You want fan-song? Lovely fan-song, very clean? Hey, GI, five dorrar I give you long time fan-song, only five Merican dorrar.
It sounds rude but not a little intriguing, some manner of red-light-district pork dish served on a bed of rice and cheap perfume. Just for a moment one wonders what it would be like to sit on a verandah in the cool of the evening, being fed fan-song by some giggling pearl of the Orient and watching the distant flashes of booby-trapped prams.
But then the music starts, and the hyphen falls away like orchid petals in the first gusts of a monsoon. Ugly and depressing, the fan song squawks to life, and sport settles a few inches deeper into the muck.
For those who mistook the jingles on the radio for nappy ads, it turns out that some time ago Supersport sent out invitations to songwriters around the country to compose a new sporting anthem that would ‘be sung for generations to come”. This seems naive, given that in two generations the official global language will be Chinese.
Besides, it’s taken our fans close on five years to master the tricky Spanish lyrics of ‘Olé, olé, olé, olé!” Now we’re asking them to learn 20 entirely different words and arrange them in the right order. An organ-grinder’s monkey would have a better chance of winning a national jingle-writing competition.
Then, again, the little be-fezzed fellows still might. In fact, he and a quartet of mating cats stuck in a cement-mixer could still go very far indeed in this competition.
One doesn’t want to be unkind to the composers of the short-listed tunes, but in more discerning times their efforts would have been rewarded with a hasty exorcism and a ride on a ducking stool.
South Africa Be Strong is what happens when bored white people give their children guitar lessons and allow them to listen unsupervised to Chicago’s Greatest Hits, Johnny Clegg and Castle Lager jingles. But it could be worse. It could be Here We Go South Africa.
This ditty, written by a Mr Bean (I kid you not), might have once earned last place in the annual Crap Scottish Highland Jingle Contest if wasn’t so determinedly South African. It’s a Juluka tribute-band busking in a Glaswegian bus stop, without their Clegg impersonator, an amplifier or talent.
Bring It Home took four people to write; one for the white notes, one for the black notes, one to hit the drum every so often, and one to clutch at headphones in the production booth and writhe with the grooviness of being a big-time musician.
So which fans are going to sing the winning song for generations to come, or at least until they face death by Chinese firing squad on charges of multilingualism? Certainly not cricket fans, reading Grisham in the shade at fine leg. Pirates and Amakhosi devotees? Too busy jubilating and setting fire to each other.
But of course these people aren’t South African sports fans. For starters, they don’t wear puffer jackets and platform tackies. They rarely have tiny wives sewn into patched leather pants, bottle-blonde hair permed into spirals of uncooked spaghetti. And they don’t automatically thrust their runny noses into passing television cameras.
Fortunately, advertising companies have told us exactly what real South African fans look like. They are white and young. The males like touching each other a lot and have embryonic beer-guts, and the females hug obsessively and are proudly anorexic. All exude the kind of panting patriotism that they despise in Americans.
Most importantly, their love of country (a vague notion of being grateful that Tokyo Sexwale has a white wife and that they’re still allowed overseas bank accounts) is galvanized by any quasi-African pseudo-patriotic ditty. The more phrases in Tame Black (‘Woza! Yebo! Simunye!”), the better.
When the Chinese arrive they won’t find any fan songs being sung, because in the real world South Africans don’t sing at sports games. And not because we’re all tone-dead, either. We’ve just never taken to instant traditions.
Still, it might be worth hanging on to at least one of the current crop of contenders for the next visit by Australia’s cricketers. South African Dream, which starts off like an add for Ouma rusks, exhorts our foes to ‘watch us play like the African drum”.
They’d like that, those Aussies, watching us getting stretched over a barrel and beaten resoundingly …