Khaman Maluach was born on September 14, 2006, in Rumbek, a town in Lakes State, South Sudan — a region that had been devastated by decades of civil conflict. He does not remember the year his family left. “I actually don’t know the year I left South Sudan,” he told ESPN. “I don’t remember anything, moving to Uganda. All I know is that I grew up in Uganda.”
His family fled to Kawempe, a crowded suburb on the outskirts of Kampala, Uganda’s capital. His father, Madit Maluach, stayed behind in South Sudan for work. His mother — whose name has not been publicly shared — raised seven children alone in a community where opportunities were scarce and school fees were a burden the family could not consistently afford. Khaman went two years without attending school because his family could not pay the tuition.
He grew up loving soccer and supported Manchester United. Basketball was not in the picture. He had never touched a basketball until he was thirteen years old.
The discovery came in the most improbable way. Walking home from school one day in late 2019, a man on a boda boda — a motorcycle taxi — stopped in front of the tall teenager. “You should start playing basketball,” the man told him. “I can get you shoes, I can get you the ball.” Maluach took the offer. The nearest court was an hour’s walk from his home, often packed with players, and he played his first game wearing a pair of Crocs.
But local coaches Wal Deng and Aketch Wuoi Garang saw something in the raw, gangly kid almost immediately. “The first time I saw Khaman, I saw so much potential,” Deng told BBC Sport Africa. Garang arranged for Maluach to attend Bethel Covenant College in Bwebajja on a scholarship, solving the school fees problem that had kept him out of education. “I trusted Akech because he was a South Sudanese coach,” Maluach later explained. “He gave me a scholarship to go study at school. By then, school tuition was hard, so I took the scholarship and it motivated me. That’s how I got into the game.”
At home, Maluach and his brother devised their own training facility. They stacked two or three large tires on top of each other to create a rim at the proper height, and Khaman practiced his shots every day — one basketball, one tire rim, and limitless ambition. At night, the brothers ran what they called the “night shift”: at midnight, when Ugandan telecommunications companies dropped their mobile data prices, they would stay up watching YouTube clips of Giannis Antetokounmpo and Joel Embiid. “I used to see Giannis’ jab step, and then with Joel I learned the shimmy,” Maluach said. “If they can make it there, I can make it there too.”
In late 2019, Maluach attended a basketball camp organized by the Luol Deng Foundation. Deng — the former Duke star and NBA All-Star who is also of South Sudanese heritage — had founded the organization to use basketball as a tool for empowerment across Africa. For Maluach, the camp was the gateway. His talent and the positive reference from Deng earned him a spot at the NBA Academy Africa in Saly, Senegal, in 2021. He was the youngest player ever enrolled at the academy. He was fourteen years old, approximately 4,700 miles from home, and had been playing organized basketball for less than two years.
The academy combined world-class coaching with education and exposure to international competition. Maluach thrived but the separation from his family was immense. He hasn’t seen them in years, choosing to focus on basketball and education. “I left home at a very young age so I had to learn a lot of stuff,” he told CBS Sports. “I had to learn how to be a man off the basketball court. The academy helped me through all that.”
His rise was stunningly fast. In 2022, at fifteen, he played for South Sudan’s professional team Cobra Sport in the Basketball Africa League as part of the BAL Elevate program. He was named MVP of the 2023 Basketball Without Borders Africa camp in Johannesburg. In August 2023, at sixteen, he was selected for the South Sudan national team roster for the 2023 FIBA Basketball World Cup, becoming the third-youngest player ever to appear in a World Cup game when he debuted in a victory over China. South Sudan, led by Maluach and a roster of players who had grown up in refugee camps, finished as the best-ranked African team and qualified for the 2024 Paris Olympics.
In 2024, playing for the Ugandan club City Oilers in the BAL season, Maluach averaged 17.5 points, a league-leading 13.5 rebounds, and 2.8 blocks per game. He set the BAL single-game record with 7 blocks. At the 2024 Paris Olympics, he was the youngest player in the entire tournament. In a pre-Olympic exhibition game against Team USA, South Sudan — 43-point underdogs — led by one point with ten seconds remaining before LeBron James sealed it with a late layup. Maluach was seventeen years old, standing on a court against the greatest basketball players on earth, representing a nation younger than he was.
On March 6, 2024, Maluach committed to Duke over UCLA, Kentucky, and Kansas. He chose Duke in part because of the impression Zion Williamson had made on him watching from Africa. He wore #9 at Duke to honor Luol Deng — the man whose foundation camp had changed the trajectory of his life.