It wasnt your typical football profile. In 2012, Prime Minister Julia Gillard recognised Lumumba as one of the People of Australia ambassadors. What stock should be placed in the moralising of men whose idea of fun was to call their colleagues poofters, homos, slaves and chimps? Lumumba also thanked Collingwood Football Club members and supporters who reached out to him. Mr McGuire later apologised for his comments. By day eight of the saga, Lumumba was weighed down by the club's betrayals and the media's relentless character assassinations. Mr Lumumba, 33, played in the Australian Football League (AFL) from 2005-2015, mostly for club Collingwood. Then he adopted words of advice from a mentor, the African-American academic Professor Lucius Outlaw Jr: "The lessons of histories of encounters between white folks and folks African and of African descent have taught us that it is not in our best interests to leave the education of white children and young people solely up to white people. The 188cm (6ft 2in) Lumumba played most of his football as a medium defender. Video, 00:00:42, The secret mine that hid the Nazis' stolen treasure. In what's been labelled a " controversial new documentary ", SBS's forthcoming series Fair Game provides a firsthand account of former AFL player Hritier Lumumba's search for identity as a Black. As the review progresses, Lumumba anticipates more of the lurid counter-narratives propagated since 2014 by Collingwood's powerful PR machine. For close to six decades in the 19th century, Cais do Valongo was a place where an estimated 900,000 women, men and children began their existence in the "new world" by being trafficked into slavery. "Lumumba, to me, sounds like the beating of a drum," he says. They're proud to pronounce it. "My father was a new arrival in Brazil, seeking asylum from a brutal civil war in Angola. He was an "infectious character", a "role model", "a leader", and that highest of compliments in the Melbourne footy world: a "great bloke". "Given the club's inability to come clean, and the way it has attempted to publicly and privately attack my reputation, I cannot accept this 'integrity' process has been proposed in good faith.". He'd devoured Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father, and been struck by his and Obama's common experiences. "The police have a well-documented history of brutally targeting black and brown people here. Lies appeared about everything from his holiday plans and mental health to his confrontation of issues as serious as suicide and sexual abuse. But it was also the season that his problems with the media intensified. A lot of the criticism came with a sneering tone. He knew himself by his birth name: Hritier Lumumba. [1][25][26], Lumumba became the AFL's first multicultural ambassador and worked to engage migrant communities through football. "I was born on the sacred indigenous lands of the Guarani, in a quaint little hospital that sits on top of a former harbour area, which was built as a port for the arrival of enslaved Africans," Lumumba says. McGuire has since admitted he 'got it wrong' in his response and said he had used the term 'pride' 'under the pressure of the day'. Fast-forward to a single fortnight of 2014, by which point Lumumba had finally attacked the AFL's myths of equality and tolerance. "We were being trained to give direct and immediate feedback to players and coaches around actions and behaviours that were in conflict with our values," Lumumba says. Seven months earlier, during the AFL's Indigenous round, a 13-year-old Collingwood supporter had labelled Sydney's Indigenous champion Adam Goodes an "ape", sparking a national furore that was exacerbated when McGuire made his immortally offensive joke, likening Goodes to King Kong. The ABC sought responses from Collingwood president Eddie McGuire and coach Nathan Buckley to a series of questions related to Lumumba's experiences at the club. The United States of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is no African-American's idea of utopia. But what they found confronting about Collingwood, Lumumba found comforting a sense of community and an acceptance of differences. In this country, and in football, we pride ourselves on our self-deprecation. In December 2013, he changed his surname back to "Lumumba" and discontinued the use of the nickname "Harry", citing his journey of decolonisation as the reason for the change. It made him think a year further back, to the bewildering period when concussion forced him into AFL retirement. Now Lumumba was "erratic", "disgruntled", "troubled", "bizarre", "outspoken", "fragile", "rogue", a "sook" and a "destabilising influence" with "serious issues". For years, Collingwood hoped, or assumed, that Hritier Lumumba would simply go away. We listen to stories about ripped jeans and low-level joshing and we ask: is that racism? Also, my maternal ancestors are native to the Americas, just like many people in Los Angeles. "His performance caught the eye of the Jongo Bassan da Serrinha community, which my mother was a part of.". We make mistakes. The resultant front page article seemed like something quirky on a slow news day all the better with news from AFL headquarters that chief executive Andrew Demetriou had escalated the request to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. "Hritier Lumumba gave permission for Scott Pendlebury to call him 'Chimp' while at Collingwood," read a Fox Sports headline in August. This is my real stuff, and the club's been fantastic in supporting me and protecting me and they've tried to do that.". News that US President Barack Obama would soon visit Australia prompted Lumumba to fire off an email to Nick Hatzoglou, then head of the AFL's multicultural programs. Nathan Buckley confrontation was the final straw at Collingwood for Mr Lumumba said he had been ostracised by coaches and teammates after criticising club president Eddie McGuire for making racist remarks about Mr Goodes. 'Releasing the burden': Hritier Lumumba says he is walking away from But couldn't Eade and Shaw also have concluded the opposite? On another, it presented a paradoxical vulnerability for Collingwood: what happened if Behrendt, reliant on those driving the supposedly improved atmosphere at the club, still uncovered examples of the toxic, discriminatory and bullying culture Lumumba laid bare? "I reluctantly, initially, accepted it, but then I later came to embrace it and in the embracing of the name I think it symbolised an assimilation into a culture that never really was able to accept me," he said. The president regularly touched on these themes on breakfast radio, and no one batted an eyelid. In documents filed in the Supreme Court of Victoria, Mr Lumumba alleged the league and his former club had failed in their duty of care to provide players with a safe environment.