World Cup is a showcase for South Africa

Anice Hassim, lead strategist for a new media agency in South Africa, e-mailed to say, "I don't think anyone in South Africa can sleep at the moment, and it's not the vuvuzelas."

The first African-based World Cup tournament, with an anticipated global TV audience of 26 billion, commences in Hassim's native country Friday. And while vuvuzelas - the yard-long plastic horns ubiquitous at South African soccer games - are reported to be waking the dead with their high-decibel blaring there, it is exhilarating civil pride that can be heard half a world away.

In response to Newsday e-mails cast into South African cyberspace, to get a read of what the World Cup means to that ethnically diverse, historically divided land, Hassim wrote movingly of the "coming-out party for a nation that is rapidly coming of age, despite the near constant stream of cynicism, talk about our crime problems and our much-married President, who continues to confound critics."

On the field, South Africa's national team - "Bafana, Bafana," which translates to "Boys, boys" - is ranked a humble 83rd in the world. It will kick off the World Cup with its match against Mexico. Its entry into the Cup was automatic as host, and soccer clairvoyants generally expect it to be the World Cup's first home team not to survive the first round. But the players, in a way, aren't any more significant than the stage itself. While the usual suspects wrangle over the sport's championship trophy - Brazil, Italy, Germany, Argentina and, this time, Spain - post-apartheid South Africa will have the spotlight, too.

When the web site goal.com interviewed a handful of young South Africans about their thoughts on staging the World Cup, the overwhelming sentiment was - in the words of 22-year-old university student Koketso Gaofetoge - "to show the rest of the world the huge strides South Africa has made as a country and allow the rest of the world to see that Africans are just as capable to organize an event of this magnitude."

Hassim, referencing his own youth in an Indian township in Durban - "I met my first White person at the age of 17" - and the fact that the "story of South Africa will forever be told in Black and White, never in Indian and Coloured," nevertheless wrote that the "reality of South Africa is a country that has, by and large, written its own destiny against impossible odds . . .

"And the World Cup. We have waited to show off our land. Oh, how we have waited!

"The World Cup will transform how South Africans view themselves. After we pull it off (I won't dare suggest there won't be hiccups, but it won't be because we are South African, just human), South Africans are going to have a real problem.

"We will never be able to complain about how we can never get anything done or how progress never seems to happen."

During the 1995 rugby World Cup, just-elected President Nelson Mandela seized on the underdog South African national team - historically, whites have been the passionate rugby followers in South Africa; blacks were soccer fans - as a tool to narrow the brutal black-white divide. The result proved that sport really can be colorblind, grab headlines and wield surprising powers on unification, however temporary.

Now comes a far, far bigger soapbox, a megaphone louder than millions of vuvuzelas.

" . . . It all takes time," Anice Hassim wrote, "and this World Cup will leave a better home for my children, for they will know that all is possible.

"Good enough for me!"