Zambia: The 1993 air crash and the 2012 Afcon underdogs

For Zambia’s population, its football team was a beacon of hope.

The price of copper, the country’s primary export, had almost halved in the past four years, tanking the economy. Income had dropped sharply.

President Frederick Chiluba had declared a national state of emergency, alleging that a coup plot against him had been uncovered.

The football team though were a source of pride.

They were known as Chipolo-polo, the Copper Bullets.

It was a nickname derived from Zambia’s main industry and the team’s attacking, aggressive style.

The team had just returned from a 3-0 win over Mauritius in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier.

They had an eight-year unbeaten home record and were a band of brothers at the peak of their powers.

As far as Zambians were concerned, USA ’94 was beckoning.

To get there they would have to top a qualification pool of three, trumping Morocco and Senegal in home-and-away ties.

First up, Senegal away.

As usual it was a DHC-5 Buffalo military plane that would take them there.

With the recession eating into its funding, the football association couldn’t afford commercial flights.

Instead the DHC-5 Buffalo, an 18-year-old twin-propeller aircraft, early models of which had been used in the Vietnam War, would lumber across the vastness of Africa.

It was not built for long-haul trips so it would have to make regular refuelling stops.

And it was showing its age. Six months earlier, while flying over the Indian Ocean en route to play Madagascar, the pilot had actually told the players to wear their life jackets.

When Zambia’s domestic-based players turned up to the airfield outside the capital city Lusaka to board, Patrick Kangwa, a member of the national team selection committee, met them.

He told 21-year-old midfielder Andrew Tembo and third-choice goalkeeper Martin Mumba that they wouldn’t need to travel. They were dropped from the squad.

Pride was hurt and hot words exchanged on the tarmac.

It was a standard selection decision, but, on this day, it decided who would live and who would die.

Those who did get onboard faced a daunting itinerary. The Buffalo planned to touch down and refuel in the Republic of Congo, Gabon and Ivory Coast before finally arriving in Dakar, Senegal’s capital.

In reality, it never made it beyond Gabon.

The Zambian government has never released the report into what happened to the flight.

But in 2003, the Gabonese authorities said that almost immediately after take-off from the capital Libreville, the plane’s left-hand engine stopped working.

The pilot, tired from flying the team back from Mauritius the day before, shut down the right-hand engine by mistake.

The heavy plane, suddenly without power or lift, plunged into the ocean a few hundred metres from the Gabon coast, killing all 30 people on board.

Back in the Netherlands, Bwalya, his run forgotten, saw the news he already knew break on television.

“There was a lady reading the news and the Zambian flag was behind her,” he remembers.

“She said, ‘the Zambian national soccer team traveling to Dakar, Senegal, for a World Cup qualifier has crashed. There are no survivors’.

“Ambition – as a young person, brothers, team-mates, the spirit of the group – was lost in one day. But it seems like yesterday, it’s so clear in my mind.”

Kangwa – the official who had sent the selected players on their way in Lusaka – flew to Gabon.

At a stroke, his role had changed from picking players to identifying their remains.

“The bodies had been in the water for some time so some had started to change in state,” he says in BBC World Service podcast Copper Bullets.

“I had to try and say, who’s this, who can this be?

“After that, I cried, we all cried. None of us thought that we would find ourselves in a place where we would see our colleagues in pieces.”

Meanwhile, Bwalya arrived in Lusaka, where reality sank in.

“We went to receive the bodies, and, one by one, they took the coffins off a plane to be transported to the Independence Stadium,” he says.

“That was when I realised I won’t see the team – the one I had travelled with in the same plane a few months earlier – again.”

On 2 May 1993, more than 100,000 Zambians came to Independence Stadium, where Zambia played their home matches, for a funeral.

Most of those attending stayed in the streets because the stadium’s capacity was only 35,000.

Following an all-night vigil and a service of remembrance the players were laid to rest in a semi-circle of graves.

Each grave has a tree planted in front of it in a memorial garden called Heroes’ Acre, 100 metres to the north of the stadium.

One commemorated the life of the legendary Godfrey Chitalu, a fabled goalscorer who became the team’s coach.

Another was dedicated to Bwalya’s room-mate, David ‘Effort’ Chabala, who had kept the clean sheet in the Olympic demolition of Italy.

Twenty-three year-old Kelvin Mutale was also among the dead. Two-footed, good in the air and two years into his international career, he had emerged as Bwalya’s strike partner and had just scored all three goals in the win over Mauritius.

“Derby Makinka was one of the best players that Zambia has ever produced in the number six position,” remembers Bwalya. “He was a tank.

“We had a world-class player in every position.

“I can still feel being in the changing room with the boys, I can still see the boys, how happy they were, and it’s a good past.”

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