‘The NBA has come to us’: inside basketball’s $1bn play for Africa

The Basketball Africa League, a joint project between the NBA and Fiba, hopes to tap into a market with a huge, tech-savvy and youthful population. Will it take hold?

On a March evening at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport, an agent beckoned me over to the check-in counter and asked for my passport. As he thumbed through its pages, he paused on the page with a red visa stamp and an imprint of a baobab tree.

What's your reason for traveling to Senegal?" he asked in a tone simultaneously neutral and stern.