Vuvuzela
Long Live the Horn Despite European Scorn
CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- According to history, the first Europeans invaded southern Africa in 1488 at a place now called Mossel Bay a good drive east of the World Cup venue here named Green Point Stadium. They eventually imposed all manner of their way of living, particularly pernicious, on the indigenous people who forever called this land home. The most recent invasion of Europeans began earlier this months when tens of thousands of fans of the 13 European countries that qualified for the first holding of this quadrennial global soccer championship in Africa started pouring in. And many of them are not much removed from the thinking of their ancestors. To be sure, some of them carped in recent days about the deafening drone of what has become the iconic symbol of Africa's first World Cup -- a meter-long plastic horn called the vuvuzela.Share
They complained to World Cup governors that the vuvuzelas are too loud and, most annoying of all, disrespectful. How's that? They drown out the European soccer custom of singing songs, created often out of popular tunes, just for the teams Europeans follow. Their complaining got so robust the past few days, and was joined by a few players and coaches who said they couldn't hear their play calls, that the organizers of this World Cup felt compelled to respond. It was a good thing to hear on Monday, however, from World Cup boss Sepp Blatter, a Swiss native, that his fellow Europeans complaints fell on deaf ears. "I don't see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country," Blatter said. "Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?" This may be the World Cup, but it is Africa's World Cup just like over half of the previous 18 were Europe's. Taking away the vuvuzela would be nothing short of another page of cultural imperialism exercised by Europe on Africa.
National Columnist Kevin Blackistone is on the scene in the home of World Cup 2010.
-- Read More After all, the vuvu, as some have shortened the popular name to now, isn't just African. It isn't just South African. It is black South African. It is to black South African soccer what the black college marching band is to college football. It just happened to get appropriated, implemented and soon exported world over by this tournament. Black South Africans aren't the first or only soccer fans to blow a horn. Fans of Mexico soccer testified recently that they were blowing horns in the '70s, a tin one. But the appeal of the vuvuzela is it is plastic, cheap and easily mass produced. The origin of the vuvuzela is disputed. A company called Boogieblast, one of several making some of an estimated $20 million off sales of patented and knockoff vuvus, states on its website: "The vuvuzela was introduced to South Africa as a toy for kids to blow, and hardly got off the ground. Selling the vuvuzela proved almost impossible, until the full potential was realized by the local soccer supporters ...The first prototype was from America and changed somewhat for more comfortable blowing and effectiveness. The word vuvuzela was first used by a few soccer supporters. There are many claims to what the word really means, but more generally it means to pump up ones performance in a truly South African manner." The folklore, which carries more credibility in Africa than a corporate statement, is that the vuvuzela was born in the townships, the sprawling apartheid-government mandated black ghettos like the most-famous one, Soweto, that rests in the shadow of Soccer City, this World Cup's crown jewel stadium on Johannesburg's edge. A native of Cape Town told me he first heard them at soccer games in the townships. Soccer is the sport of choice of black South Africans while the minority population prefers rugby and cricket. A fellow who has befriended me as my unofficial tour guide took me past a fellow's house in Soweto where he said the first vuvuzelas were made.
Then there is a guy named Freddie "Saddam" Maake, who is the best know fan of the Kaizer Chiefs soccer team, who has shown various publications pictures of himself in the '70s and '80s at Chiefs games holding an aluminum horn made from an improvised bicycle horn that he says was the first vuvuzela. Maake, who is from another Johannesburg-area township called Tembisa, claimed he carried his horn to international contests in the '90s, including the '98 World Cup in France, but got the boot with it by security officers who said his metal vuvuzela was a dangerous weapon. Maake said he took his idea to a plastics manufacturer and, "vwala!" But as part of the history that has pained this country, Maake told South Africa's Mail & Guardian newspaper last week that he's been ripped off. "This is my invention and it saddens me that other people are benefiting from all the suffering I have endured in popularizing the vuvuzela," the Mail & Guardian quoted him. Maake was most upset with a face that made the rounds on the airwaves here Monday afternoon as word of FIFA's vuvuzela ruling rolled out -- Neil van Schalkwyk. Van Schalkwyk co-owns Masincedane Sport in Cape Town and makes vuvuzelas by the bushel "He is making a killing out of my hard work while I starve," Maake said. "Journalists from as far as England and Mexico have visited me here and say that I should be rich, but look at me." The fellow I met in Cape Town told me the shame of it is that neither Maake nor any other alleged inventor of the vuvuzela in a black township ever patented the horn. Who, after all, would have foreseen its commercial explosion at a South African-hosted World Cup? Nonetheless, there is no disputing that vuvuzelas are "ingrained in the history of South Africa," as South Africa World Cup organizing committee spokesman Rich Mkhondo pointed out Monday. "Let us not make this a South Africa instrument alone," he said. "A vuvuzela is now an international instrument. People buy them and stuff them in their suitcase to go home." The whining Europeans included.
Read More: Soccer fifa+world+cup+2010, freddie+maake, Freddie+Saddam+Maake, FreddieMaake, Sepp+Blatter, Vuvuzela
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