Mick Hartley

Whatever happens during the course of the World Cup, one thing's clear: by the end everyone will know what a vuvuzela sounds like:

The 94,700-seat Soccer City Stadium is shaped like a calabash, a gourd used as a cooking pot. When the World Cup opens here Friday, though, the stadium will sound like a giant, throbbing beehive with the incessant blowing of plastic trumpets that are the cause of much celebration and consternation.

The trumpet, called a vuvuzela (pronounced voo-voo-ZAY-luh) and reaching as long as three feet, has over the last 15 years become to soccer in South Africa what the samba drum is in Brazil — albeit at a much higher volume.

From the beginning of Friday’s match against Mexico until the end, Bafana Bafana, or the Boys, as South Africa’s team is known, will be serenaded by a deafening, inspirational chorus. For some, the vuvuzelas herald the country’s piercing emergence from the forced racial hush of apartheid.

“This is our culture,” said Lucas Radebe, the captain of South Africa’s World Cup team in 1998 and 2002. “This is how we create our national rhythm and dance.”

For some opposing players and coaches, as well as television broadcasters, however, the vuvuzela is viewed as a major annoyance that should be toned down or banned from the 10 stadiums used at this World Cup.

Some officials are also concerned that the trumpet noise may make it difficult to hear emergency announcements on the stadium public-address systems. Still others think the vuvuzela can be a health risk.

On Monday, Hear the World, a Swiss-based initiative to raise awareness of hearing loss, cautioned in a study that the trumpet blasts could lead to permanent hearing damage and urged fans to wear earplugs or earmuffs during World Cup matches.  

Not all South Africans are enamored of the trumpet. Mondli Makhanya, a former editor in chief of The Sunday Times of Johannesburg, wrote a column in the paper on May 30 that was headlined, “Nothing Kills the Joy of Soccer Like a Bunch of Wailing Vuvuzelas.”

The trumpets have smothered the spontaneous singing that traditionally accompanied soccer matches in South Africa, Makhanya wrote. And while some compare the sound of an individual vuvuzela to that of an elephant or an air horn, he compared the noise “to that of a goat on the way to slaughter.”

But the trumpets will not be silenced any time soon.

Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, soccer’s Swiss-based world governing body, has said repeatedly that African traditions should be embraced, not restricted by European aesthetics.

“When you are in Africa, there is another noise, another ambience,” Blatter said last June at the Confederations Cup, a pre-World Cup tournament played in South Africa, dismissing complaints by some that the vuvuzelas were a distraction. “We have to adapt a little.”

From Mondli Makhanya's article:

What the vuvuzela has done to our football is to take away the spontaneity of song. Soccer fans do not compose new songs any more. The tribal chants that you hear at great soccer cathedrals such as White Hart Lane and the Santiago Bernabeu are rarely heard in our soccer grounds these days. Except for the Bloemfontein Celtic support base, the music in South African stadiums has been drowned by the dreadful instrument. 

Here's a nice YouTube intro to the joys of the vuvuzela. There are links to traditional South African music, but mostly it's just a question of blowing as hard as you can. Imagine 94,000 or so of those – for the full 90 minutes.

There's an enthusiastic editorial in today's Times – "The roar of the vuvuzela should become the soundtrack of the World Cup" – but I suspect many, especially those watching live, are going to end up disagreeing:

[O]ne thing is clear already – this will be the most annoying World Cup in memory.

[Some links via this Metafilter post]