Last Sunday, Manchester United beat Liverpool.
We qualified for the Champions League.
I celebrated in a way that a professional with responsibilities probably should not celebrate a football result. And sitting with that feeling afterwards, I kept going back to the same place. A sitting room at the Council flats in Hillcrest, Ndola, 1999. A 11 year old alone with a television. My mother asleep. Everyone sensible asleep.
That is where this started.
Hillcrest, 1999
ZNBC was carrying the Champions League final.
In 1999 this was simply something that could happen. A national broadcaster could put a Champions League final on and if you were in Zambia and you wanted to watch it, you sat in front of your television. No streaming. No highlights later. No second chance. You watched it live or it was gone forever.
My mother and Kafwana were asleep. I had the volume low. I was being responsible.
Bayern Munich were winning 1-0. The clock passed 90 minutes. Then Beckham swung in a corner, Sheringham got his foot to it, and 1-1.
What came out of me was not a quiet sound.
My mother appeared at the door. Nichani! Nichani! Not calmly. The way a person asks when they think something has gone seriously wrong in the house. She looked at me. She looked at the screen. She told me to calm down. She went back to bed.
Two minutes later, Solskjaer touched in a Sheringham header.
I forgot everything she had just said. All of it. Instantly.
She came back to the door a second time. This time the energy was different. More focused. Less concerned, more direct. I barely registered that she was there. I was somewhere in the sitting room moving around the chairs.
From that night I was sold. Completely. No clause, no exit, no reconsideration. A Manchester United supporter in the permanent sense.
The intervention
What follows from a moment like that, when you are a teenager with limited money and unlimited conviction, is merchandise.
Jerseys. The home kit. The away kit. Tracksuits. Head socks. Scarves. Caps. Anything with the badge on it. If a magazine had a Manchester United poster inside, the magazine was opened, the poster removed, and the poster went on the wall. That was simply what you did with a magazine.
When Ronaldo arrived at United in 2003 I was in grade 10 at David Kaunda. I watched him play his first games. The stepovers. The way he would receive the ball on the wing and look at a defender as if to say: I am going to do something to you now and there is nothing you can do about it. And then he would do it. I bought the Vodafone-era jersey with Ronaldo’s name at the back with my own money, the money my mother had given me for other things technically, and had KAKOMPE printed below the number 7.
My mother noticed the jersey. She noticed the tracksuit. She noticed me leaving the house for a function wearing Manchester United from head to foot when the function had nothing to do with football.
She sat me down.
The conversation that followed was calm, structured, and thorough. It covered what the money she gave me was for, what it was actually becoming, and what was going to happen going forward. It had the structure and the tone of an intervention. The kind normally reserved for more serious situations. I had not anticipated that a football merchandise collection would trigger one.
No more pocket money.
I understood. I was not happy about it. But I understood.
Kafwana Melody and the great recruitment
My sister had no interest in football.
I had been a supporter for years. I talked about it constantly. She was completely unmoved. Football was not her department and she had no apologies about this.
Then in 2005, United lost the FA Cup final to Arsenal on penalties. Paul Scholes missed the decisive kick. Kafwana was in grade 10 at DK, I was in grade 12, and she had gone home for the weekend and watched the game. When she came back she found me and described the match in detail. The missed chances. The shootout. The specific pain of the Scholes moment. She told me she had cried.
I looked at my sister.
She had cried about a Manchester United penalty miss.
Without knowing it, she had just converted herself. All my years of talking had done nothing. One painful Sunday afternoon had done everything.
I went to Central Park in Lusaka, next to the Post Office on Cairo Road, the printing place where jerseys became personal, and bought her a Manchester United kit. Rooney, number 8, her player. The name on the back was Melody, her middle name, now also her United name.
The jersey was delivered. The membership was sealed.
Welcome to the “faith”, Kafwana Melody. There was no exit process.
DK: Ferguson, Wenger, Mourinho
At David Kaunda in 2004, following your club meant a small radio and the right frequency. This was not a DK problem. In Zambia in 2004, the internet as we understand it today did not exist. Smartphones had not arrived. DSTV was beginning to appear in certain households and if your family had it you were living at a different altitude. For most people, especially students in boarding school, the BBC World Service on a small radio was the line to the outside world.
On Saturday evenings, Richard, Gideon, Chishiba, Mulenga Kalu and I would gather in the Luapula hostel common room for the Peter Burter show on Radio Phoenix. He played the US Top 20. That was where you heard new music. Encore by Jay Z and Linkin Park. Ludacris with Get Back and Coming for the Number One Spot. Kanye’s first album, Through the Wire, Gold Digger, Big Brother. The Ying Yang Twins Whisper Song. If you heard something you liked, you went to Permanent House in town and paid someone to burn it to a CD. The guys who burned CDs at Permanent House were considered genuinely cool. They had computers. They seemed to be living the actual life.
But football always dominated the conversation. The Ayabi.com class had strong affiliations. I was United. Richard, Chap, was Arsenal. Chishman was Real Madrid. Gideon, Kanye East was Chelsea.
This was the most interesting era to be in an argument. Ferguson was building. Wenger’s Arsenal had just gone an entire Premier League season unbeaten and they had a point. Then Mourinho arrived at Chelsea, spent money nobody had seen spent before, and suddenly the Chelsea fan population at DK grew noticeably. People who had been looking for a reason found one quickly.
