SOWETO—For my money, which lately consists of fistfuls of rand with pictures of buffalo gracing the bills, no sporting event invites greater tension and drama than a local derby. So when I realized that I would still be in Johannesburg for last Saturday’s match between the two giants of South African soccer, the Kaizer Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates, both based in Joburg’s predominantly black township of Soweto, it was an obvious must-Trot experience.

No matter how big a match gets, no matter how high the stakes, whether a league championship, a world final, or a match between college rivals, the contest against a faraway side is a shared experience for the local fans. While a Red Sox vs. Yankees “Armageddon� series may induce more coronaries in New England than a mandatory government program to provide intravenous injection of chowder (those crazy liberals!), the respective communities on each side experience the drama, for the most part, with their comrades in fandom.

Similarly, if the Russians win the world championship, Canadian hockey diehards only have to tolerate seeing their great rivals on the ice, in the stands and in the streets of Moscow on TV for a split-second before switching off the tube and leaving the bar in Moose Jaw. They skidoo home with similarly depressed friends; they commiserate with work colleagues the next day at the water cooler. Perhaps they field an obnoxious telephone call or two from a newly installed world leader eager to taunt his cowboy-hat-totin’ counterpart, but that’s about the extent of it. The embarrassment of losing is felt from a distance, and can be minimized with little effort.

But when the team you’re battling is supported by your neighbours, your work colleagues, sometimes even your own children, things get interesting. Throw in decades of history and a religious rivalry or two, and you have the ingredients for sporting drama at its highest level.

Look, I hate military-metaphors-applied-to-sports as much as the next guy, but indulge me just this once: The local derby, pitting two sides from the same town against one another, is a civil war. There’s no distant enemy for locals to demonize and root against—the home front is muddled and confusing. In these situations, the fear of defeat trumps the hope for victory. You’re rooting for your side not to lose, because the consequences of defeat are impossible to escape. Seeing the opposition celebrating in your street, which is also their street—now even more their street because they won and you lost—is brutal punishment.

Now, let me be clear that Chiefs-Pirates is certainly no Celtic-Rangers. The Glasgow contest is arguably the granddaddy of all derbies, couched in a thick layer of unlikely history, wild passion and that whole Catholic-versus-Protestant subplot that pushes the tension beyond what any reasonable Glaswegian football fan should have to endure twice each year. But the Orlando Pirates, founded in 1937 and the oldest professional soccer team in South Africa (yes, they call it soccer here—they’re just as gauche as North Americans!), and the Kaizer Chiefs, formed in 1970 by former Pirates player Kaizer Motaung (and the namesake of a rather mediocre British rock band), have cultivated over the course of thirty-two derbies a local rivalry that’s probably the most intense in African club soccer, with last fall’s derby in Durban televised in more than forty countries in Europe alone.

I was aching to see the match live, in front of what is always a 40,000-plus sellout whenever these two teams meet, but due to a stadium renovation in Joburg for the 2010 World Cup, the game was moved to Mafikeng in North West province, several hours away.

I was nevertheless able to talk the official Sportstrotter fiancée and several of her colleagues into venturing to Soweto to watch the telecast among local fans. Soweto, short for South Western Townships, is an urban area created by the eviction of African residents from Johannesburg before and during apartheid. Most white residents of the Joburg’s northern suburbs would never set foot here, and several people I met were shocked that we were going to Soweto on derby day. Yet, almost every black Joburger I met recommended the trip, assuring me Soweto would be safe and the locals welcoming. We decided to incorporate the match into a fascinating tour of the Sowetan townships, courtesy of Billy Nkosi, our guide from Africa Prime Tours, who led us through some of the most historically significant locations from South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle.

But the real draw of the trip for me was the match, and after two aborted stops at half-empty tourist bars, we convinced Billy to take us to The Rock, the hip bar in Moroka township. This was what we were looking for—fans of both teams glued to the bar’s lone TV screen, wearing team jerseys and drinking Carling Black Label. (For some reason the Black Label enjoys a better rep among Sowetans than in Canada—here it’s called “Zamalek� and is a huge local favourite.)

It was definitely the Pirates fans at The Rock who were more overt in their team pride. Known as “the ghosts,” most Bucs fans there were decked in black and white jerseys and several tooted on long, plastic blow horns, an omnipresent instrument of African soccer crowds. One fan showed me a fantastic Pirates tattoo covering his entire upper arm.

The Chiefs fans were less ostentatious—until David Mathebula converted a goal-mouth pass from Shaun Bartlett to put the Amakhosi (Zulu for “chief�) ahead 1-0. All of a sudden, the bar was full of Chiefs fans! Who knew?! The Pirates fans countered the friendly jeering with chants of “ladies first.�

In fact, the spirit of the match was friendlier than I’d expected—the rival fans chatted throughout the game, and many seemed to know each other. The taunting was comical and if there was a mean-spirited sentiment in that bar, I certainly wasn’t privy to it.

(The rivalry has not always been peaceful, and a Chiefs-Pirates match in 2001 produced the country’s greatest sporting disaster when forty-three people were trampled at an overcrowded Ellis Park in Joburg.)

Unfortunately for the Pirates fans, the “ladies� who scored first ended up as the only ones invited to the party. Despite an injury-time sequence that ended with the ball in the back of the net, the Pirates couldn’t manage a goal—the aforementioned play only saw the ball in the Chiefs net after the goalie dropped the ball following a swift boot to his nether regions that had him flipping and writhing in pain.

Still, when the game ended at 1-0 and the Chiefs fans danced and shook their bottoms in front of the Pirates fans, both groups could be happy about one thing: unlike Chiefs keeper Itumaleng Khuna, neither group would be spending the rest of the day with an ice-pack on their collective balls.

Tags: international, soccer, south africa

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Posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.