South Africa amazed itself at the response of fans who came out in their tens of thousands to cheer Bafana Bafana in Sandton ahead of their first game. But perhaps more surprising were street scenes I saw across Jo’burg where fans came out in yellow droves to celebrate the fact that we were hosting the World Cup.
In the Johannesburg suburb of Richmond, near the SABC, the vuvuzelas were answering one another up and down the street. In Greenside, where my daughter was, she said that at first there were very few people, but then you started to hear vuvuzelas calling one another and the crowds quickly gathered.
“I had no idea so many people worked in Greenside,” she said.
On the night before the opening game we attended a stupendous rendering of Beethoven’s Ninth by the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Conductor Bernhardt Gueller was handed two token gifts, one of which was a vuvuzela. It received a murmur of appreciation from the crowd. The maestro tried to blow it, but couldn’t produce a sound, never mind a note.
You could hardly credit the appreciation of this high-brow audience for this crass, brash and possibly the world’s cheapest instrument. It plays just a single note.
Replay to before the advent of democracy in 1994. It was hard in that period to see what would become the symbols of a new, united South Africa. There seemed to be literally nothing that both white and black South Africans could unify around.
When the new flag first made its appearance one commentator likened it to Y-front men’s underpants. Our national anthem was welded together from disparate parts.
But we nonetheless found symbols to unite around, icons to celebrate and define who we are and what we want to be. One of our icons, Madiba, is globally shared. As the World Cup drew near, South Africans began flying the flag from their cars, homes and wherever they could.
I was fortunate enough to attend the opening ceremony, a day of days, one of my very best as a South African. But as much as I loved the experience, the highlight of the day for me was not the incredible atmosphere of this truly impressive stadium.
As we parked our cars at the Park and Ride at Wits, the vuvuzelas were blasting down to the cars on the highway below and they were hooting back in a cacophony of joy which would have brought tears to Beethoven’s eyes.
The world, in the meantime, found a new word to add to its vocabulary: Vuvuzela, it being one of the top trending items on Twitter. There are suggestions that the vuvuzela and World Cup tweets have been behind the capacity problems the popular service has been experiencing for much of the week.
Hundreds of people have complained to the BBC about the droning noise the vuvuzela adds to World Cup background sound, but tens of thousands have bought their own vuvuzelas from Sainsbury’s and more than a million have downloaded an iPhone application which allows you to play the vuvuzela on an instrument with the national colours of your choosing.
The bookies were at one stage this week offering good odds that the vuvuzela would be banned by Fifa at remaining games this World Cup. Local World Cup boss Danny Jordaan said that this would be the case if fans blasted their horns during the singing of the national anthems. He seemed to be acknowledging fan behaviour. At the two games I attended the trumpets went silent when the anthems were sung.
Then Mr Vuvuzela himself, Sepp Blatter, ruled that the instrument is far too much of the South African fan experience to even think of banning it. So the bookies have moved their attention to premiership games in the UK, giving odds of 7 to 4 that local clubs will ban it.
I prepared for the opening game by buying ear plugs — “Shu Shu zelas” — not an easy item to find. Whole shopping centres were sold out. But at the game the plugs remained in my pocket as I revelled in the exuberance of the moment.
The critics say that vuvuzela playing is a mindless blasting of the horn, but this does not do it justice. There are any number of fans who can blast out complicated rhythms. Or, they play a riff of four or five short notes and then a larger group belts out a single long note.
But with the vuvuzela set to take over the world, I wondered if we were not giving away important intellectual property too easily. I noticed the Mexicans next to us giving the vuvuzela an envious look. This worried me. We are talking, after all, of the people who gave the world the Mexican wave.
My web reading tells me that the ownership of the vuvuzela is in dispute. Parties who lay claim to having originated it include the Nazareth Baptist Church, which says it has been using the vuvuzela since 1910; Freddie “Saddam” Maake, who sells a CD of vuvuzela tunes; and Neil van Schalkwyk, who runs a company in the Cape which makes and sells the vuvuzela. Maake has said in interviews that he named the horn the vuvuzela from the isiZulu words welcome, unite and celebrate.
Carl van Rooyen, intellectual property lawyer at Spoor and Fisher, says that “no one has done the groundwork required to give effect to ownership of the vuvuzela. There are valid patents or designs registered in respect of the musical instrument now called the vuvuzela.
“Even if this instrument could have formed the subject matter of a design or patent registration, the opportunity of doing so has long come and gone. The only question is who, if anyone, is the owner of the vuvuzela trade mark?”
Van Rooyen examined the records of the South African Registrar of Trade Marks. He says that there have been 40 related trademark applications in the past eight years. He says all of the vuvuzela trademark applications are still pending, “which means that at this point no single party can claim to be the registered owner of the vuvuzela trade mark in South Africa”.
“It would appear that the trade mark vuvuzela is used by all the people of South Africa and [they] will be able to claim ownership of the name vuvuzela when referring to the musical instrument.”
By the second game I attended I noticed that foreign fans were taking to the vuvuzela in their droves. I asked Van Rooyen if we were not giving away an important competitive advantage which we should protect in the same way that the Portuguese have protected port and the Greeks ouzo?
“That’s an interesting question,” he said, explaining that that kind of intellectual property protection was of a more political nature, resulting from bilateral agreements which are enforced by political rather than legal principles.
Enforcement would require the government to step in on the basis that it was protecting the intellectual property of a domestic industry. A question, said Van Rooyen, was “who will make money?”.
What we have now is a noisy trumpet that plays a single note and has a legion of both fans and detractors. The world may or may not take to it, but if I had my way I would declare one of our holidays Vuvuzela Day and join other South Africans on the street blasting to high heaven.