T W E N T Y - F I V E : Angola

I was determined to take the measure of the game on its most untapped continent—Africa, especially south of the Sahara. I’d heard all the stories about Peace Corps workers yanking 7’ teenage thyroid cases out of the mouths of soccer goals and teaching them the drop step. (In other words, I’d read Hakeem Olajuwon’s autobiography and seen The Air Up There.) But where was the African game going?

In the country hosting the African championships—a country still mired in a civil war of a quarter century’s duration—I realized that this huge continent, which had yet to send a non-center to the NBA, would someday be exporting point guards. And Mike Lasme, an absolutely delicious playmaker from the Ivory Coast, could well turn out to be the first.

The Afrobasket had a bizarre mascot: the welwitchia mirabilis, an unusually hardy plant that grows in the Angolan desert on virtually no water. The mascot appears at the far right in this block of commemorative stamps.

ANGOLAN STAMPS

TWENTY-SIX: KANSAS CITY