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Potjiekos is one of those dishes that started out as utilitarian and developed into an art form that now has a life of its own, long after the original constraints were removed. A lot like one of our other favourites: biltong.

With potjiekos the constraints were fire and cooking containers. The introduction of the three-legged cast iron pot, the potjie, was a boon for all kinds of South Africans. These pots are virtually indestructible, which is handy if you are semi-nomadic like the early Afrikaners and a lot of local tribes. They are relatively easy to clean (if not by modern, teflon-tainted standards) and they can be used to make a wide variety of dishes.

They were also just expensive enough to keep the average family from coveting more than one or two. Also, as you’d know if you’ve ever roughed it for more than a couple of days, keeping a fire going takes work. When you have to gather your own fuel you don’t want to make for of it than is strictly required, especially if you’re stuck on the savannah where you are bang out of luck once you run out of cow dung to burn.

These two factors created a preference for one-pot cooking. Traditional Afrikaners and groups from just about every black tribe can make an amazing number of things in a single potjie. Potjiekos is simply the most impressive.

So what is it? It’s stew, if you want to be impolitely harsh about it. Potjiekos is the combination of a meat (beef, chicken or venison, traditionally) with a hefty dose of onion, potato and assorted other vegetables of your choice, although the use of broccoli is frowned upon.

The secret, or the open secret at least, is that you never, ever, ever stir a potjie. When it comes off the fire it should be perfectly layered so that you need a long spoon and good technique to dish it out properly. Stirring before completion is a sin punishable by raised eyebrows and a generally cool demeanour.

That is why a good potjie is such an art. It requires the perfect choreography of fire (not too hot, not too cold), ingredient selection and absolutely exquisite timing.

The end result is something that straddles stir-fry, boiling and steaming, with distinct individual notes contained within an overall harmonious symphony. Basically, you have to try it, especially as it doesn’t contain anything you haven’t eaten a million times before and therefore requires absolutely no culinary adventurism.

In theory you can buy decent potjiekos from a select few restaurants, but for the genuine article, cooked for at least four hours with constant vigilance, you need to find a male Afrikaner, preferably over the age of 45, who has developed his own unique take on the preparation – including some secrets that he will not share with his own mother.

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.

If you are French, or hail from a similar mainland European country, you’d better watch yourself. Mothers of young children and pregnant women will viciously assault you with handbags, or at the very least glare at you fiercely and mutter among themselves, if you light up a cigarette in any public space. Yes, it’s just like California. And everywhere else in the civilised world. Europe is the last outpost of the indoor smoker.

Smoking is illegal in just about any public space in South Africa, except in rooms specially designated and equipped. That includes public transport and hotel lobbies. As a rule you can light up anywhere with bar (as in the actual counter over which alcohol is served), but if you are a first-time visitor then don’t risk even that. If there is a roof but no ashtrays, and no other smokers, then just don’t do it. Even if you don’t get fined – which you won’t – you’ll soon discover just how much support the ban has. Even if you’re outside in the cold and the rain, don’t think you’re safe. Blow your exhaust in the general direction of a non-smoker and see for yourself.

However, procuring cigarettes won’t be a problem. Almost all advertising is banned but all the major brands – Marlboro, Camel, Dunhill, Stuyvesant, Gauloises, and the usual cheap stuff – are available at all the 24-hour garage shops and from vending machines or over the counter at just about any drinking establishment.

If you are a cigar smoker then you may have more trouble finding your favourite brands. The stuff you can buy in general retailers and at bars is usually cheap ‘n nasty (except for the upper-class steakhouses and the like); though there are still specialist tobacconists to be found in the big cities.

Just keep in mind that sin taxes are high, so if you are coming to South Africa for a short stay, bring in a carton of duty-free.