The prison where murderers play for Manchester United | David Goldblatt

Luzira was once the most notorious prison in Uganda. Now it’s home to what is surely the world’s most elaborate prison football league – and a model for the transformative power of the beautiful game

A decade ago, Opio Moses was a lowly policeman out in the sticks of Eastern Uganda with a complicated love life. He had fallen for the wrong woman. One day, her uncle, who was politically connected, came to pay Moses a visit at home. He told Moses at gunpoint that their match was unsuitable and that the relationship was now over. Moses also had a gun. Both men fired at each other. Moses was wounded and the uncle was left dead, shot in the chest. Moses then turned his gun on himself. These days, his greying hair is cropped short and barely conceals the long jagged scar where his own bullet split his scalp and skull.

The prison where murderers play for Manchester United. By David Goldblatt Read more

Moses was sentenced to 20 years for murder. When he first arrived at Luzira Upper Prison, Uganda’s only maximumsecurity facility on the southern edge of Kampala, he was filled with despair. His days were bleak and purposeless. He was paralysed by remorse and did not know how he would serve out his term. But as the shock began to wear off, he realised Luzira was not like other prisons. The inmates could play football. And the football was not just kickabouts in the yard. There were formal clubs and tournaments, even fans. In 2006, Moses began to play as an accomplished striker with a prison team.

Now, nine years later, he is the chairman of UPSA, the Upper Prison Sports Association, football’s sovereign body in Luzira. Moses, among his other duties, is also a warder, personally responsible for the care of two dozen psychiatric patients, who are among the most vulnerable inmates in the jail. He shares their ward, organises their medication and generally keeps an eye on them. This is not his toughest duty, however. “Being chairman of UPSA is the most challenging, stressful, disturbing and tiresome work that one can do in the Upper Prison,” he said. His daily duties include finding sponsors, organising tournaments, dealing with disciplinary issues, and running a player registration and transfer system.

Over the past two decades, Luzira has gone from being a notoriously violent and squalid place, to one of the most progressive prisons in Africa. By any standard, it is a success. It has a recidivism rate of less than 30%, better than its counterparts in the UK, where, according to the Prison Reform Trust, 46% of former inmates commit crimes on release. Its schools, staffed by the prisoners themselves, put almost every inmate through a programme of education that stretches from basic literacy to the completion of high school and then offers vocational training (tailoring and carpentry) or university degrees in law with the local Royal Mutessa University and the University of London. Luzira’s infrastructure is dilapidated, its poverty is harsh but it is a deeply humane environment. The philosophy behind the prison is very simple. “People need to be busy”, the officer-in-charge, Wilson Magomu, told me.

Upper Prison has kept itself busy with extraordinary ingenuity. The prisoners have created their own drama, they dance, and they play music on homemade instruments. There is prayer and counselling in the church and mosque. But more popular than anything else is football. Within the prison there are 10 football clubs, some of them almost two decades old, each with their own players, boards and constitutions. Alongside Moses’s old team Aston Villa, there is Liverpool and Manchester United, Everton and Chelsea, Arsenal and Newcastle United. There is Barcelona, Juventus and Hannover 96 too, but football in Luzira, like football in all of Uganda, is dominated by the Premier League.

Since the arrival of satellite television in the early 2000s, English football has come to fill the sports pages of every Ugandan paper, as well as eating up the radio and television schedules. Nine out of 10 inmates who I spoke to supported a Premier League team. The same was true of the guards, nearly all of whom were Arsenal supporters. Every day, during my time at Upper Prison, a young inmate named White Angel – “because I’m good inside” – would come and find me to discuss the latest news from Arsenal and Tottenham. “Do you really think Soldado was worth the money at Spurs? Do you have Arsène Wenger’s address? Could you get a letter out to him?” John, one of the guys who drove us to the prison each day, followed Chelsea, or “my Chelsea” as he preferred to put it. Our trips around Kampala were always accompanied by the staccato rap of Lugandan football commentary on the radio, broken by ecstatic English: “Oh my God! Ross Barkley! Ross Barkley! Ross Barkley! Goal!”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Opio Moses, who is serving a 20-year sentence for murder, is in charge of football at Luzira prison. Photograph: Ronald Kabuubi/EAPPA images/Demotix

The centre of the prison’s football culture is Boma A, the main prison yard, which is just big enough to accommodate a full-size pitch. On the first day I visited Luzira, in March, a match was due to take place. In the rainy season, which had not yet begun, the Boma sometimes resembles a grass pitch, but under searing sunlight it had been reduced to scorched red earth. At both goal ends there were two-storey cell-blocks, known as the wards. Along one touchline was a low school building with a tiny veranda under a corrugated iron roof – the only slice of shade available for a quietly gathering crowd of around 500. The game was just a friendly. Ward Two were in white, Ward Seven were in blue.

