The message of the vuvuzela is blowing in the wind

I recently wrote about the vuvuzela neither to praise nor to malign it. Mine was and still is an attempt — only an attempt — to interpret its bewitching power. It was not a perfect attempt. Otherwise I would not have come across as if I was saying people should either subject themselves to the vuvuzela or get lost. Nothing could be further from my truth. It is more fruitful to consider the meaning of the vuvuzela prior to, and outside of, the question of whether it is likeable or detestable, civilised or uncivilised, hospitable or inhospitable, a psychological aide or a health hazard, environmentally friendly or not and whether it is reasonable or irrational. These obviously important but rather simplistic binaries, are matters which will catch up with us in due course.

The vuvuzela is neither for your or my comfort. This simple point has been especially but inadvertently brought home (again !) by people who bemoan the manner in which the vuvuzela drowns out and replaces singing human voices.

I have been duly accused of being “un African” for choosing (literally) a monotonous piece of plastic in place of the legendary African singing voice. Less than a century ago, African miners engaged in glorious song-and-dance sessions outside their hostels every weekend. Visitors from afar came to watch and record these glorious events. More happened there than meets the lazy eye. They sang songs and danced dances from “home” — and home was far away – as far as Blantyre or Lusaka. They sang joy and recited pain. They danced for fun and chanted militant spirituality. At these events, redemption songs were sung, lament was dramatised, liberation heralded, history redrawn and surrender mimicked even as it was fearfully derided. Though the music and the dances were from home, the setting was not “home” and therefore creativity was demanded of them. This is where and how isichatamiya — the music made famous by Ladysmith Black Mambazo — was born.

In similar ways and settings African-Americans produced negro spirituals, jazz, blues and more recently hip-hop. When kwaito broke on to the South African music scene some protested how “noisy”, “repetitive”, “monotonous”, “patriarchal” and “uncreative” it all sounded. Similar if not worse complaints were and are still levelled at the vuvuzela blowers. In time, kwaito was to manufacture a singer (does he ever actually sing?) called Mandoza and his hit single, nkalakatha — a song that softened many a previously hardened heart. For all his colourfulness and vuvu-blowing ability, “Sadaam” Maake –- the alleged founder of the power of the vuvuzela on the soccer pitch, sometimes called the number one Bafana supporter — is no match for Mandoza. Nor does Maake have the vuvuzela patent, poor fellow, but that is a matter for another article.

How dare I compare vuvuzela blowing to music making? Surely, even bad music is not comparable to the monotone sound of the vuvuzela? But the vuvuzela blower never promised or intended to make music.

The vuvuzela enters the fray to deepen, disrupt and plunge into crisis all the above traditions of song, dance and performance. Like these traditions of art, the vuvuzela phenomenon is a complex and subversive commentary on and of our times. While it was already making its subversive if also sporadic appearance during the 1995 African Football Cup, 15 years later, the vuvuzela drone has become the quintessential sound and feel of the South African soccer game. The vuvuzela sound is not music. It is an interruption of music as you and I have known it. It is a jolting replacement of music-making with a constant, sharp and amplified monotonous hum of a thousand vuvuzelas.

The sooner we will wake up to the fact that the vuvuzela sound depicts a refusal by the working classes to entertain the middle- and upper-classes, the better. Vuvuzela blowing denotes a refusal — not an inability — to sing. It is an option for harmonic noise of a special kind rather than harmonic music of the familiar kind. It is assertiveness designed to affect and to solicit reaction — even if that reaction is the insertion of ear plugs, the switching of TV channels, or the screening out of the vuvuzela sound during match broadcasts.

This is not about narrowly conceived notions of hospitality and inhospitality. After all, the encounter between (South) Africa and the world did not begin on the 11^th of June 2010. We have several hundred years’ worth of opportunities for mutual hospitality — opportunities that continue to unfold in our times, opportunities taken, opportunities flouted and opportunities abused (in worse ways than the sound of the vuvuzela). Yet, if we were willing to radically redefine our sense and taste of “music”, we may yet “see” and “hear” “the music” in the trance-inducing hiss of thousands of vuvuzelas blurring in monotonic unison — occasionally breaking into short-lived sporadic vuvu choruses during a soccer match. With a little more courage we might venture to seek to understand both the power and the sound of the vuvuzela.

I will be the first to admit that it was in sense (only in a sense), a bit of an overstatement to dub the vvuzela sound the desperate cry of an entire continent in an earlier article. The overstatement pertains to the reference to all of Africa. Not all of Africa is taken with the vuvuzela. Not all South Africans embrace and/or appreciate the vuvuzela. Generally, the vuvuzela offends the tastes and sensibilities of the middle, upper and chattering classes — African middle and upper classes included. For this reason, in any given South African match, by far the largest concentration of the vuvuzelas per capita, will be found among the folk seating in the cheap seats — seats which are pejoratively called the “extra-strong seats” in South African football supporter’s lingo.

The vuvuzela is emerging as a working-class instrument of self-expression during a soccer match. Could vuvuzela blowing be part of a sort of a silent “peasant’s revolt” first within South Africa, but also on the continent and beyond? One of the “fears” of the middle classes relating to the vuvuzela is that its sound might become the most memorable aspect of the Fifa 2010 World Cup in South Africa. Some are even suggesting that Fifa might never award the World Cup to an African country because of the vuvuzela. I suppose the vuvuzela might be a slightly better excuse for not awarding the cup to the continent that the non-excuses we have not been given for the past 80 years. But vuvumania could spread across the world. Retailers from other parts of the world — especially in Europe — are already reporting growing sales of the infamous plastic trumpet.

Few visitors to South Africa will leave the country without purchasing a vuvuzela — if only for sentimental and ornamental reasons. When I flew overseas recently I saw dozens of colourful vuvuzelas protruding from hand luggage carry-bags — several dozen must have been shoved into the main luggage. Friends begged me to bring one “for the kids”.

Nothing I say or do will affect the sales or usage of the vuvuzela during matches. The vuvuzela is already out there and indications are that it is growing in popularity. It will not always be hegemonic — hegemony is seldom total, if ever. But we owe it to ourselves to try to understand its power and attraction at this point. Even the banning of the vuvuzela by various football associations might have the unintended consequence of drawing the working classes to the vuvuzela by sheer force of suspicion alone. The millions who love, buy and use vuvuzelas cannot be doing it simply because they are dim-witted, selfish and inhospitable.

Does it mean the vuvuzela sound is not dangerous? I have no objective reason to disbelieve the scientists who say it is. Not anymore than I have reason to disbelieve those scientists who have counseled that smoking (including passive smoking) causes lung cancer. Like its power of attraction, could it be that the “danger” of the vuvuzela also lies in the coded message it carries from the working classes to the upper classes, from the poor to the rich and from Africa to Fifa? What might that message be? This is where Bob Dylan comes handy. The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind – and it is coming soon to a stadium near you.