Men and women in the yellow and black of Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates’ black pour through the turnstiles, whooping and leaping in excitement, ahead of a derby between two arch- rivals.

Kaizer Chiefs and Orlando Pirates are to Johannesburg what River Plate and Boca Juniors are to Buenos Aires or Glasgow Rangers and Celtic are to the Scottish city. The rivalry between the Amabhakabhaka (the Buccaneers) and Amakhosi , two of the top teams in the Premier Soccer League, is legendary.

“In the 80s, if you came here (to the Pirates home ground) and you didn’t do this they would beat you!” says Kaizer Chiefs steward Sammy Motsielwa , clenching his fists and crossing his arms in front of his chest to make the Pirates’ crossbones sign.

Football is the sport of the poor black majority in South Africa, where youngsters in townships practise penalty kicks using balls made out of a wad of shopping bags and games are played on pitches that are sometimes no more than a rectangle of red earth with crooked boughs stitched together as goalposts.

Just as former England striker David Beckham inspired the haircuts of a generation of young English football fans, so South Africans copy their favourite players.

The diagonally parted cornrows of Bafana Bafana and Everton striker Steven Pienaar adorn the head of many a young black man.

Fans of Chiefs, formed by an ex-Pirates player in 1970 and whose motto is Peace and Love, say Pirates fans still like to fight.

But in reality football hooliganism is alien to our culture . The most devout Chiefs and Pirates fans, the ones who wear plastic headdresses made from safety helmets in the colours of their team, can be found sitting behind the same goal in a cloud of dagga smoke.

The atmosphere in the stadium is electric, with the braying of the vuvuzelas that so riled some European players and broadcasters during the June Confederations Cup, making conversation impossible.

Local staples such as stew and pap are served up for a song by “stadium mamas”.

“I always come to the games ,” shouts Petrus Matlhoko, a helmeted Bucs supporter who works in a platinum mine three hours’ drive northwest of Johannesburg and follows his team around the country.

When a game clashes with work, “I say Orlando Pirates are playing, they (his employers) say: ‘You must go’.” At between R20 and R40 a ticket for a PSL game, he can afford it.

The World Cup, he says, is a different matter.

The cheapest, category- four World Cup tickets, which are reserved for South African residents, start at R140 for a group game, putting them beyond reach of many in a country where the minimum wage is about R1500 a month and more than one in four of working age is unemployed.

So far, out of about 700000 tickets that have been sold for the Cup to date, about half have gone to South Africans.

In the final count, however, when foreign fans who have been waiting for the World Cup draw to secure their tickets book their place, foreigners are likely to heavily outnumber locals.

And if the Confederations Cup, the eight-nation World Cup warm-up, is anything to go by, white South Africans will be out in large numbers.

Traditionally reared as rugby or cricket fans, whites are warming up to football in the run-up to the World Cup. White fans at the Confed Cup were clad in Bafana’s yellow and green.

“Sure, it’s a sport that’s more readily available in the townships ,” Allan Bader says. The clean-cut, 26-year- old insurance industry executive hired a minibus to take him and 11 friends from Johannesburg’s mostly white northern suburbs to Soweto for the derby.

Despite being a Bucs fan, Bader has never been to a game before. He had also never been to Soweto, epicentre of the struggle and a staple on the tourist route.

After the game, which ended in a goalless draw, the group planned to retire to the northern suburbs to watch the national rugby final on television.

It’s scenes like these, of South Africans reaching out across to each other across racial lines, that the country hopes to replicate on a grand scale next year.

“That kind of SA,” says Danny Jordaan, head of the World Cup organising committee and a former activist, “ is the kind of society that we struggled hard for”. – Sapa-DPA