Life in Luzira is colour-coded with precision. Remand prisoners and those serving less than 20 years are in intense canary yellow. Those serving more are in atomic tangerine. You get a red stripe for trying to escape, and blue trim for seniority and privilege. RPs – the regimental police – are the inmates who keep order in the Boma, and they get a white armband. Psychiatric patients are in green, their garb is the most ragged of all. The condemned, as they are known, waiting out time on death row, live separately and wear white.

The guards are in tan with maroon trim. There are fewer than 100 on any given shift, responsible for over 3,500 prisoners in a space designed for 500. In a British prison the overall staff-to-inmate ratio is around 1:5. At Luzira the ratio is 1:15. According to the staff, a significant fraction of inmates should not be there – because they were framed or because the glacially slow Ugandan court system has left them on remand for years. But the majority of the people in Luzira have done awful things: murder, rape, armed robbery, kidnapping. Given all this, the atmosphere is remarkably tranquil. In the week that I spent there, I never had a sense that aggression was near. Of course, a guard was often around, but the mood was always calm. Everyone looked everyone in the eye.

The match between the wards was highly physical but there was no time-wasting, no talking back and no slide-tackling, tripping or diving. Given the state of the pitch, it was remarkable that any player was able to complete a pass. Ball control skills, under impossible circumstances, are the mark of the best players in Luzira.

Once the game was over and the Boma crowd were drifting back to the wards for the 3pm lock-up, Moses handed me a scrap of paper: “5 foot playing boots. 12 footballs. 3 volleyballs. 1 box of laundry soap. 2 Sets of Jersey. A Trophy. A Goat”. These were the supplies required if a tournament was to take place during the next week. Football at the prison comes in the form of kickabouts, practices, friendlies. But valued above all are the knockout tournaments, with trophies and prizes. After I had agreed to provide them all, Moses offered me a provisional schedule and I wondered where I would find a goat.

The opening match of the tournament was Manchester United vs Arsenal. United, of course, were the favourites, while the Luzira Arsenal were the minnows. Before the game could begin, the pitch needed to be marked out. The lines from the previous day’s match had been erased by the busy footfall of the Boma. An hour before kick-off, a pair of inmates stretched out a length of green string until it was taut; this was the guide line. Then a third, stooping low, his cupped hands holding a mound of manioc flour, moved along the string and let the flour fall through his fingers. The referees, dressed in a motley collection of part-black kits, were next to arrive and limbered up in the newly drawn centre circle. Members of the UPSA executive – chairman, vice chairman, secretary, treasurer and match officials – took up their positions against the chainlink fence on the halfway line and checked their team sheets.

Players arrived one by one and began to mingle with what was left of the morning Boma crowd: broom-makers, draughts players and lounging conversationalists. Slowly, as people drifted to the sidelines and the shade, the teams emerged on the pitch, while the referees and UPSA officials conferred. Money is not permitted in the prison, so there was no coin to be tossed to decide which team would play at which end. The teams posed for photographs, six standing at the back, five squatting at the front. The referee checked in with his assistants, looked at his watch, held his arm aloft, and blew the whistle.

Prisoners have been playing football in the Boma for decadesas long as anyone can remember, but inmates began to create more formal clubs with managers, coaches and fans around the turn of the century, shortly after more liberal conditions were introduced. The first club to emerge was Liverpool, which was founded around 2000 by a group of a dozen former soldiers who had turned to armed robbery. Despite being incarcerated, they were able to draw on the wealth they had accumulated outside the jail to obtain the best kit and attract the prison’s best players.

