZerotheHeroAkoy

  11. Families

  12. Perfection

  13. Basketball and Business

  14. Temptation and Decision

  15. Standing Bear and Brando

  16. Dynasty Blues

  17. Four!

  18. Spring Prom

  19. Repatriation

  20. Getting It Right

  21. Beyond

  Postscript: Pop

  Notes

  Index

  Illustrations

  1. Akoy Agau at the age of six

  2. The Dinka of South Sudan

  3. Cone-shaped hut with thatched roof in South Sudan

  4. Mason School Apartments in 2016

  5. Scott Hammer

  6. Central High School, west entrance

  7. Manute Bol with Duoth Kuon and Both Kuon

  8. Eric Behrens

  9. Nebraska Class A state champions 2010

  10. Central Eagles giving the “Eagle wings” signal in 2011

  11. Akoy and siblings at naturalization ceremony

  12. Akoy as a junior

  13. Akoy’s signature roar

  14. Tra-Deon Hollins

  15. Akoy as a senior

  16. Coach Eric Behrens and Akoy Agau

  17. Akoy holds aloft a souvenir net

  18. Akoy Agau and Deandre Hollins-­Johnson

  19. Akoy wearing No. 0

  20. The 2012–13 Central team

  21. Akoy Agau and Lotte Sjulin

  22. Koang Doluony

  23. Pulaski Park

  24. Akoy and his siblings at church

  25. Mabel and Benjamin Marantz

  26. Akoy at graduation from Georgetown

  27. Akoy playing for SMU

  Acknowledgments

  This story owes, first of all, to Akoy Agau, who was the primary source of information and whose cooperation was beyond generous. Just as instrumental was Akoy’s mother, Adaw Makier, who reconstructed her refugee journey with pride and sadness. Akoy’s father, Madut Agau, and Akoy’s siblings were politely supportive of the process. I am thankful for their help and deeply respectful of their struggles and accomplishments.

  My thanks to Akoy’s confidantes: Scott, Leisha, and Trae Hammer; Dave, Ann, and Charlotte “Lotte” Sjulin; and Tarir “Ty” Gatuoch. Thanks also to Akoy’s former Omaha Central High coaches and teammates: Jay Ball, Eric Behrens, Paulino Gomez, Tra-Deon Hollins, Jay Landstrom, Dominique McKinzie, K. J. Scott, Tre’Shawn Thurman, and Edward Vinson. Former Central coaches Rick Behrens, Chad Burns, and Herb Welling contributed, as did opposing coaches Bruce Chubick and Tim Cannon. Jay Landstrom’s video highlight reels were an archival source.

  More thanks to current and former Central High administrators and teachers Bette Ball, Edward Bennett, Keith Bigsby, Linda Ganzel, Gaylord “Doc” Moller, Rod Mullen, Paul Nielson, Denise Powers, Tim Shipman, Jen Stastny, and Michelle Synowiecki, as well as former Central students Emily Beck, Jacob Bigelow, Changkuoth Gatkuoth (formerly Lol Kuek), Henry Hawbaker, and Jen Rooney.

  Central High Foundation executive director Michele Roberts offered her memories and resources, with the able assistance of communications manager Josh Bucy. Alumni historian Jim Wigton provided archival material on the struggle to save Central in the 1970s.

  South Sudanese and African perspectives came from Omaha Talons founder Koang Doluony, Bernadita and Nancy Peter, Gutluak Kang of the Refugee Empowerment Center, and attorney Amadu Swaray. Institutional viewpoints came from Susan Mayberger of Omaha Public Schools and Ryan Overfield and Lacey Studnicka of Lutheran Family Services of Nebraska. Mabel Boyd and Raydelle Meehan offered a history of the Mason School. Central alum A’Jamal Byndon offered an African American perspective.

  Interviewees from media included Mike Sautter, who founded the website Nebraska High School Hoops, and Thor Tripp of KETV 7. Ryan Spring and Joe Mantegna at Blair Academy and Stu Vetter at Montrose Christian Academy were interviewed. Doug Goltz at Falls City Sacred Heart provided hoops history at his school.

  Media sources included the Albany Times-Union, Alternet.org, Anderson Independent-Mail, Breitbart News, espn.com, Grand Island Independent, Huffington Post, Idaho Statesman, Lincoln Journal Star, Louisville Courier Journal, MaxPreps.com, New Sudan Vision, New York Times, Omaha World-Herald, Rivals.com, and Washington Post. Additional sources were the Central High Register and Central High O-Books from the late 1990s through 2013 and Leo Adam Biga’s blog, My Insi
de Stories.

