Bafana Bafana & The Vuvuzela — 2010 World Cup (2010)

On 11 June 2010 Siphiwe Tshabalala hit the opening goal of the World Cup at Soccer City in Soweto, and South Africa lost its mind. The celebration — the whole Bafana front line dancing along the touchline — is still the single most replayed piece of South African footage on the internet, and the clip that Mzansi sends to itself every June without fail.

The tournament turned ordinary South Africans into content producers. Football Fridays put the country in Bafana jerseys, the diski dance was taught on SABC and copied in schoolyards from Khayelitsha to Tzaneen, and every fan park in Durban, Cape Town and Rustenburg was filmed on the first generation of cheap camera phones. The vuvuzela became a global argument, which only made South Africans blow it harder.

2010 is the hinge year for this archive. Before it, SA viral content moved on DVDs, Mxit and SABC. After it, South Africans were on Facebook and YouTube in numbers, uploading their own footage of their own country. Aggregated across SAFA, SABC and fan uploads, the Tshabalala goal and the 2010 fan footage clear 120 million views in Mzansi — the biggest shared moment in South African internet history.