Manchester United were the team of non-Bugundans. In the 19th century, the Bugunda were the leading tribe of the central region of Uganda. They were used as an instrument of devolved colonial rule by the British, who gave them more autonomy than any other tribal group. Too small to dominate post-colonial Uganda – a nation-state that began life in 1962 with at least 50 ethnic groups and languages within its borders – there continued to be tension between the Bugunda and other tribes. Manchester United, in their early days, gathered rural prisoners and inmates from peripheral tribes in the north and east, united by their marginalised status.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Manchester United play Liverpool on a pitch surrounded by watching prison inmates. Photograph: Ronald Kabuubi/EAPPA images/Demotix

Today, Liverpool and Manchester United remain the largest clubs in the prison, reflecting the huge support enjoyed by their namesakes within the wider Ugandan population. But there are other challengers. A side called the Orange Bees, created by former students of Kampala’s Makere University, became known as the “team of the elites”. After the release of its founders in 2003, it mutated into Chelsea FC, which has established itself as the tribune of youthful talent. The same year, Woodworkers FC and Kitchen FC became Juventus and Germany respectively. Rebranding as Germany proved so unpopular that the team was once again renamed, this time as Aston Villa. Newcastle United was the brainchild of Angina Boscso, a man renowned in the prison for his skill as a talent spotter, and his deftness at buying players cheap and selling them dear. Boscso has been released but Newcastle endures, now serving as a feeder club and academy for Liverpool.

Prince FC turned into Everton – the league’s perennial underdogs – a club that is staffed by Kampala street kids, ex-addicts and dealers. Police FC, a testament to the number of former officers in this jail, became the suitably rough-house Leeds United. The financial demise and multiple relegations of the team’s English counterpart in the mid-2000s led to it changing its name once more. It became Hannover 96, and Manchester United’s feeder club; though one dogged fan, Brian, who came to talk to me almost every day, had trouble saying goodbye to the glory years and still insisted on calling it Leeds.

The two newest clubs are Barcelona and Arsenal. Although most inmates come from poor backgrounds, occasionally someone really powerful ends up in Luzira on remand – a businessman, an opposition politician, a high-ranking soldier – though they rarely stay long. A Kampala businessman, long since released, was so enamoured by the short-passing tiki-taka style of Barcelona circa 2009 that he created a namesake side out of thin air. Arsenal, meanwhile, benefited from the wider popularity in Uganda of the team that had won the Premier League in 2004, unbeaten and invincible. Luzira’s Arsenal is known as the Catholic team – another kind of minority group in predominantly protestant Uganda.

The way in which the clubs are run is now strictly regulated by the UPSA constitution. They must have their own constitutions, a chairman, coach, secretary and treasurer, a minimum of 16 registered players and a maximum of 25. Each club also has its fans, who are essential in providing services and resources to develop the side; they are the errand-runners who specialise in finding people when meetings are called, the cobblers who patch up boots, the medics and the healers.

Manchester United has a trio of fanatical supporters who carry their own tiny banner and regularly run on to the pitch when the team scores, which it regularly does. Luzira’s single Chinese inmate is also a fan. His huge United beach towel, weighted with plastic water bottles, hangs from the barred windows of an upper floor cell behind one of the goals. Arsenal has its own little group of ultras, too, while Liverpool’s supporters have made a flag recalling the Hillsborough disaster and the club’s most recent European cup triumph.

Perhaps the most important role the fans play is donating kits and food to their clubs in order to attract the best players. Watching the opening rounds of the tournament, it soon became clear that the Manchester United and Liverpool players were noticeably bigger and evidently better-fed than the others. Everton and Chelsea’s squads, in particular, looked spindly; these clubs have a tiny fan base within Luzira so their players are more reliant on the basic food ration: porridge in the morning and a supper of posho – a glutinous mash made of manioc – and beans, which are so tough they need to be boiled for eight hours. Posho is particularly hard going: sticky yet dry, pulped but gritty, and utterly tasteless.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Liverpool keeper stands in front of his goal and a packed crowd. Photograph: Ronald Kabuubi/EAPPA images/Demotix

Despite the dedication of the prison’s football fans, the crowd that turned out for the tournament, which often numbered more than 1,500, was curiously quiet. There was some joy and jubilation, stray shouts and calls, the occasional hug and holler, but it was hardly a cauldron. Opio Moses reminded me that fans are not above the rule of law and that constitutionally, the clubs have been made responsible for their behaviour. Unsporting conduct by the crowd is punished as severely as it is on the pitch.

