Vanity Fair
The Uplifter DIKEMBE MUTOMBO
Center, Shot-Blocking Specialist, Chairman and President of the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation
July 27, 2025
By David Kamp, Photographed by Mark Seliger
He'll always be grouped with Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning in the pantheon of terrific big men who played for Georgetown University's Hoyas in the 1980s; but Dikembe Mutombo has been, in every way, the biggest. The seven-foot-two-inch four-time N.B.A. Defensive Player of the Year, currently with the Houston Rockets in the twilight of his pro career, was born and raised in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This month in Kinshasa, the country's capital, he'll preside over the dedication of the $29 million, state-of-the-art Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital (named for his late mother) and the realization, at last, of a decade-long push by his foundation to improve the poor state of health care in his homeland. A Pan-African altruist, Mutombo has also devoted much of his attention and wealth to South Africa, enlisting fellow N.B.A veterans (including Ewing and Mourning) to provide material relief and hold basketball clinics for underprivileged children there. Nearly everyone who has played in the N.B.A. in the last 15 years knows what it's like to get "rejected" by the ball-swatting, finger-wagging iconoclast known as Deke, but thousands more people, from Kinshasa to Soweto, have felt his embrace.
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