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As the 2026 FIFA World Cup unfolds across North America, I find myself thinking about a song from another World Cup entirely.
Nearly three decades after its release, Shibobo by TKZee and Benni McCarthy remains one of South Africa’s most enduring sporting anthems.
Mention it to anyone who was around in 1998 and chances are they can still sing along with ease.
Why do certain sporting moments in South Africa become inseparable from sound? From football stadiums to rugby grounds, South Africans have rarely been content to simply watch sport. We sing it, dance it, chant it and blow it through the now world renowned vuvuzela.
The soundtrack has changed over the decades. There was Shosholoza, the miners’ song that found its way into stadiums.
There was Shibobo, which captured the excitement of South Africa’s first World Cup appearance as a democratic nation. Football supporters later adopted Sister Bettina as an unofficial terrace anthem, while the vuvuzela became the sound that introduced South African football culture to the world in 2010.
More recently, teams have taken amagwijo, the Xhosa call-and-response choir sound, from schools and communities into dressing rooms and stadium tunnels before matches.
Together, these songs, sounds and expressions tell a story about how South Africans experience sport itself.
Shosholoza: Before sport had a soundtrack
Long before it had anything to do with sport, Shosholoza belonged to the mines. I
t is a Nguni song in isiNdebele, originally sung by migrant labourers who travelled by train from present-day Zimbabwe to work in South Africa’s mines. The song helped make exhausting labour bearable.
By the 1995 Rugby World Cup, Shosholoza had moved from the mines into the stadiums; a song built for endurance repurposed for celebration.
It became a fixture across sporting codes and racial groups because people knew the words and knew the rhythm. That shared recognition is what turns a song into an anthem.
Unlike many of the sounds that would follow, Shosholoza was not created by the music industry. Its authority came from the people who sang it.
Before South Africa learned to soundtrack sport through popular music, fans were already arriving at stadiums with a chorus.
Shibobo: The sound of 1998 and beyond
Released ahead of the 1998 World Cup in France, the collaboration between kwaito group TKZee founding members Zwai Bala, Kabelo Mabalane, and the late Tokollo “Magesh” Tshabalala and Benni McCarthy captured a specific moment in South African history.
Democracy was still young, and kwaito was becoming the defining sound of urban youth culture.
Named after the local slang term for a “nutmeg” the ultimate street-soccer skill move where a player slickly dribbles the ball right through an opponent’s legs the song came to symbolise local flair, confidence, and ultimate dominance on the pitch.
The song was not really about France. It was about South Africa going to France.
Behind the scenes, the collaboration was an intentional effort by TKZee to connect local supporters with one of the country’s biggest football stars. McCarthy was playing abroad and becoming a household name, but there was a distance between him and fans back home. Shibobo helped close it.
Musically, the group aimed for scale, by sampling Europe’s 1986 rock anthem The Final Countdown. As TKZee’s Zwai Bala recalls:
“It was also the spirit of South Africa at the time and here was a song that was very majestic. Just The Final Countdown on its own is big. Shibobo was big before it was created because of the backdrop of The Final Countdown.’
For Bala, the timing mattered just as much as the music.
“1998 was a big year. We were at the height of everything. We were seeing a path of prosperity, and things were just happening.”
Renowned South African bass guitarist and composer Concord Nkabinde remembers the cultural impact.
“1998 was the year. I was 30 years old, in Soweto, the year in which we witnessed a significant marriage between music & sport like never before in South Africa, maybe in Africa or perhaps in the world.”
Nkabinde points to several reasons the song became massive: TKZee was already creating waves, The Final Countdown sample carried international recognition, the timing aligned perfectly with World Cup fever, and the track featured a beloved footballer while moving effortlessly between several South African languages.
“Shibobo was bound to be massive. For years now, as a South African, it is impossible to hear that song and not link it to football in general. It drew football fans to music and music lovers to the game of football.”
‘Sister Bettina’: When the Crowd Takes Ownership
Not every sporting anthem begins as one.
