I doubt that anyone in my household knows much about the late, great Dikembe Mutombo. He has long been one of my favorites for quite a few reasons, including his famous catch-phrase, “Man does not fly in the house of Mutombo.”

This phrase, with some help from related ads from Adidas, made Mr. Mutombo a household name in the 1990’s. Don’t want to end up laying on the parquet floor with a very large, highly intelligent, physical specimen wagging his index finger at you? Well, don’t try to dunk on Mutombo. Pass it to someone else and let them try. All Mr. Mutombo is going to give you is a big smile, a finger wag and a bad, bad case of rejection.

What does this have to do with Momotombo? What exactly is Momotombo? Strictly speaking, it’s a volcano in the country of Nicaragua. Other than having a bit of all-too-easy-fun with a Central American volcano’s name and the surname of a statesman and scholar who also happened to be a famous basketball player originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo… there is not much in common between the two.

Wait! That’s not entirely true. There is a connection: the aforementioned rejection. Mr. Mutombo was quite successful at rejecting any attempt to score by a member of the opposing team. For its part, the stamp shown above, which was part of a benign series detailing railroad development in Nicaragua, was used (abused) by those who preferred that the much discussed canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans take place in Panama, not Nicaragua.

The entire story is found here in a great article from the Smithsonian. The abbreviated version of the tale is that those who wanted the canal constructed in Panama sent the stamp to each of the members of the US Senate. In their self-serving view, the stamp showed the perils of construction in Nicaragua. Could the senators not see the smoke rising from the peak of Momotombo? Could they not sense the chaos, the destruction and the folly of building something as important as this canal in a country with active volcanos?

The fear-mongering strategy worked. The canal was indeed built in Panama. A drawing defeated one canal in favor of another. That’s correct, it’s not a picture, it’s a drawing (the stamp is from 1900). There have been many, many attempts over the years to build a competing canal in Nicaragua and, with a corresponding, catastrophic environmental cost, it could still happen. There is simply too much money to be made to ever dismiss the notion entirely — which explains the long-standing interest in Mexico, Central and South America from power brokers all over the globe.

And now back to my related attempt at historical fiction.