When South Sudan became an independent country on July 9, dignitaries from around the world descended on the planet's newest national capital, Juba. But even as Juba rejoiced, violence continued to rage, with South Sudanese and their Nuba allies dying not only at the hands of the northern government, which continued its bombing campaign in the border regions, but also as victims of fellow Southerners, caught up in ethnic and tribal rivalries that independence could not end.
The incongruence between the euphoria in the capital and the slaughter in the hinterlands would have seemed strangely familiar to the late NBA star Manute Bol. Like the homeland whose birth he never lived to see, Bol’s life—richly chronicled by Jordan Conn in his new Atavist e-book, The Defender—was filled with spectacular contradictions and turns of fate.
In order to wrap their heads around this ungainly 7-foot-7, barely 200-pound freak of nature from one of the most remote corners of the earth, many Americans relied on reductive simplifications: Bol was the NBA's first African-born player, its tallest player ever, a human stick figure. When that didn't suffice, they gravitated toward myth. To this day, perhaps the best-known anecdote about Bol is that, as a boy, he killed a lion. That story contributed to an only slightly less simplistic picture of Bol, one Conn describes as, "benevolent, fearless, almost superhuman." And yet, to this day, it remains unclear whether the story about the lion is even true.