FC Bayern: Basketball player Wenyen Gabriel and his exciting life story with his escape from South Sudan

Wenyen Gabriel strolls down the corridor in front of the basketball hall on the FC Bayern campus on this cold, foggy Tuesday, wearing a red shirt, black sweatpants, and carrying white sports shoes in his hand. The 28-year-old is a little late, he apologizes politely and sits down on a stool. These are also stressful, hectic times. There’s a team meeting soon, then individual training, team training, lunch, and at 4 p.m. the plane leaves for France for the Euroleague game against Lyon-Villeurbanne. Monaco on Friday, Bundesliga against Bonn on Sunday, the game against the champions in the Lanxess Arena in Cologne, which has a capacity of almost 19,000 spectators, and a home game against Hapoel Tel Aviv on Tuesday. Only Christmas Eve is free before the merciless schedule continues.

Gabriel, 2.10 meters tall and weighing 100 kilograms, has been the center of the Bayern basketball team since this season. He has 164 NBA games on his resume and was passed around like so many other professionals in the US circus: Sacramento Kings, Portland Trail Blazers, Brooklyn Nets, LA Clippers and LA Lakers. He never got beyond a supporting role. This is one of the reasons why Gabriel dared to make the leap to Europe. He came to Munich via Maccabi Tel Aviv and Panathinaikos Athens.

His status so far: diamond in the rough, excellent abilities, but he doesn’t really shine on the field yet. His highest score in the Euroleague was 13 points, an average of three rebounds isn’t outstanding for a center, plus there are a lot of turnovers and an almost abysmal free throw rate of 35.3 percent. “There is a lot to improve. The rebounds, the free throws, I have to get used to the style of play in Europe. It’s different than in the USA,” says Gabriel self-critically. But: The lanky center can also shine, no one blocks as spectacularly as Gabriel.

On the other hand, the professional basketball player Gabriel is happy for this next chance to prove himself again. And he isn’t completely alone in Munich either. His younger brother Gob Makuag plays in the second team, their two French bulldogs are at home waiting for the next round of walks with their sporty owners.

Building a new life is the story of Wenyen Gabriel. And to give something back from this life.

Because he is a refugee by birth, a displaced person from his homeland in East Africa. His parents lived in South Sudan, specifically in Rumbek, a provincial capital surrounded by savannah. There are no asphalted roads, but there is a dusty airfield and lots of aid organizations. And there has been and is war and conflict there, basically for decades. In very short terms, the rebel groups in South Sudan, whose residents felt oppressed, wanted independence from Sudan. They achieved this in 2011, but a bloody civil war broke out between 2013 and 2018. The flow of refugees has not stopped and tensions continue to flare up to this day. Catastrophic floods, like a year ago, are exacerbating the humanitarian situation.

“Many relatives still live there, many in my family died because of the war.”

During the chaos of war at the end of the 1990s, Gabriel’s parents fled from Rumbek, where fighting was raging, to the Sudanese capital Khartoum. Wenyen was born there, and when he was two years old, the family fled to Cairo for a year with three sons and a daughter. “We lived in a small apartment, my parents had small jobs, and at the same time we were trying to find ways to return to our homeland,” says Gabriel. But the dangers were too great, there was no turning back.

With the help of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, his family was placed in an integration program in the USA; from Cairo they moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, north of Boston. Gabriel grew up there as one of six children. And started playing basketball. However, he has not forgotten his homeland. “Many relatives still live there, many in my family died because of the war,” says Gabriel, “I never met my grandparents.”

“We organize various projects there, sports camps with football, handball, basketball, volleyball,” says Gabriel, and a basketball court is currently being built on his initiative. Gabriel invests part of his salary in these projects, in basketball camps, also in the USA, where many refugees from South Sudan live. ROSS Leaders is the name of his aid network, the abbreviation stands for Republic of South Sudan. “Because of the war, we are scattered everywhere and grew up in very different educational systems. We have to use these resources,” says Gabriel. Why does he help? “I could easily be one of those people and never have the opportunity to live the life I have today. It was just luck to be accepted into the United States.”

It wasn’t until July 2022, when he was 25, that he returned for the first time to the country he had to leave before he was even born. Doing this earlier would have been too dangerous. Gabriel caught up on a lot of things, met with families, adults and children who had fled the flood and the conflicts and were living in camps. And he started to form a network. He has now been to South Sudan four times and one of his cousins ​​is there right now.

Not only that: Gabriel, who has citizenship of both South Sudan and the USA, took part in a World Cup with South Sudan for the first time in 2023. At the first-ever Olympic Games for his young country in 2024, he waved the flag in the athletes’ boat on the Seine and sang the anthem “with a sense of pride that I had never felt before.”

He is therefore a displaced person who has found his way back to his homeland through different paths. And that’s what really counts for Wenyen Gabriel. Bad free throw rate or not.