NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama grapples with the times we’re living in, even as his career takes off.
Victor Wembanyama, commonly known as Wemby, is the 7’4” French basketball phenom who began playing for the San Antonio Spurs in the 2023-2024 season. His skills, height, personality, intelligence, and good looks have led many to crown him the new “Face of the NBA.” Several current players have shared this informal title, depending on who you talk to, but all of them—Steph Curry, Kevin Durant, and most of all, LeBron James—are nearing the end of their careers. Wemby has probably been most often described as their successor, or at least one of them, and he’s already a global superstar with 6.2 million Instagram followers.
Is it possible that Wemby might someday become the Conscience of the NBA as well? There are signs that he might, and his enormous global following makes him hugely influential.
The Spurs played the Minnesota Timberwolves shortly after ICE officers shot Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, and the press asked him to respond in his postgame interview.
“PR has tried,” he said, “but I’m not going to sit up here and give something politically correct. Everyday I wake up and see the news and I’m horrified. I think it’s crazy that some people might make it seem like it’s acceptable, the murder of civilians, acceptable. I read the news and I’m sometimes asking very deep questions about my own life, but I’m conscious also that saying everything that’s on my mind would have a cost that’s too great for me right now, so I’d rather not get into too many details. I know that I’m a foreigner here.”
Wemby is French, but he has Congolese roots on his father Félix Wembanyama’s side. He has said that he is learning more about the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the most wartorn, long suffering, and long exploited countries in the world, particularly in conversation with fellow Spur Bismack Biyombo, who hails from Lubumbashi, the capital of Congo’s most coveted and mineral rich province, Haut-Katanga. Congo’s independence hero and first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, died trying to defend Katanga against Belgian-engineered secession in 1961.
Congo is the most resource-rich nation on earth, but its people are among its poorest. Bismack Biyombo pledged his entire 2021-2022 salary to building a hospital there.
Wemby excelled in school, studying earth and life sciences and social and economic sciences. He is so known as an avid reader that the San Antonio Library features an exhibit that says “Read Like Wemby” in Spurs colors, turquoise, pink, and orange, with a companion presentation online, and it’s reported that his favorites are flying off the shelves. In June, Town and Country Magazine published A Guide to Victor Wembanyama’s Favorite Books. There’s plenty more chatter about Wemby’s reading habits online; he says that he reads before every game and every night before sleep.
So what does Wemby read? He favors science fiction and fantasy, notably including George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984, the dystopian classic set in a hyper-surveilled, securitized, totalitarian future in a state of perpetual war. On the evening of the Spurs first playoff game against the New York Knicks in Madison Square Garden, he showed up carrying a copy of 1984. Coincidentally or not, that was the same night Donald Trump showed up and fell asleep in an exclusive viewing box, alongside Knicks owner James Dolan, after being booed so loudly that you couldn’t hear the national anthem.
Fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson is Wemby’s favorite. Most of Sanderson’s tales take place in the Cosmere, a world of great inequality and violent hierarchy, where oppressed and oppressive classes clash, often leading to revolutions of various outcomes. Whether Sanderson’s politics are ultimately revolutionary or liberal and reformist has been debated online.
Wemby is not known to adhere to any particular religion, but last summer he spent time in a Buddhist monastery, observing its spiritual practice. In May, he arrived for a pre-game warmup wearing a thobe, a garment traditionally worn by men in the Arab world, in honor of this year’s Muslim Eid al-Adha celebration.
The NBA player who already deserves the title “Conscience of the NBA” is without doubt Kyrie Irving, who has unabashedly taken a stand on Palestine, the moral issue of our time. At the NBA All Star Game, Irving appeared in a t-shirt with “PRESS” printed on the front in honor of all the heroic journalists covering Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Al-Jazeera reported that nearly 300 of them had been killed by that time.
Irving also appears in front of a keffiyeh background on an Instagram page called “lovinPalestine.” There he wears a baseball cap that says “Living Sacrifice” and a t-shirt with the image of a tree, which reads, “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” He has been the subject of intense criticism from reporters and social media for his stance on Palestine but refused to back down and pushed back against what he said were “attempts to gaslight him and mischaracterize his position.”
This is not the first time Irving has taken a stand and refused to back down. One might wonder how he has kept his job as the superstar point guard of the Dallas Mavericks, given that the team is owned by arch Zionist and casino billionaire Miriam Adelson, but so far he has and he’s obviously not afraid that he will.
Irving has spent 15 much-lauded seasons in the NBA. During that time he acknowledged and celebrated his Native American heritage, converted to Islam, and took many social justice actions and stands, which included making a documentary about Breonna Taylor, the Emergency Medical Technician slain by Louisville police who burst into her apartment while she was asleep.
Might we see Wemby follow an equally inspiring arc? He certainly has that potential.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com. You can help support her work on Patreon.
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