Bafana bafana: it's here

We all know what today is. The Cape Times simply states: “It's here.”

At first glance, this is Cape Town going to work. A domestic worker struggles onto the train carriage carrying a vacuum cleaner half her size. As she struggles for breath I see beneath her thick woolen cardigan the green and gold of a bafana shirt. In fact almost everyone, of every gender, age and ethnicity, seems to carry some insignia of some kind—Bafana scarf or hat, bandana, socks, hat, a small flag in the hair, a phone case in South African colours. At each stop the station masters call out to Bafana bafana through their megaphones, the police stand relaxed with a baton hanging on one side of their belts, a vuvuzela on the other. The noisy white kids behind me bray that they haven’t used public transport for a year, but they are here today and heading for town.

I feel a delicious sense of anticipation flood through me and as we are disgorged from the train at Central Station, passengers from each carriage flow into each one other on the narrow platform, flow into the lines of commuters swarming off the other trains that are arriving, a great swelling river of green and gold, horns, pipes and whistles. I head north up Plein Street past the parliament where giant footballs sit incongruously amongst the Victorian formal gardens, weave through the knots of chattering fans, pass through the random cries of "ayoba," "Bafana bafana" and suck up the ever rising swell of a whole city of vuvuzelas.



Crystal comes to meet me, an SABC reporter on her day off. I've already woken her earlier than she planned and the carnival started in her neighborhood at 2am, but I tell he we’ve got to be there, we’ve got to get down to the fan fest today because its going to be rammed and I can't, just can't watch this game in a bar. In fact, the further away from the noise and the swell I am, the more anxious I feel.

We arrive at the fan fest 20 minutes before opening and already 3,000 or 4,000 people are assembled and ready to go. Crystal surveys the scene and says with glee, “the people have come today, the flats have come to town.” They seem to have come from everywhere in Cape Town and for 30 minutes we bay and blow and shout to be let in, to break the unbearable tension of waiting.

The previous night six people were hurt in a crush at the Cape town fan fest, but this crowd, for its all its chaotic euphoria and exuberance, moves quickly and easily through the sluice gates and, exultant on arrival, takes the noise to a new level. We're here, its 11 o’clock and we are going to watch the opening ceremony and South Africa vs Mexico. By noon there are 25,000 people and the square in front of Cape Town City hall is full.

We decompress, the crowd scatters, and we wander, eat and drink, and check out the tat stands. I take a walk and find what I’m looking for. In a deserted corner near the five-a-side pitch a gaggle of characters have taken up furtive residence behind an old imperial statue. This is, of course, the dope heads' corner and for all their caution a great plume of blue smoke rises over the head of some British adventurer.

The whole setup is a commercial bubble, plastered by logos, regulated by sponsors' needs, bombarded by adverts for glitzy casinos, but today I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be a cynic today; I want the football and the crowd. They make it hard for you to lose yourself, though. The covered stands reserved for sponsors and media and those ready to fork out 225 rand. The film of global football fandom that goes from Berlin to Bangkok but doesn’t make it to Accra or Abidjan. The fact that the tiny space for street traders is hidden so far away I don’t find it until I leave. But the crowd now regrouping ready for the opening ceremony and opening matches just drives it all away.

The music, old time South African accapella, and Cape Town house and reggae, is fantastic. Our MC says it'll be 2-0 to Bafana bafana and maybe we are beginning to believe this. Finally, the official ceremony comes onto the screen. Sorrow for Madiba’s tragedy and absence, cheers for the dancing Desmond Tutu, riotous horns for the map of Africa, rhythmic punctuated blasts of sound for Femi Kuti and, with every passing minute, the air seems more rent with flags and horns than ever.

The teams emerge, and in an ecstatic peak, the crowd simply makes a wall of unbroken noise. Kick off. Suddenly, not quiet silence but a muted drone, we seem, like Bafana bafana, to have frozen; we are reduced to cheering throw ins and tackles. We hold our breath, and as South Africa claw their way back into the game the crowd rises to the occasion, pressing closer together, and when South Africa take their chance and the lead early in the second half the crowd erupts—vertically—as hands and horns punch the air, and then horizontally as those who cannot contain themselves set off on long wheeling runs around the square.

The man beside me now alternates between Zen mediation, bouts of cheering, and prayers to the clock n the city hall to move faster. The air is thick with the bitter burnt herbs of imphepho, a crucial tool in opening channels of communications with the ancestors. I hope they are telling Bafana's back line to tighten up, but if they were, the boys wern’t listening. Mexico equalizes. Our 20 minutes of delirium deflates. When the final whistle comes the cheers are vast and yes,  it's relief that Bafana did not lose and did not freeze, it's relief that it really has begun and it all seems to work. Relief, that on this day, we were here together to witness it.

In seconds, we have begun to fragment and split apart, hurrying for exits, slipping off into side streets, our collective energies spent. I head back to Crystal's. She has left at half time, back on duty, to report live form Guguletu Township down the road. Sitting in a cafe on her street I watch her report from outside a Shabeen in a street full of beer and mounds of grilling meat, celebration and drunken reverie. She is virtually mobbed. The consensus in the flats is that this was a result.

Just an hour after the game, the crowd has dispersed altogether. Another has gathered at Green Point, on the other side of the city, to watch France and Uruguay. The highlights of the Bafana game play out on the big screen behind me. On the curbside to my left someone has emptied their car ashtray. It’s a bonanza for the thin, frail main that collects butts. He methodically sweeps them up and turns to watch the replays of South Africa's goal. Glassy eyed, in another world, he begins to slowly swing and dance. We catch eachother’s eye. We smile, and for that fleeting moment are part of the same crowd. I offer him a few cigarettes, which he takes and stashes. The pundits have come back on air, he shuffles down the street. The last of the compressed rainbow of light on the horizon drops down behind the mountains. Yes, it’s here; but most of all, we are here.