South Africa 2010’s major cultural legacy — the vuvuzela plastic horn — is spreading like a plague across planet football. This Made-in-China ‘invented tradition’ has drowned out the chants, songs, praise poetry, music (yes, music) and other organic collective sounds that used to accompany the ebb-and-flow of the game in South Africa. A Kenyan friend pointed out to me that the term vuvuzela is being used both as a noun and a verb.
However, there is increasing evidence from overseas that a movement is growing in opposition to the notion that the stadium experience can be reduced to the deafening sound of wailing goats. Six English Premier League clubs — Tottenham Hotspur, Arsenal, Birmingham, Everton, Fulham and West Ham — have banned vuvuzelas from their home grounds and others are likely to follow suit. In the United States, where the infernal horn is already in MLS stadiums, the New York Times reports that the New Meadowlands Stadium has been declared a ‘vuvuzela-free zone’ for the USA-Brazil friendly on August 10.
Read the article here.
8 replies on “Vuvuzelas Banned Abroad”
For all those who love the Vuvuzela sound this might be a nice link:
http://www.zeit.de/kultur/musik/2010-06/konzerthaus-vuvuzela
The Vuvuzela group of Berlin’s concert hall symphony orchestra playing Brahms’ Vuvuzela Chorale and the great solo for Vuvuzela in Ravel’s Boléro.
Here is a version with English subtitles:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wf2P8SnOwLo
Having experienced the ear-annoing sound of the i can only agree with the decision of the ban. Hopefully Italian stadiums (or at least rome’s) will be delcared vuvuzelas free.
Peace
It doesn’t surprise me that the vuvuzela performance has been rejected in the European and parts of North American football perfromances. There are deconstructive elements of the largely modernist philosphy that defines western civilization, and it is paradoxically beautiful that South Africans took up a music instrument invented and designed elsewhere to imbue it with an explosively new perspective! If we get down to the logistics of the anti-vuvuzela brigade, we may ask this questions: does vuvuzela blind the eyes from seeing the match? Isn’t the stadium experience a sort of micro-managed carnival experience? Isn’t the fear for vuvuzela more to do with what it implies? that if it is taken up all over the football world, it will always be a plus for South Africa 2010, where it was first elaborately performed? …. for those who may be having some soft sport for poetry, I invite them to read Leopold Seda Sengor’s poem “New York”, I believe the poem directly speaks to this vuvuzela concept, long before SA 2010!
Haven’t experienced vuvuzelas sound live in a stadium I can only assess their level of nuisance through comments, TV broadcasting and Youtube. The annoyance is definitively established by many football fans. However vuvuzelas, more than Shakira’s commercial World Cup pop song, will remain the acoustic stamp of South Africa 2010. Its undeniable that tourists and football fans from all over the world were fascinated by the plastic trumpet made in China and made sure to buy their own during the World Cup, and carried back home for family and friends.
Given the early controversy and complain of Europeans during the confederation cup in 2009 the ban in Europe and the US can be pursued by Africans as an euro-centrism rejection of African football vuvuzela culture. Above, Salomon expressed that perception. Although the decision to ban the vuvuzelas in some Europeans and US sport arenas could be consider a business decision It’s will be difficult for many Africans to accept it.
I personally believe that vuvuzelas have made their way through world football fans’ culture and will survive the bans. New versions, and a eventually a more harmonious ways of blowing them will emerge with time.
Thanks Solomon for the reference to Senghor. Will check it out now.
Couple of thoughts:
‘Isn’t the fear for vuvuzela more to do with what it implies?’ I’m not scared of the vuvuzela and what it (supposedly) means, let alone implies, I just detest the sound!
It also might be hasty to say that if the vuvuzela ‘is taken up all over the football world, it will always be a plus for South Africa 2010’. In fact, the opposite could also be true; that as a legacy of 2010 the vuvuzela will reproduce negative images of Africa.
Finally, South Africa is not the first place where the vuvuzela has been used in stadiums (USA had them in the 1970s) and there’s no such thing as it being ‘elaborately performed’. (Unless your sense of humor is coming through here!) Let’s hope Gerard’s prediction about new versions of the vuvuzela becoming more harmonious with time comes true.
At the stadiums, I barely found the vuvuzelas annoying. The sound was only bothersome when blown directly in your ear, or blown in an enclosed space, like the concrete walkways at the stadiums or train stations. Personally, I would restrict the use of the vuvuzela to native South Africans and/or children under 13, but they aren’t as big an issue as was made during the tournament and even now. The Brazilian contingent’s drums were drowned out, (which may not be an all bad thing), but they had their own horn anyway, so fan noise was always going to be present. As a Joberg resident commented to me, if you were to watch the 2010 WC on tv without vuvuzelas, the matches might as well have been played anywhere else. No, I think the sound of the vuvuzela will always have a wholly positive association with me, as it will remind me of a great tournament, country, and people. Banning the vuvuzela is akin to abandoning terraces because of the archaic idea that standing at matches creates conditions for hooligans. “Let the peasants have their tartar”, as Mr. Burns from the Simpson’s would say. Let the vuvuzelas blow.
http://africartoons.com/sites/default/files/images/jun24-2010.jpg
Having become adept at the art of the vuvuzela and now being able to get two notes from my kuduzela, I will miss the sound when I have to return to the UK. Those 6 weeks worth of trumpet lessons as a child stood me in good stead when I bought my first vuvuzela in early 2008 at Orlando Pirates v Golden Arrows at Johannesburg Stadium. The sight of an umlungu being able to blow a vuvuzela confused a lot of local fans.
During the World Cup, I loved was how fans incorporated the vuvuzela into songs. Yes they’re noisy but are they really any more offensive to our ears than chants of ING-ER-LUND and Rule Britannia?
I’m going to take my vuvuzela to Tiverton Town matches (English Southern Premier League) when I return!