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“This plane will kill us one day.” Members of the Zambia squad said it with gallows humour early in 1993, according to Kalusha Bwalya, then the star striker at PSV Eindhoven. On 27 April 1993 the joke came true. Five crew and 25 players and officials died when the plane carrying the national team to a World Cup qualifier in Senegal crashed into the sea off Gabon.
The aircraft was an ageing DHC-5D Buffalo of the Zambian Air Force. Minutes after taking off from a refuelling stop at Libreville, it lost height and struck the water around 500 metres offshore, in a bright and fiery explosion that was seen from the beach.
A week that pushed the plane and its pilot too far
The squad had been on the road for days. A week before the Senegal game, Zambia played Mauritius in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier, and the trip had already strained both the plane and its pilot, Feston M'hone. The Football Association of Zambia (FAZ) had hoped a wealthy supporter would charter a passenger jet to the Indian Ocean island. The money never came, and the association asked the air force for a military aircraft instead.
The Buffalo was built for short hops, so it had to refuel in Lilongwe. After take-off it was ordered back. Madagascar had closed its airport for the night, and the players slept on board the plane in Malawi. The match itself was simple by comparison: Zambia won 3–0, with a hat-trick from Kelvin Mutale.
M'hone then flew the 1,957 miles back to Lusaka, and the next day he was in the cockpit again for a 5,758-mile trip to Dakar. Three refuelling stops were planned: Brazzaville in Congo, Libreville in Gabon and Abidjan in Ivory Coast.
The state of the aircraft was a running topic among the players. Mutale shared his worries with the travelling journalist Beauty Lupiya, as recalled in Ian Hawkey's history of African football, Feet of the Chameleon: “You know, Beauty, even if we were to crash, this plane floats. We could survive. They keep life jackets on board. We'd have a good chance of surviving.” Agency pictures of the squad from those years can be found via Embed from Getty Images, and they show a confident, young side.
What went wrong over the water
Mutale had reason to worry. The plane was 18 years old and had not flown between 21 December 1992 and late April. Two test flights were carried out on 22 and 26 April, and the checks found defects, including carbon particles in the engine and gearbox oil filters and cables that were disconnected or not secured. The captain still decided the flight would go ahead.
As so often on that trip, there was a delay after refuelling at Libreville, this time because the aircraft was at first refused permission to cross Congolese airspace. It finally took off at 22:44, an hour and 45 minutes late. Shortly afterwards the left engine failed. The plane turned out over the sea, lost height and hit the water.
For years the cause was clouded by rumour, while ministers in Gabon and Zambia argued over who should pay for an investigation. A report by the Gabonese Ministry of Defence suggested the pilot had accidentally shut down the working right-hand engine, leaving the aircraft with no power at all.
The official report was not released until November 2003. It blamed a mechanical fault in the left engine and found that the crew reacted but switched off the right engine by mistake, partly because of a poor indicator light bulb. It also noted that the pilot was tired after flying back from Mauritius the day before. President Frederick Chiluba declared a week of national mourning, and photographs of the grief in Lusaka are held under Embed from Getty Images as well.
The rise of the Chipolopolo
The loss was all the more cruel because the team was improving fast. A win in Senegal would have given the Chipolopolo, the Copper Bullets, a strong chance of reaching their first World Cup in 1994, a tournament whose finalists Brazil and Italy were a world away from the dusty airstrips of the qualifying trail. At club level Nkana Red Devils had reached the African Champions Cup final in 1990, and the splendidly named Power Rangers won the African Cup Winners' Cup the following year.
The moment Zambia really announced itself came at the 1988 Seoul Olympics. The side thrashed Italy 4-0 in Gwangju, against a team managed by Francesco Rocca that included Andrea Carnevale, Luigi De Agostini, Ciro Ferrara, Massimo Crippa and Mauro Tassotti. West Germany ended the run with a 4–0 win in the quarter-final, Jürgen Klinsmann scoring a hat-trick, but the point had been made.
Charles Musonda started against Italy that day. A knee injury that would eventually finish his career also saved his life. “One day, during training, during the time of Aad de Mos, I felt a pain in the right knee. I hurt myself stupidly, as they say, all alone,” he later told the Belgian sports paper DH. “In 1993, I was on my hospital bed in Antwerp when I learned that all my friends on the national team had perished in an airplane crash. Without this operation, I had to be with them.”
Musonda was one of a small group of European-based players who were not on the plane. Bwalya was another: under pressure from PSV, who were chasing the Dutch title against Feyenoord, he had planned to fly to Dakar separately and join the squad there. Pictures of Bwalya in that era can be seen through Embed from Getty Images too.
The players and staff who were lost
Six members of that 1988 Olympic squad died, among them the goalkeeper Efford Chabala, Zambia's most capped player with 115 appearances. So did the 19-year-old Moses Chikwalakwala, Zambia's young player of the year in 1992, along with the manager and national hero Godfrey Chitalu.
Chitalu was voted Zambian Footballer of the Year five times. The Zambian association has claimed he scored 107 goals for club and country in 1972, which would beat the 86 Lionel Messi managed in 2012, although the figure has been disputed. He had taken charge after Samuel Ndhlovu was sacked and illness forced Moses Simwala to step aside, and his record was four wins, a draw and one defeat, with 13 goals scored and three conceded. Few great players outside Europe get the recognition they deserve, a theme that runs through the stories of great players most fans have never heard of.
From Tunis in 1994 to Libreville in 2012
Zambia did not reach the 1994 World Cup. What happened instead was remarkable. A new squad, led by Bwalya on the pitch and coached by Ian Porterfield, the scorer of Sunderland's winner in the 1973 FA Cup final, reached the final of the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations in Tunis. Elijah Litana put Zambia ahead after four minutes, but two goals from Emmanuel Amunike gave Nigeria a 2–1 win. Plenty of the faces from those tournaments still turn up among the Africa Cup of Nations stickers collectors remember.
“Even though we lost that game, I have fond memories because we had just come out of the Gabon tragedy,” Bwalya told BBC Sport in 2010. “After losing the entire team, we started to rebuild and getting to the final was a great achievement.”
The fitting ending came in 2012. Hervé Renard's side reached the Africa Cup of Nations final at the Stade d'Angondjé in Libreville, a few miles from where the plane went down. Bwalya, by then president of the Football Association of Zambia, led the tributes on the day of the final as players and staff paid their respects. After 120 goalless minutes against an Ivory Coast side packed with Premier League names, Zambia won the shoot-out 8–7, Stoppila Sunzu scoring the decisive kick. The scenes afterwards are among the pictures under Embed from Getty Images.
“I said to the players that a team of ‘replacements' took Zambia to the final in 1994, so why not us?” said Renard, who had once had a spell in charge of Cambridge United. “Our first game was against Senegal and the team was on its way to Senegal for a match when the plane crashed. The plane crashed in Gabon and we won the final in Gabon. It was a sign of destiny, written in the sky.”
Renard went on to win the tournament again with Ivory Coast in 2015, and his Saudi Arabia side beat Argentina at the 2022 World Cup. Ask anyone in Lusaka which of his wins matters most, though, and the answer will be the night in Libreville.