I THINK OF MYSELF AS FROM CAMEROON” – JOEL EMBIID TALKS ABOUT HIS IDENTITY AND CHOICE

Philadelphia 76ers star Joel Embiid was a guest on the New York times. He detailed his decision to represent the US, his innate Cameroonian identity and why he turned down the French team.

JOURNALIST: Do you think of yourself as American?

JOEL EMBIID: ” Nah, I think of myself as from Cameroon. That’s always going to be home. I was born there, and from what I’ve seen growing up; the struggle, I’ll always identify with it.

That’s one of the reasons I ended up succeeding: because of the way I was raised, the environment I was raised in. Nothing was ever comfortable. I always felt like I got to work for everything.

I started playing basketball at 16. It’s hard to make it when you start that old, especially because guys have been playing their whole life in America”.

Embiid said he received so much pressure to play for France, which rather repelled him to choose the US. He said France even gave him a timeline

JOURNALIST: What was the timeline?

I didn’t know. You know, I saw it on Twitter, and I was like, Whoa, where did this come from? Because from the conversation that I had with the U.S., it was: Take as much as time as you need. We’d love to have you, but it’s OK if you make another decision.

Then when you’ve got someone else putting the pressure on you, making it seem like, Oh, you got to make the decision, we need it, we need it — I’m like, well, I got one person over here telling me; take as much time as you need.

But one thing that was always known was that Cameroon is the first choice, and if they qualify I’m playing for my home country. I had the opportunity to talk to the French president about what was going on, and I told him one thing that was kind of bothering me a lot was the relationship between France and Cameroon and Africa’s countries in general.

JOURNALIST: Historically, you mean?

EMBIID: “Yeah, and even right now. There’s a lot of things going on over there. There’s a lot of pushback as far as basically k!cking out the French because it’s been so many years of oppressi0n. So that was my mind-set. I still got my family living in Cameroon, and I don’t want to put them through any of that stuff. I want them to be safe, and the relationship between France and Cameroon or Africa in general is just not good”.

JOURNALIST: You spoke to Pres!dent Macr0n about this?

EMBIID : Yeah.

According to Embiid, he will live more time in the US, than Cameroon. He has a wife and kid born in the US. This shaped his decision.

SOURCE: New York Times

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