  Books included The Dinka of Sudan, by Francis Mading Deng (Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, 1984); The Middle of Everywhere, by Mary Pipher (Orlando: Harcourt, 2002); I Am a Man, by Joe Starita (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008); What Is the What, by Dave Eggers (New York: Vintage Books, 2007); Play Their Hearts Out, by George Dohrmann (New York: Ballantine Books, 2012); Manute, by Leigh Montville (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993); LeBron James: The Rise of a Star, by David Lee Morgan Jr. (Cleveland: Gray and Company, 2003); Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me, by Robert Lindsey (New York: Random House, 1994); Brando’s Smile, by Susan Mizruchi (New York: Norton, 2014); Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language, by Esther Schor (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016); Notes from My Travels, by Angelina Jolie (New York: Pocket Books, 2003); Running for My Life, by Lopez Lomong (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2012); Of Beetles and Angels, by Mawi Asgedom (New York: Little, Brown, 2001); and Breaking Cardinal Rules, by Katina Powell (Indianapolis: IBJ Book Publishing, 2015).

  Karina Longworth’s podcast “You Must Remember This” educated me on the Hollywood blacklist. Refugee data, reports, and analyses came from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees; the Congressional Research Service; the Office of Refugee Resettlement; the Departments of State, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services, and the Migration Policy Institute. Bronwen Manby provided a study on nationality rights in Sudan and South Sudan and a follow-up assessment.

  Special thanks to Central High history teacher Scott Wilson for connecting pertinent faculty to me, critiquing my first draft, and inspiring students lucky enough to get a seat in his classroom.

  My son, Alex Marantz, read the first draft and helped me shape the content. My wife, Alison Arnett, daughter Nora Marantz, son-in-law Luke Gaudreau, and daughter-in-law Rose Heydt provided moral support. The arrival of grandson Harris Gaudreau was a reminder that birth—be it a baby or a story—is both an agonizing and a blessed event.

  Introduction

  Refugee

  History and hate chased Akoy Agau from his native Sudan as a little boy. He came to America as a refugee, and among what he learned was basketball. At Omaha Central High School, in love with the game, Akoy chased history and a place to belong. He came of age at the dawn of social media and with it posted a saga of hoops, hope, and salvation.

  Nebraska and grassroots basketball gave him his audience, though the audience might well have included refugees and displaced persons worldwide had they been privileged to watch one of their own. As a six-year-old in Cairo, Egypt, Akoy was among an estimated twenty million refugees outcast from or displaced within their native lands on the occasion of the first World Refugee Day, June 20, 2001. Inaugurated by the UN High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR), its purpose was to recognize those who, as defined by law, were unable or unwilling to return to their home countries because of a “well-founded fear of persecution” due to race, political opinion, religion, nationality, or membership in a particular social group.

  “Refugees are the great survivors of our time,” said UN secretary-general Kofi Annan. “Many overcome immense hardship during years of exile, finally returning to their devastated countries to rebuild shattered communities. Others can never go home, and must forge new lives in strange lands. All of them deserve our encouragement, support and respect.”

  Annan spoke on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which created a legal framework for refugee rights. That same day U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell honored several south Sudanese refugees at his Washington DC office. Powell’s guests were “Lost Boys,” so called because many had been conscripted against their will, orphaned, and subjected to peril and hardship. “They are representative of millions of people around the world who have been separated from their homes, separated from their loved ones and may never see their loved ones again, or people who are displaced within their countries,” Powell said. “It is a worldwide tragedy that we have this consequence of war and other tragedies that cause people to be so displaced.”

  On the second World Refugee Day, in June 2002, seven-year-old Akoy was in Maryland as Powell honored refugee women in the nation’s capital. “To look into the face of a refugee woman is to peer into the very eyes of the exodus,” he said. “Mirrored in them are memories of fear and flight, of devastation and despair. But when those extraordinary eyes look back at you, they are also the eyes of hope, and surely they are the eyes of a heroine.” Of the twenty-two million refugees counted by UNHCR, Powell said, eighteen million were women and children:

  We have seen it again and again, from Cambodia to Colombia, from Kosovo to Congo, from Liberia to Bosnia, from Sierra Leone to East Timor to Afghanistan. Wherever tyranny and terror, conflict and chaos, force families to flee their homelands, it is the women—it is the women—who become the most vulnerable to the worst kind of violence. And is it also the women who play the most vital roles in their families’ survival.

