Dikembe Mutombo
Built the hospital his own mother could not reach in time, and kept building more
Dikembe Mutombo grew up in Kinshasa, one of ten children, and moved to the United States on an academic scholarship intending to become a doctor before basketball coaches at Georgetown University redirected him toward a professional career. He became one of the National Basketball Association's most dominant defensive players over an eighteen-year career, known as much for his finger-wagging block celebration as for four Defensive Player of the Year awards.
In 1997 his mother died in Kinshasa because the family could not get her to a hospital in time during unrest that had shut down the city's few functioning facilities. Mutombo channelled his grief into the Dikembe Mutombo Foundation, and between 2004 and 2007 invested around fifteen million dollars of his own money into building the Biamba Marie Mutombo Hospital in Kinshasa, named for his mother and equipped to standards rare anywhere in the country at the time. It was the first new hospital built in the region in decades.
He continued funding clinics, schools and disease-prevention campaigns across the Democratic Republic of the Congo for the rest of his life, and served on humanitarian and public health boards including the CDC Foundation. He was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2022 and died in Atlanta in September 2024, aged fifty-eight.