Everton 1 – 1 Newcastle United (Newcastle won 5-4 on pens)

Liverpool 0 – 0 Chelsea (Chelsea won 5-4 on penalties)

The next day, early in the second half of the Liverpool-Chelsea game, play was stopped for over 20 minutes when a hundred sacks of manioc flour, which had just been delivered to the prison, needed to be carried across the pitch. Jonathan Mugerwa, a match official, who had to keep a report of players, substitutions, goals and cards, noted this down. Later on, all the match reports would be collated and a detailed official account of the tournament produced, handwritten on lined paper and filed in UPSA’s own archive.

Life in Luzira wasn’t always like this. The prison was built by the British in the 1920s, 30 years after Uganda had been made a British protectorate. The imperial state replaced the British East African Company as Uganda’s notional rulers but, with very few colonists on the ground, the country was run by a system of divide-and-rule that delegated power to selected tribal groups. In its colonial incarnation, the prison was less crowded than today but still barbaric: pitiful living conditions, institutionalised humiliation and a harsh regime of discipline including the use of punishment cells, deliberately flooded with water to make them uninhabitable. The British, who finally left in 1962, used the prison to house nationalists and political dissidents.

Post-colonial Uganda was no more humane to its prison population. Idi Amin’s eccentric and brutal dictatorship in the 1970s was followed by coups, uncertainty and a gruelling civil war that destroyed the economy, what was left of the Ugandan state, and made the use of violence and torture the norm. By the early 1990s, Luzira was ravaged by HIV and so starved of funding that less than a quarter of the prisoners could be supplied with even a blanket; inmates buried the dead in mass graves and grew vegetables on the same ground to keep the living fed. In 1993, a group of former soldiers staged a two-day riot that required an intervention by the army and left two prisoners dead and many injured.

Something had to change. In 1999, the high commissioner of the Ugandan Prison Service, Joseph Etima, a progressive who also opposed the death penalty, declared an open-door policy to the outside world. At Luzira, the Red Cross and Swedish development agencies brought money, best practice and international law. Local churches and European NGOs, including the African Prisons Project, began to improve healthcare and living conditions. Together they inculcated a hybrid prison culture that drew on western concepts of human rights and individual rehabilitation, Christian notions of redemption and forgiveness, and African traditions of collectivism and restitutive justice. The success of the prison depends on keeping the peace, the fragile rule of law and the consent of the prisoners themselves.

Wilson Magomu began working at Luzira around the time that the changes first started. After a decade rising through the ranks of the prison service, working in provincial jails, he returned in 2011 as officer-in-charge. Magomu is a big man who moves through the prison with unhurried poise, shuffling between his three mobile phones, dispensing orders, casting an eye over the CCTV. He seems to speak and think in the same manner. Recalling a visit to Belmarsh prison in London he observed: “You have all of the technology, but you do not have calm.” He looked out of the window into the Boma. “I have just 100 guards on duty to look after more than 3,000 of my inmates,” he said. “I have to have calm.” He believes that adding guns, as is common in America, makes matters worse. “There, the guards are afraid of your inmates and your inmates are afraid of the guards. This causes tension. I do not like to work in a place that is full of tension.” There is an implicit deal at Luzira. Prisoners will be incarcerated but their rights will be respected. Violence will not be tolerated. Laws and rules are applied consistently. In return, the prisoners must not only stay put, they must help to run and organise the place.

UPSA was one product of this system. In the early 2000s, individual football clubs existed and there was a desire for competition, but no neutral organisation to make it happen. So in 2003, the administration and the prisoners created UPSA. The body’s leading figures are voted in annually by an electoral college of the prison’s referees, the clubs and their officials. It has the practical and logistical task of seeking out sponsors and putting on properly refereed tournaments. It must regulate and negotiate with the football clubs and the prison administration over the use of the Boma, behaviour and discipline, and the timing of tournaments.

