The air crash and the underdogs – a triumph for a lost generation

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For those watching on the beach on the morning of Wednesday, 28 April 1993, the first bodies were revealed by the rising sun.

Fishermen searched in and out of creeks, divers went out in boats and a helicopter hovered overhead.

By lunchtime, black kit bags, wreckage and the remains of 24 of the 30 people aboard the plane had been reclaimed from the Atlantic Ocean and brought ashore in Gabon. No more bodies would be found.

So begins a story that touched generations across two decades, laid bare a nation’s soul, and delivered triumph, just as unexpectedly as disaster.

Four thousand miles away, another kit bag had been packed and its owner, one of Africa’s best footballers, was preparing to go for a long run.

Kalusha Bwalya was Africa’s Player of the Year in 1988.

Earlier that year, he had scored a hat-trick as Zambia thrashed Italy 4-0 on the way to the Olympic quarter-finals in Seoul.

Since then, he had moved to PSV Eindhoven, partnering Brazilian great Romario up front for the reigning Dutch champions.

Bwalya and two other Europe-based players were due to meet up with their Zambia team-mates in Senegal, before the first of four qualifiers for the 1994 World Cup.

Zambia’s stellar generation of players were strongly fancied to take their nation to the tournament for the first time.

With the prospect of a flight itinerary taking him from Amsterdam to Dakar via Paris, Bwalya wanted to stretch his legs and clear his mind.

But, before he could leave on his run, his landline rang.

In the early 1990s, mobile phones were a rare luxury. One Bwalya didn’t have. Calls could not be ignored.

Bwalya picked up the receiver.

“It was the treasurer of the Football Association of Zambia,” says Bwalya.

“The first thing he said to me was, ‘Kalu, you have to delay your flight. There has been an accident.’”

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.”

Amid the shock and loss, a big question loomed: what would Zambia do now?

Bwalya thought he knew.

“I thought that Zambia was not going to play (again),” says Bwalya. “I was convinced that, there goes the ambition of us doing anything.”

But, a phone call from the country’s president, convinced him otherwise. The search for a new team – to be built around Bwalya – was on.

Twenty coaches gathered in Lusaka to give trials to 60 players. A squad of disparate hopefuls was then chosen and sent to Denmark for a six-week training camp at the expense of the Danish government.

They were greeted at Copenhagen airport by their new, temporary coach.

Roald Poulsen had pedigree. The 42-year-old had won both the Danish league title and cup with Odense, but his task of creating a competitive team for the World Cup qualifiers was formidable.

“I had no clue what I was going to do,” he admits. “I had no idea about the players and no idea about the background, no idea about the society itself, anything about Zambian football.

“I was a little bit worried when I saw the standard of the players. They didn’t know whether they were good enough.”

The players had to adjust too. Most had never left Africa before. Poulsen had to reassure them a post-training jog through Danish forest was safe, explaining that the risk of a lion attack was lower than in Zambia.

Bwalya found a group bonded by a common purpose and sense of duty.

“Everybody felt like they had to do something extra for the fallen heroes,” says Bwalya. “You knew that, I am a replacement but I am doing it on behalf of somebody, I’m stepping in for somebody.”

On 4 July, was their chance to step up.

Almost exactly two months after the funerals, Zambia’s 1994 World Cup qualifying campaign belatedly began against Morocco in Lusaka.

“I was with the captain’s armband and we were lining up,” remembers Bwalya.

“I looked behind to see that everybody is in place. The first person behind me was always Effort Chabala. Now, I saw all new faces.”

After just 10 minutes, Morocco led through a spectacular goal by Rachid Daoudi. In the stands, the home fans called upon the past to help the present.

“The people on the upper tier that faces the memorial site turned around and they started to appeal to their deceased players, their brothers,” remembers journalist Ponga Liwewe.

“They said, ‘can we, with your help, get back into the game?’”

Zambia could.

Just after the hour, Bwalya hit a magnificent equaliser from a free kick and within 10 minutes, Johnson Bwalya, no relation, won it with a second goal.

“It felt like we had come back from the dead,” Liwewe says.

“The whole nation was on its feet. We were resurrected. That’s an…