Читать книгу You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport - Matthew Norman - Страница 28

79

The Vuvuzela

The one-note plastic horn that played its selfless part in producing the worst World Cup thus far was, so Fifa assured us when the global outrage was at its zenith in the tournament’s early days, too deeply embedded in South African football culture to be banished. Once, you could hardly help reflect, pissing in the pocket of the person in front of you was deeply embedded in England’s football culture, but if the tournament had come here in the early 1980s, would Fifa prissily have refused to discourage that for fear of treading on effete cultural feet? I don’t believe so.

Before we go on, let me say this. I love South Africa and its people. One of the happier weeks of my life was spent there covering the story of the Lemba, a tribe who believe themselves to be Jewish, insist that the Ark of the Covenant (Ngundry Llogoma in their language) was once in their possession, and have the coolest flag known to humanity (an elephant inside a Star of David). Another was passed in a Johannesburg hospital attached to a weird, bubbling machine re-inflating the lung punctured by a burglar, in the home of old family friends, who had the impertinence to stick a bread knife into my chest. It’s an incident about which I never speak, though I will show the chest X-rays to anyone to whom I’m refusing to speak about it, pointing out the 1/12th-inch gap between the blade and the heart and the 1/18th-inch cordon sanitaire between steel and aorta.

For all the literal and psychic scar tissue the incident left behind, hand on nearly-pierced heart, I’d rather relive that lively dawn encounter than listen again to that drone of basso profundo killer bees trapped in a drum. If what my wife, whose finishing school was bombed in the war, refers to as the ‘vulva labia’ is indeed a central panel in the tapestry of South African national life, so too are Aids and carjacking, and you don’t hear anyone slapping metaphorical preservation orders on them.