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.