Freddie Marquet

We are in Africa, and we have to allow them to practice their culture as much as they want to.

Here's journalist Mark Gleeson again.

While broadcasters were trying to mitigate the noise on their end, DIY solutions were making their way around the internet.

One of them involved writing your TV's audio through your computer and using software to remove the particular frequencies of the Vuvuzela.

The complaints were even enough to inspire a study from the South African Medical Journal.

It measured the Vivizella's sound levels, which peaked at 131 decibels.

That's as loud as a jackhammer or a jet engine.

It concluded that prolonged or regular exposure could cause noise-induced hearing loss.

Most of the Viva Zala outrage came from a very Eurocentric perspective.

It was an argument about what was considered appropriate in football fan culture, which Dwayne Jethro says was an attack on the idea of Africanness.

While the Vivizela was condemned by international audiences, it's also true that many visitors to South Africa embraced it.

For comedian Trevor Noah and plenty of other South Africans, the appropriation was the problem.

In South Africa, we should have a thing where you have to have a license to blow a vuvuzela.

The English fans, the Spanish fans, middle of the day, there they are, 9 a.m.

What are you doing?

It's so much fun.

It's wrong.

It's the wrong people.

You know who should be blowing vuvuzelas?

For viewers watching around the world, it represented the sound of an entire continent.