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If you’re planning to visit our sunny shores for the Fifa Soccer World Cup 2010, you’ll have to make peace with our national instrument, the vuvuzela. Even if you won’t be going to any of the actual soccer matches, even if you won’t be visiting a fan park, even if you won’t so much as set foot in a sports pub, if you are in this country any time in May, June, July or August 2010, then the vuvus will find you.

To outsiders the vuvuzela is an oversized plastic horn with a long, thin neck and a range of sounds that stretch from “screech of the annoyed harpy” to “geriatric cow in heat”. To you it is something that blares, honks or brays at an astonishingly (and annoyingly) loud volume. It is possibly something you think you are entitled to complain about.

To us it is a penis substitute.

In a manner of speaking, that is. The vuvuzela is the end result of a spectator arms race at local Premier Soccer League matches, especially those between the two mega teams: Orlando Pirates and Kaizer Chiefs. In South Africa, you see, we don’t hold with that pansy-ass melodic singing they do in stadiums in Europe. We don’t politely clap our hands. We don’t whistle. We just make as much sheer noise as we possibly can.

Fans at local matches used and discarded a number of traditional and derivative instruments on the evolutionary path which reached its summit in the vuvu. In the vuvu we have it all: the maximum volume that won’t get you beaten up by the guy next to you, an affordable (even disposable) instrument and the ability to carry a rudimentary tune. Honestly. It has about the same kind of range as the bugle.

Now in South Africa soccer is primarily a black sport, in the sense that local league matches will have audiences as close as damnit to 100 percent black. That isn’t a problem; most people who pitch for rugby matches are white, and everybody is okay with that kind of racial preference for certain sports.

But during the Fifa Confederations Cup this year – a kind of miniature preview of the Wold Cup – we had a surprisingly large number of white people attending soccer matches. You know how it goes; when it’s a big international event everybody is suddenly a fan. Thanks to the Confed Cup we had a mixture of white and black in the stadiums, much as will be the case in 2010. And some of those white people, not being accustomed to them, complained about the vuvuzelas.

It hurts their ears, they said. It’s not fair to the foreign teams who aren’t used to playing under such a barrage of noise, they said. It spoils the television broadcast for foreign audiences, they said. It isn’t civilised they said.

These are roughly the objections we expect to hear from you, the visiting foreigner who has not acclimatised to the vuvu. And to you we say the exact same thing we said to our local white people: screw you.

The vuvuzela is part of how we play soccer in this country. If you want to come into our house to watch the games, then you can bloody well do so under our rules, and the vuvu rules. Even the Fifa administrators know better than to even suggest that we think about considering the possibility of banning vuvuzelas from stadiums, because that just ain’t gonna happen.

So consider yourself told. If you want to be grumpy about it, be our guest. On the other hand, you can choose to participate instead. If you can vaguely vibrate your lips then you can play the vuvuzela, and we’ll sell you one for just about no money at all. You may discover, as have a pretty impressive number of our new, white, local soccer supporters, that it’s a great deal of fun when you’re part of the problem.

There’s nothing quite like going into their homes, pointing at them, and then discussing them loudly in a foreign language to make poor people feel like animals in a zoo. Then again, poor people will do a lot of things for money, and letting you do the whole pointing-and-talking thing is not the most demeaning by quite a long way. Thus was born the township tour.

Townships, in case you’ve somehow missed this until now, are the ghettos where white people made black people live because that’s just the way Apartheid rolled. For foreigners these remnants of an unjust past can have a lot of romance as the site of the 1976 riots, for instance, or for featuring the homes of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, or just because a lot of poor black people are charmingly going about their daily lives in such a genuinely authentic manner.

The problem is that townships aren’t what they used to be. We don’t have our riots in them anymore; these days we hold protest marches in front of government office buildings, because the police don’t cage black people in any more. Mandela and Tutu once lived in Soweto, sure, but they haven’t for decades; they moved to the suburbs a long time ago, as did a great many people with the money to do so.

The most shocking truth about the townships – from the point of view of tourists, anyway – is that they aren’t poor and dirty any more, at least not universally. As the income inequality gap between black people and everybody else has been normalising, so money has been flowing into the townships. The net combined effect has been tremendous, and you can now find a growing number of shiny new shopping malls and franchise retail outlets in townships. Look just to the left of the comfortable new family homes and just to the right of the emerald green sports fields, and you’ll find them.

A good tour guide can still give you a sense of a universally desperate (and repressed) people scrabbling for existence by careful manipulation of the bus route. Please do flip these kinds of tour guides the bird, if your township tour is a must, and choose somebody who’ll take you walkabout or cycling. And under no circumstances should you hand over money to anybody who hasn’t taken you to a local tavern, even if it is a sanitised tourist trap. Telling the folks back home that you drank with the locals in some shitty joint is the best story you’re likely to get.

Oh, and you can take pictures. The poor ignorant natives will not think you are trying to steal their souls with your demon box. Remember: not everybody who doesn’t speak English is a noble savage. Some are just people.

Technically a mielie is an ear of corn and braai is a verb referring to the process of barbecuing (usually meat), so a braai mielie is simply a piece of corn prepared over an open fire. But sometimes direct translation fails, and this is one of those times.

The braai mielie is a South African phenomenon that laughs in the face of academic analysis and stubbornly refuses to make sense. In some urban areas, like Johannesburg, they are an infallible seasonal feature. Whenever mielies become available it’s like God’s own multifunction printer kicks into action to run off an infinite number of exact replicas of the braai-mielie lady: always black, always female, always friendly, always on duty no matter what the weather, always tending a fire fuelled primarily by a mixture of anthracite and soft, smoky coal, which is always contained in a modified big metal drum, and always stationed by the side of the road, anywhere the road shoulder allows a truck to pull over.

Mainstream retail has attempted to co-opt the braai mielie that seems so popular (given the high number of roadside sellers) but attempts have invariably failed. Nobody wants to buy a mielie over the counter after it has been carefully prepared on an industrial-grade gas-fired stove by a trained food technician in an environment certified to be hygienic. We want to pull off the road and buy a mielie which is carcinogenic and probably slightly radioactive from all the coal dust spread over it, and then eat it without so much as a pad of butter for accompaniment.

If you are not familiar with corn on the cob, it isn’t exactly easy to eat with one hand (or at all), so why it should be popular among drivers is yet another mystery. And the fierce competition among the sellers, sometimes located just across the road from one another Starbucks-style, mean that prices are rock-bottom low, so why they bother to do it is also not clear. Yet rain or shine you can find a mielie lady ready to serve.

We wouldn’t normally recommend them on a culinary basis, but if you are the kind of tourist who has a township tour on your itinerary, then don’t go home until you can claim to have eaten one.