  For them, every new day brings life or death, burdens and dangers. Most often it falls to refugee women to provide the family’s income and to provide an education for the children. It is most often up to them to search for fuel, food, water, and medicine—the very bare essentials of life. They risk bullets, land mines and rape to provide the little that their families need just to survive.

  Akoy was new to English, so he might not have grasped Powell’s comments had he heard them. Then again, he did not need the U.S. secretary of state to tell him about his mother. She had escaped Sudan with him and his brother while his father was jailed. She had found a place to live in Cairo and had worked menial jobs to buy subsistence rations so they could eat. She had helped his father get to Cairo and had given birth to two more children. She had gotten him to America. Life would hurtle Akoy forward, and no matter where and how it sent him, he always would be his mother’s son, in her debt.

  As a teen, Akoy courted attention with the dignity and discipline of his role model, LeBron James, and with the artifice and cool of his alter ego, Ferris Bueller. He was so bold—or brazen—as to prophesize four state championships. He became the sum of his family, faith, and education and of his appetite for basketball, social media, and drama. Indeed he tweeted two days before his seventeenth birthday in 2011, “I need to be an actor!”

  By then the global population of refugees and displaced persons had reached 44 million, on its way to 68.5 million in 2017. Nations and entire regions shuddered and convulsed while Akoy grew tall and strong. His parents found him a place to live—Nebraska!—and then he found a place to belong, on Facebook and Twitter, above the rim, and in the record book.

  1

  Adaw

  Akoy Agau was among nearly two million south Sudanese who fled their country from 1983 through 2004. His mother, Adaw Bak Madut Makier, was his guide and protector.

  Adaw was born in 1974 outside the town of Wau, on the river Jur, in what was then the south of Sudan. She grew up on a farm and was “in the middle” of thirteen children who spoke Dinka, their tribal language, and Arabic. Ebony, tall, and slender, the Dinka were the largest tribe in south Sudan, known for “initiation” rites that scarred the foreheads and removed six lower teeth of their young men and for their devotion to cattle, of which they were said to be “loving slaves.” Central to their culture were the concepts of cieng and dheeng, or unity and dignity.

  The Dinka were one of the tribes in south Sudan who practiced Christianity and traditional beliefs and were long oppressed by Arab Muslims to the north. Arab Muslims had carried out slave raids on the southern tribes before Britain colonized Sudan in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century under British rule, light-skinned Arab Muslims segregated themselves from dark-skinned Christian and animist tribes, sowing division and conflict. The Republic of the Sudan, about one-fourth the geographic size of the United States, with nineteen major ethnic groups and about six hundred ethnic subgroups speaking more than one hundred languages and dialects, shed British con
trol in 1956. The British transferred power to Arab Muslims, who in turn imposed Arab customs and beliefs on the population of 10.5 million. A toxic stew of racism, ethnic feuds, religious fundamentalism, and anarchy erupted into what is known as the First Civil War.

  A truce declared in 1972 coincided with Adaw’s early years. In the south it was a welcome period of peace and autonomy from Arabism. “We used to live by my [maternal] grandma because my grandma loved my father—they worked together and tended cows together; he was like her real son,” Adaw recalled. “We stayed in my grandma’s house and my mom’s house. They were thatched and round with cone roofs. My dad grew the seed for both houses; he grew the corn because he was the only man in both houses. . . . We made our own peanut butter and fished with our dad. We gathered wood to cook our fish and ate it right there at the river. We didn’t need to eat at home.”

  Cattle were integral to the social and spiritual values of the Dinka and provided many of their needs, starting with milk, which they considered the best and most noble of foods. Dried dung was used as fuel and fertilizer; urine as disinfectant; hides as bedding skins; and horns as snuffboxes, trumpets, and spoons. As a condition of marriage, a Dinka groom was expected to present cattle as gifts, or “bridewealth,” to the bride’s family.

  “My dad had a lot of cows,” Adaw recalled. “Also sheep and goats and a lot of chickens. If we needed some eggs, we got it from our farm. We got our own milk. I drank a lot of milk. At night he herded the cows back to the barn.”

  Adaw remembered her youth as uncomplicated and nurturing: “We didn’t go to school. There was a school in the city very far away. A couple of cars went from the city to the village, but people just walked mostly. When you go to the city, you don’t worry about putting your kids in school. You go to buy things, like a skirt. Back then they don’t care so much about clothes—you could walk naked. You buy what you needed and walked back to the village. . . . There was a big love around us from my grandma and my dad and mom. Life was good.”