What is Bafana Bafana and other information required for a football fan

Behind my right shoulder there is a TV on the wall, where at the moment, live on Supersport 3, a group of fans of the South African football team is twirling in a choreographed dance of the correspondent. All these happy people - both the TV man in a formal suit and his sincere extras dressed to the nines - are enthusiastically shouting “Bafana Bafana”! That's the name of their favorite team, which today sailed slowly through the crowd in an open double-decker bus in Soweto, a suburb of 4 million people in Johannesburg, populated almost exclusively by black South Africans.

Cape Town is far from Johannesburg, where on June 11 Bafana Bafana will play its first championship match against the Mexicans, not by a car rally, but by air, and yet here we can hear very well what the first ever football world championship in Africa sounds like continent.

You won’t confuse this sound with anything, I’ll write it and I’ll deceive you. Because I myself confused it just an hour ago in the old Cape Town port with the whistle of some Australian cargo ship. He released into the evening sky the trumpet-like rasp of a giant vuvuzela —that’s what the intrusive plastic pipes are called here, from which every self-respecting local considers it his duty to extract this sound, difficult for the European ear.

At the entrance to the stadium there is a sign with an extensive list of items prohibited from being brought into the stands. Among the inscriptions is the following: “It is prohibited to create noise using megaphones, horns and tubes with a gas canister. Vuvuzelas are allowed ." The latter is written in bold.

I took a tour of the fan outlets and got an idea of the pricing of the 2010 World Cup staple. So, the simplest vuvuzela - a half-metre long, sloppily molded plastic tube - sells for 39 rand (just over $5 at the local exchange rate). Black, with a rope handle, made a little more carefully - 74.10 (about $9.8). A vuvuzela, covered with fabric in the colors of the national flags of participating countries, costs 108 rand ($14.5). But there is a queen vuvuzela costing R1,000 ($133), trimmed with real antelope skin. True, the inside is still the same inexpensive plastic. And they all sound the same.

How much does a vuvuzela queen cost?