Like any football association it runs a player-registration system – one that requires players to appear in person on three consecutive days once a year at a specific place in the Boma. It has also had to police the black market in players as clubs have used every means at their disposal – extra food, contraband, blackmail and persuasion – to get them to switch teams. Two years ago UPSA introduced transfer windows, two short periods each year in which players can move between clubs.

In this regard, UPSA is part of a long African nationalist tradition of football as a school of administration, politics and democracy. Before the first world war, Albert Luthuli, an early president of the ANC, was vice president of an African football association in Durban. Then, in the 1940s, the trade unions formed in Bulawayo were led by shop stewards who also captained the Zimbabwean teams Matabele Highlanders and Red Army.

But there is another tradition at work in the UPSA constitution. The preamble to the most recent edition, written by the inmates themselves, brings to mind the Victorian moralists and public-school teachers who saw football as a school of character, an ethical, even spiritual, enterprise. These were the kind of Britons who brought imperial rule, Christianity and football to Uganda in the late 19th century.

We the inmates of Ugandan Government Prison Upper

- OBSERVING that society imprisoned us demanding that we learn to adhere to the rule of Law, and

- DESIROUS of transforming ourselves into Law abiding citizens.

- YET REALISING the inestimable influence to abide by the rules and regulations on all who culture themselves to regular competitive sports activities.

- AWARE of the benefits of physical fitness and entertainment effect of sports to human health,

- AND NOTING the development of the talents of the youths that can be delivered from sporting events

- DO SOLEMNLY DECIDE to enact and adopt the following articles as the constitution of the Uganda Upper Government Prison

The reformers of the English public schools sought to turn out muscular Christian gentleman who would go on to rule the empire. UPSA has been trying something much harder. Through football, its members have been trying to turn themselves into citizens ready to rejoin a society they damaged. You can read it in their words and you can see it in their play. Dissent, football’s code word for slagging off the referee, is almost entirely absent. Unsporting behaviour of any kind is frowned upon. A red card means a two-month ban from football – an agonising punishment for any player here.

The Liverpool-Chelsea game went to penalties. When Chelsea scored the winning goal, Jonathan Mugerwa made the final entry in his notebook and then turned back to his Bible. Before he arrived in the prison, Mugerwa sold shoes on the streets of downtown Kampala. He was, in his own words, a drinker and a drug taker, an illiterate troublemaking youth. One evening, a man suspected of multiple robberies in his neighbourhood was caught and confronted by a small group of angry locals. By the time Jonathan and his friends arrived after a night of drinking, the crowd had turned violent, and Jonathan joined them. As Mugerwa told the story, his eyes remained fixed on me but his voice trembled. “I am here because of mob justice. I played my part, but my greatest sin was not to save the boy.” Now, Mugerwa has finished high school, works as a counsellor, and has turned himself into to a poet and pastor. He eyed me, in all seriousness, and said: “Timothy 2, Chapter 2, Verse 5. An athlete is not crowned in glory unless he competes according to the rules.”

In the first of the semi-finals, Barcelona took an early lead but I missed the goal; Bertrand Lavalle was talking to me again. A short, round-faced Congolese man, he was simultaneously delighted to be speaking French and exasperated that he could not form DRC FC, a Congolese football team. “Oui, Il y a beaucoup de discrimination, Professor. Il y a un problème congolais.” During the second half, as Manchester United turned the tide, I asked Opio Moses why UPSA would not let Bertrand form a team. Moses patiently explained the Congolese problem to me. First, clubs have to join in pairs. As there are already 10 clubs, adding a single club makes matters impossible. Second, “We do not seek to encourage teams that are tribal.” There had been trouble in the past with this, explained Moses. (I pointed out that Arsenal were Catholics and that Manchester United were once non-Bugundans, but Moses demurred). Third, English is the official language of UPSA. “The administration cannot have a team speaking only French.”

As we were talking, Manchester United equalised and the crowd, a little more excitable today, began advancing over the touchline and on to the field. Moses, who is neither large nor loud, gently waved them back behind the line with understated but impressive authority – an authority derived in part from his status as chairman of UPSA. When he has done his time, Moses plans to found an NGO devoted to bringing vocational education to the prison. “Football is so good for many things, but it will not allow a man to eat,” he said.