Sister Bettina was never written with football in mind, yet it became one of the songs most closely associated with South African supporters, across all races. To this day, when South Africans hear the intro, they know it’s time to have a party.
What makes Sister Bettina significant is not how it was created but how it travelled. Popularised by taxi drivers and embraced far beyond its original context, the song eventually found its way into football stadiums where supporters adopted it as their own.
Easy to sing and easy to dance to, it transformed spectators into performers. Especially the non-explicit version that can be enjoyed by all. Like Shibobo, the song found a place anywhere that South Africans wanted it.
From bars, taverns to family social gatherings. Today, the song can be heard immediately after the national anthem at all South African national rugby team games.
The Vuvuzela: The Sound the World Could Not Escape
By 2010, South Africa was hosting the FIFA World Cup, and its sound went global.
To many international viewers, the vuvuzela was an irritation because of its sustained buzzing. To many South Africans, it was the atmosphere and a familiar football sound.
The debate was never really about noise. It was about culture, about whose traditions counted as legitimate at a World Cup and whose did not. For one month, the soundtrack of South African football became the soundtrack of world football. People complained, mocked and debated it, but they remembered it.
The vuvuzela demonstrated something South Africans had long understood: sporting culture is not only what happens on the field. It is also what happens in the stands.
Amagwijo: The Team Sings First
The newest addition to South Africa’s sporting soundtrack is also rooted in one of its oldest traditions. Amagwijo are communal call-and-response songs that have long accompanied school life, cultural gatherings and community celebrations. If Shosholoza represents a single song that travelled into sport, amagwijo represent an entire singing tradition that has found a place within it.
Teams now sing them in dressing rooms, on buses and in tunnels before matches. The Rugby World Cup helped bring the practice to wider public attention, revealing something distinctive about South African sporting culture.
What makes amagwijo different from every other sound in this story is where they happen.
Before the crowd begins singing, the team is already singing. While teams elsewhere emerge to playlists blasted through speakers, South African teams often carry their own soundtrack into the tunnel. The songs reinforce unity, settle nerves and create a sense of collective purpose even before kick-off.
Why South Africans Turn Sport Into Song
Taken together, Shosholoza, Shibobo, Sister Bettina, the vuvuzela and amagwijo span more than a century, yet they tell a single story of a culture that values participation as much as performance.
Former Orlando Pirates captain and Bafana Bafana player, Innocent Maela sees that connection as part of a much longer South African tradition.
“Music has always been a part of our expression. Historically music healed our people from the struggle against apartheid, and gave us some joy in difficult times.”
That joy is something the sporting world held onto.
“As a former player, my experience inside the field of play, hearing our fans sing and transmitting their energy unto us was special.
“Football in South Africa is more than just what happens on the field. It’s a joyful experience, an occasion where we forget our problems and come together to be free even if it is only for 90 minutes.”
There is also a broader African tradition at work here. Across much of the continent, sport is rarely treated as a silent spectacle observed from a distance. Through singing, dancing, chanting, drumming and collective celebration, supporters become participants in the event itself.
As Bala puts it:
“Sports connect us, whether it’s Shosholoza or any other anthem, but something has to be done that connects us and not many things are better than music.”
What emerges across all of this is not a fixed national unity, but a fragile one, something that appears in bursts rather than permanence. South Africa is a country still shaped by painful histories, uneven realities and differences that do not simply disappear in moments of celebration.
Yet sport, especially when paired with music and chanting, seems to offer brief interruptions to that reality. In stadiums and public spaces, people who might otherwise remain separated find themselves participating in something shared, however fleetingly.
The unity doesn’t always last. It is sometimes performed, felt, and then released back into everyday life. Still, those moments matter. They reveal that togetherness is not an illusion, just something difficult to sustain. And perhaps that is why South Africa’s sporting soundtrack carries such weight. It does not solve the country’s divisions, but it repeatedly shows that shared identity is still possible here, even if only in fragments.
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