In the dormitory we rated girls at DK from one to ten. We debated which artist was better. But football always won. The debates were long and never resolved. They were not supposed to be.
Ruins hostel, after a loss
At the University of Zambia, watching a big match at the Ruins and Rez hostels meant arriving early. If you arrived even an hour before the match started you were outside on your tiptoes, pressing toward whatever gap existed in the crowd, hearing the room react before you could see the screen. Honestly, sometimes the voices inside were more entertaining than the game itself.
Before the match even started, the moment the Champions League anthem came on and they showed the players lining up with the flags, something happened in that room that is genuinely difficult to put into words. It still does.
After a United loss, something else happened.
There were students at UNZA whose passion for football was specifically organised around seeing certain teams lose. Not just supporters of rival clubs. Something more committed than that. People who were genuinely more satisfied when your team lost than when their own team won. After a bad result, the ama monks would come around the hostel blocks. You would hear them coming before you saw them. Man U Wawa! at full volume, outside your hosteal, at whatever hour they felt like it. Sleep was not available to you that night.
Nobody warns you about the monks when you start. You find out on your own.
When United won the Champions League in 2008, the Ruins was a different story entirely.
Barcelona. Twice.
Then came 2009.
Champions League final. Rome. Barcelona. Xavi, Iniesta, Messi. We lost 2-0 and it was not as close as the score suggested.
I told myself: once. It happens to everyone once.
2011. Wembley. Barcelona again. Messi in the kind of form that makes you wonder whether the sport has been entirely fair to everyone else who has ever played it. We lost 3-1.
The monks had two very good years.
The last day
The 2011/12 Premier League season came down to the final day.
United were at the top. We needed to win and hope City slipped. We won our match. City were playing QPR at the Etihad, losing 2-1 deep into stoppage time. It was happening. It was actually happening.
Then Dzeko equalised. Then in the 94th minute Aguero received the ball and drove it past the goalkeeper.
3-2. Man City. Title gone. On goal difference. In stoppage time. On the last day of the season.
I sat with that one for longer than I care to admit. There is a particular kind of football suffering that comes from being three minutes from something and watching it disappear. We learned about those three minutes in Hillcrest in 1999. They can go either way. That day they went the wrong way.
When Fergie left
In May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson retired.
I did not fully understand what that meant until the seasons that followed. The managers came. The managers went. Seasons that would have been unacceptable became the new normal.
There were moments in those years when the interest cooled. When you watched a match and felt something you had never felt before in relation to this club, a mild version of not caring how it ended. When you asked yourself honestly why you were still doing this.
The wondering did not last long. But it happened.
Gabon, 2012
Before any of that, in the middle of all of it, something happened that had nothing to do with Manchester United.
In 1993, the Zambian national team boarded a plane to Senegal for a World Cup qualifier. The plane went down off the coast of Gabon. Eighteen players died. The entire squad.
Nineteen years later, Zambia went to the Africa Cup of Nations. In Gabon. The same country.
Christopher Katongo as captain, carrying himself with quiet authority even when he did not have the ball. Rainford Kalaba on the wing, direct and brave. Emmanuel Mayuka with the instinct of someone who simply knew where the goal was before the ball arrived. Herve Renard on the touchline in his white shirt, the French coach who had found something in this group that they had perhaps not yet fully found in themselves.
They won the tournament. In Gabon.
That night at UNZA, it did not matter which club you supported. United, Arsenal, Real Madrid, Chelsea, all of it dissolved. There was only Zambia. What football does to one person in a sitting room in Hillcrest, it did to an entire country simultaneously. I was there for it.
That night deserves its own article. It will get one.
Man U 4 Life
In 2017, under Mourinho, the same man who had made Chelsea insufferable at DK, United won the Europa League. I appreciated the irony. I appreciated the trophy more.
Last Sunday we beat Liverpool and went back to the Champions League.
I sat with the result for a while after the final whistle.
The Hillcrest sitting room. My mother at the door. The monks outside the hostel. Kafwana Melody, who did not ask to become a Red but became one anyway. The intervention over the jerseys. The two Barcelona finals. The last day of 2012. The years after Ferguson when it was hard to watch.
Here is what I keep coming back to.
People change partners. People change political parties, sometimes more than once, and settle into the new allegiance without much difficulty. People change jobs, change churches, change neighbourhoods, change friendships. But nobody changes their football club. You do not wake up one day and decide to support someone else because the results have not been going your way. It does not work like that.
We do not get paid for this. Nobody compensates us for the bad seasons. When United lose I am in a bad mood in a way that is genuinely disproportionate to what has actually happened in my life. I have been upset for days over a football result. I have asked myself, in those days, why I am like this. Why any of us are like this.
I have never found a satisfying answer.
What I know is that somewhere in the celebrating last Sunday, without planning it, something reverted. The professional with responsibilities was briefly gone and a twelve-year-old from Hillcrest was back in the room, moving around the chairs, forgetting that people were asleep. That is what this does to us. It finds the kid we were before we learned to contain ourselves and gives him permission to come out for ninety minutes, sometimes longer.
I stopped trying to explain it a long time ago.