Bafana Bafana

This is a vuvuzela:

This is what 35,000 South African soccer fans sound like when given vuvuzelas and unleashed into a soccer stadium:

On Saturday, South Africa’s national team played Botswana in Durban. As Darren and I were (and indeed, still are) stranded in the area, we decided to go. Tickets were a very reasonable 100 rand (~$10), though we spent another $15 on South African Football Association shirts after realizing en route that we had both inadvertently dressed in the colours of the Botswana team. We deemed it more politic to position ourselves on the South African side. Their team is called ‘Bafana Bafana’, which I understand translates into something like ‘Go Boys Go Boys’. Presumably it was chosen to make it easy for foreign visitors to come up with cheers.

We crossed the bridge into Central Durban and followed a group of young Botswana fans towards Moses Mabhida stadium. The stadium was built for the 2010 World Cup and has a very modern sort of appeal. The sloping walls are shaped into white sail-like peaks that reminded me of the Sydney Opera House, and the open roof is spanned by a soaring white arch. When we arrived – over an hour early – the area around the stadium was packed with people milling around in a frenzy of pre-game excitement, many of them still celebrating the Springboks’ win in a rugby game against New Zealand that morning.

At three o’clock, the crowd swarmed up the ramp that encircles the stadium, pushed its way through two ticket checkpoints, and was herded through a pat-down zone in which I made the mistake of approaching the nearest guard. He gave me an appalled and mildly disgusted look as he waved me sternly towards a distant female. We found our seats precisely where one would expect to find them, though we were offered assistance by no fewer than four ushers. This overstaffing of entry-level jobs is rife in Durban; every patch of grass has a five-man crew to trim it, another to fertilize it, and a third to hose down the bricks around it. From a societal view, maybe this is a good strategy; better to have fifteen people doing relaxed work at minimum wage (under $2 an hour in most sectors) than to employ five and add ten to the city’s jobless. Estimates of the unemployment rate in Durban range from 35 to 45%. In South Africa as a whole, the figure is about 25% – not far from the 28% that is creating such havoc in Greece. Darren points out, depressingly but probably accurately, that unemployment causes comparatively little fuss in South Africa because South Africa’s government assumes less responsibility for the social welfare of its citizens.

You would think this sort of thing would put the residents of Durban in a state of perpetual gloom, but the people attending the soccer game were certainly in high spirits. Perhaps only those with jobs could consider tickets, and were feeling doubly lucky.

I was still staring around the stadium when the game began. South Africa immediately went on the offensive, and I was beginning to enjoy watching when Darren nudged me. “Are they booing the white guy?” I watched for a few moments. To my disquiet, he appeared to be correct; every time the ball was touched by Bafana Bafana’s #15, who happened to be the only Caucasian on the field, there was a loud, long chorus of ‘Booooooooooo’ from the stands. “Could he have recently transferred from a rival team?” I said uncertainly. “Or maybe he scored on his own goal in the last game?” Both explanations seemed like stretches, but the alternative was an uncomfortable one. I pushed it to the back of my mind, resolving to look into it later.

South Africa dominated the first half, which finished 2-1 in their favour, and added another goal to their tally shortly after the intermission. One of the nice things about the game was that the people in the crowd would regularly stand up and start doing a sort of stepping, hip-twisting dance of enthusiasm. This intensified with every goal; at the final one, with South Africa up 4-1 after a penalty kick, over half the stadium – young men and middle-aged women alike – were standing and sporadically breaking into this dance. This was in stark contrast to the scene at a Canucks game I attended last winter, where half the crowd struggled to stomp their feet in unison and the other half was too self-conscious to try.

The cheering and clapping and vuvuzela-ing degenerated into a characterless roar near the end of the game. We left a few minutes early to avoid being caught in the mass exodus.
“Do you know anything about #15?” I asked our host, Paul, when we returned. “It sounded like everyone was booing him.”
“Fifteen?” said Paul, seeming puzzled. “That’s Booth. They love him. Every time he touches the ball, they cheer.”
“Not booing, then,” I said.
“Boooooo . . . th,” said Paul, very slowly and distinctly.

So the potential for a racially charged misinterpretation evaporated.

It occurred me that, with the addition of a short ‘Life Lesson!’ summary at the end, this incident would be almost ideally suited for inclusion in one of those saccharine anthologies of morality tales for children.