Over the next four weeks, South African footie fans will be blowing their vuvuzelas loud and proud in a joyful release of pent-up emotion. Bafana Bafana may not be quite the finished article the Springbok rugby team was in 1995. So wishful thinking on a grand scale is required to expect Nelson Mandela to be presenting the World Cup to the home-grown heroes of 2010. Or Jacob Zuma, the republic’s president, who played for the political prisoners’ soccer team on Robben Island. Yet soccer, unlike rugby, as journalist Celia Dugger says, ‘is the fanatically followed sport of the black majority’.