Crushed frogs. That’s what a witch doctor in Zaire slathered on Jean-Claude Petilon’s legs a few hours before he played his first game with a local basketball team. “The frog lotion would make us jump higher,” Petilon recalls.
Today, a photograph of the team hangs on the wall of Petilon’s Paris office, which is off a courtyard near the Opéra Garnier. Petilon, a French national, is the only white man in the picture. When it was taken, in 1974, he was a young lawyer who had been dispatched to Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire—now the Democratic Republic of Congo—to open an office for what was then Duncan Allen & Mitchell. The U.S. firm wanted to set up an all-purpose office to represent American clients investing in Zaire. Playing basketball was a way to build ties to the community and to understand the culture. “It was essential to be seen as not being there to just make money,” Petilon says. “For a foreign lawyer to compete with local firms, you had to be involved in local life.”
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