Moses’s predecessors were no less politically adept. In the early days of UPSA there was a widespread problem of bribery, as ambitious chairmen paid opposition players in food and contraband goods to throw games. The organisation was also threatened by a breakaway movement, fired by discontent amongst the devotees of sports other than football. Even more seriously, in 2006 the highly polarised atmosphere of Ugandan politics found its way into Luzira. Clubs began to align themselves with President Yoweri Museveni’s governing National Resistance Movement party or the opposition Democratic party. Competition turned to conflict, referees lost control of games. Now, by force of law, clubs must not assume a political identity. Bribery, always illegal, was tackled by the UPSA executive, who persuaded club chairman that it was better to spend their resources on making their team better, rather than making other teams worse. The indoor sports and volleyball fraternities have been given their own administrative committees, and UPSA has a legal duty to promote these minority interests.

“Above all, while making decisions and dispensing the rule of law you should incline to the constitution,” Moses said with quiet pride. Alex Rwinomugisha, the chair of the referee’s committee joined us as Hannover 96 squeezed past Newcastle United. An imperiously tall former solider, imprisoned for 20 years for shooting a man, Rwinomugisha agreed that the constitution is important. But, he added, the rule of law needs referees as well as words, and of course no one wants to sponsor the referees. Did I see the kit they were wearing, the state of their boots? How can we improve as referees without coaching? I promised Alex that I would find them new kit for tomorrow’s final, and Moses that I would track down the goat.

On the morning of the final, a marquee was erected. A table of honour was laid with the prison’s cleanest white cloth and a plastic rose centrepiece. The Guardian Spring Trophy 2015 was placed behind it. The officer-in-charge’s straight-backed chair, with its brushed red velvet cushion, sat centre-stage. The inmates put on their smartest and cleanest kit, making their yellow and orange glow more incandescent than ever. Manchester United saved their best for last with official-looking away jerseys. Their opponents, who had hitherto played in the strip of the Portuguese national team and shirts that must have come for a Coca-Cola-sponsored youth tournament, had the real thing on today: maroon Hannover 96 jerseys. The referees were wearing the new matching black strips I had bought for them in downtown. They looked the part.

By mid-morning, two hours before kick-off, the musicians had arrived and old Congolese rumba crackled out of the prison’s PA. The entertainment programme began with ritual circumcision dances from the north, wild hip-swirling gyrations, accompanied by harps and home-made pipes. A two-man wooden xylophone and drum ensemble combined to play traditional music from the east of the country. We heard dancehall reggae tunes that declaimed the pain of prison life, and comic African pop on the importance of the soap bar in the economics of the jail.

The final itself was a walkover. Manchester United scored twice in the first half, wobbled for a moment at 2-1, and then scored three more. At the final whistle, their small coterie of flag-wavers did half a victory lap but everyone else, even the team, headed for the marquee, the shade and the prizes. Magomu, the officer-in-charge, was stern, but visibly swelling with pride that his inmates had put on such an extraordinary show of organisation, or as he liked to say, “maximum discipline”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest One of the Luzira inmates holds a trophy won by Manchester United. Photograph: Ronald Kabuubi/EAPPA images/Demotix

Opio Moses addressed the crowd: “Generally a prisoner is deemed, and is by definition, a person quite incapable of following and abiding by established laws and regulations. Soccer tends to correct this disability.” He also asked that I become UPSA’s official ambassador to the Premier League. I promised that they will get their place in the global history of football, and that I would come back and see them again.

It was time for the prizes, hastily distributed from the table of honour as the clock ticked towards lock-up time. Manchester United got the new set of jerseys, Hannover 96 were awarded the goat, though it still had not shown up. The referees and the executive committee got sugar and soap, notebooks and pens. Everyone got toothbrushes: the clubs and committees, all the players and musicians, the Boma chief, the regimental police, the cobbler who makes boots last forever and, finally, the line-markers and net man. (Most inmates do not posses a functioning toothbrush.)

The biggest cheer of the day was reserved for the announcement that I had stumped up for a new satellite decoder for the TV that sits in its own corrugated iron hut, and enough of a subscription to get the men through to the end of the Premier League season. The goat, it later transpired, had been delivered to the wrong address and had been eaten. (Measures have been taken to purchase a replacement.)

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