Cricket let’s the music play

Times Media

TELFORD VICE, Hamilton

ONLY in Senekal and Swellendam could Sundays be sleepier than they are in Hamilton. That changed on Sunday, when a self-described “ad-hoc” Zimbabwean group and the Soweto Gospel Choir issued wake-up calls that would have been heard all the way from the city centre to the faraway paddocks of this dairy-farming community.

The beautiful noise boomed two hours before SA and Zimbabwe played their World Cup match a kilometre away at Seddon Park. First the Zimbabweans delivered a tuneful tremble of voices and drums. Then the choir let loose a righteous, raucous riff.

The locals looked on with eyes wide locked on the stage. White folks took it all in with polite incredulity and the occasional twitch. Maori folks could not have stood still if they tried, not that they tried.

The music rolled across time zones and cultural divides and racial differences and made everyone present what they are before and after everything: people.

Among them was Koki Mugabe, a medical scientist who has lived in New Zealand for eight years.

Was he, umm ...

“Related to the president? No,” Mugabe said. But he was Zimbabwean: “The only South African I know is my wife.”

She was not around, but their teenaged children, Thabo - in a Zimbabwe cap and a SA shirt - and Mpho - wearing a Springbok top - were.

Would Mpho ever go home? “One day,” she said in an accent tweaked with Kiwi twang. “I’m going to buy a city in Zim and make everything different.”

Nearby, Colin Scheepers looked ready for the cricket in his sunhat and SA shirt. He lives in Cape Town and was in New Zealand to visit his daughter, a teacher in Tauranga, about 100km to the west of Hamilton.

“She still loves supporting the SA and Western Province teams,” Scheepers said. “Her accent is still the same, but the little one, my grandchild, talks like a New Zealander.”

When the show ended, the throng began making their way towards the ground. Presently, the dying duck squawk of a lone vuvuzela disturbed the restored peace.

But that ugliness was soon forgotten. It was replaced by the soulful strains of a pukaea, a maori war trumpet, played by a tattooed, grass-skirted warrior standing tall on the boundary just before the teams took the field.

Then the crack of willow on leather, and the applause it earned, took over the soundscape. All around, Hamilton listened intently.