A sports journalist with South Africa's Times, Bareng-Batho Kortjaas, said critics of the vuvuzela should watch the matches on television.
"The irony of it all is that most of those denouncing the vuvuzela's democratic right to be blown are part-time football fans who, under normal circumstances, avoid setting foot anywhere near a soccer match because it is 'too dangerous,' " he wrote recently.
Local soccer in South Africa is perceived largely as a "black" game, attracting mainly black supporters, whereas rugby crowds are overwhelmingly white.
Philip Kalinko, manager of PerkalGifts, a vuvuzela distributor in Johannesburg, said South Africans have been disagreeing for years about the noisemaker.
"For everyone who loves it, there's another person who says it should be banned," he said. "I sit there and watch the football on TV, and I don't even hear the vuvuzelas. My wife sits next to me, and she can't bear to listen to the sound of the vuvuzelas."
There is not even agreement on the horn's origins or the meaning of its name. The International Marketing Council of South Africa says the vuvuzela reportedly originated in the kudu horns used to summon villagers in times past. But Boogieblast claims the trumpets were imported as plastic toys from the United States and did not sell -- until soccer fans started using them about a decade ago.
According to the marketing council, a survey last year by research company African Response showed that 71% of South Africans think vuvuzelas will add to the atmosphere at World Cup matches.
The Confederations Cup seems to have created international interest in the trumpet: Kalinko said PerkalGifts had almost no foreign orders until a few weeks ago. In the last three weeks it has sent thousands to countries such as the Netherlands, Turkey, Austria, Britain and Ireland, usually ordered in each country's team colors, he said.
Blasting the plastic horns takes practice. "They're not easy to blow. You have to blow very hard. You've got to fill your lips up with air and blow, as hard as you can," said Kalinko. "Not everybody can do it. We've had a couple of people bringing them back saying, 'It doesn't work.' "
Shadrack Mohsen, 16, a soccer fan who's been blowing vuvuzelas since he was about 10, said banning them in South Africa would be like banning cheering in other countries.
"It's like a tradition for us to play the vuvuzela at our soccer matches when we are singing our songs," Shadrack said. "We're doing things with the vuvuzelas, like pointing them at the players."
A ban, he said, "obviously wouldn't work. People would take their vuvuzelas along anyway, because they're used to them."
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robyn.dixon@latimes.com
