Zambia’s victory at the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations in Gabon remains one of football’s most compelling stories. Returning to the country where most of the Chipolopolo squad had been killed in a plane crash almost two decades earlier en route to a World Cup qualifier in Senegal, Zambia defeated Ivory Coast, the heavy favourites, in the final on penalties to become African champions for the first time. But you won’t find any trace of that famous triumph at the Football Association of Zambia’s headquarters in Lusaka.
“If you walk into Football House today, you will never find a single picture of what is our greatest achievement,” says Godfrey Chikumbi, a journalist and the vice-president of Mansa Wanderers in Zambia’s northern Luapula province. That, he says, is down to Andrew Kamanga, who in 2016 succeeded Kalusha Bwalya, one of the few surviving members of the 1993 squad, as president of the FA (Faz).
