“Tshabalala… goal Bafana Bafana, goal for South Africa, goal for all Africa! Jabulani, rejoice!”

Sixteen years later, with Bafana back at the World Cup, I dare anyone to ask me to recite those words from Peter Drury. Not only can I tell you where I was, but I can also recall what I was thinking.

On Friday 11 June 2010, I was in a car on Blue Downs Way, listening to the radio after leaving my grandmother’s home. I said a little prayer, asking God to let Bafana win. That was before I realised the higher being was a Spanish supporter, and that I should have been more specific about which game. I suppose that’s what people call a core memory, and the reason it is one is that I remember exactly how I felt in those moments.

For my second of this series of article through the archive, I again turned to the nearly 100-year archive of DistrictMail & Helderberg Gazette to review the pages. The place to start was obvious.

June 2010 is World Cup fever. Resident sports photographer Peter Bee captured the emotion, the anticipation, Cape Town’s clean streets, the local viewing venues and his pick of England or Spain.

He attended the match between France and Uruguay and defended the vuvuzela as the soul of Cape Town Stadium. His most emotional piece came from Bafana’s 2-1 win over France, hearing Shosholoza sung in full and properly for the first time.

Sixteen years on, Peter says the stadium stands as a reminder of that day and the welcoming spirit of South Africa remains alive.

Vuvuzelas are banned inside stadiums at the 2026 World Cup. I suppose the Americans have their own blaring noisemaker to contend with, but Peter’s feelings remain the same: “It does not sound the same on television, but it is magnificent in the stadium.”

I guess we will just have to keep it at home.

Not everything was a celebration, though. The front wall of Church Street Methodist church collapsed minutes before the opening ceremony. It has since been rebuilt.

That is just the feeling I get from the Helderberg – we are down, but we never give up.

The Hottentots-Holland High School drummies performed at the Grand Parade on Youth Day (16 June 2010), commemorating the 1976 Soweto Uprising.

This made me browse through the newspapers of June 1976. While the rest of the country was fixated on Johannesburg, Helderberg residents had their own concerns.

A Somerset West garage made headlines for hiring coloured women to operate its petrol pumps. The owner said men are unreliable; the women called it Women’s Liberation. I say they crawled so that the women of today could run.

Somerset West ratepayers were in an uproar over new property valuations, the first since 1967. The market was described as “slightly depressed,” yet 160 objections were lodged at the Valuation Court. The valuations of local business premises had increased by as much as 800%, with a plot off Heywood Avenue valued at R7 500.

Today, properties in the same areas fetch far more than R1 million. Where are the ratepayers of ’76 when you need them?

But even with property prices that depressing, finding locals in the archives always lifts my spirit.

In 2005, I found Taryn Conradie (née Joyce), one of three under-12 girls from Laerskool Lochnerhof in Strand selected for the Kuils River regional netball team.

Today Taryn is a layout artist at the very newspaper that once featured her photo.

She still finds it special designing school pages because, like her, learners will look forward to seeing themselves in the ‘Mail.

Also in 2005, the Dr GJ Joubert Primêre Skool drummies were crowned Western Province champions for the third consecutive year. Nicole Ruiters (née Kleinhans) led the team, one of the youngest captains at the time, trained by teacher Sharon Lategan. That same year she was also named the school’s top Grade 7 learner and received the principal’s trophy.

Today she is a mother of four boys in Strand, working towards completing her degree. She went on to captain the drummies at Hottentots-Holland High School in 2008. Lifting that WP trophy, she says, was a feeling she has never forgotten.

Also in 2005, Firgrove Primary School pupil Veronique Bailie won the Manager’s Choice Award at the Cashbuild Art-at-Heart Community Competition in Strand. She filled every centimetre of her entry with crayon, determined not to leave a single patch of white on the page. The news came in a phone call from deputy principal Van der Bank, so urgent he could not wait until the next day. Her mother pulled over on the R102 under some trees to hear it.

Today Veronique is Veronique Bell, 33, living in the Kuils-River area where she grew up. She never stopped creating.

While the World Cup festivities swept the country, history was also being made in Strand. Portia Vries broke three junior SA weightlifting records in 2010 and went on to become a three-time Commonwealth Games competitor and African champion at both junior and senior level.

Her records still sit at number four on the SA all-time women’s rankings and Portia is proud of the legacy she built, but says records are meant to be broken and hopes a younger generation does exactly that.

Between Taryn designing pages she once appeared on and Portia hoping someone breaks what she built, the thread is the same.

The feeling that history gives us is a reminder: there were good times in times of darkness, hope when we felt hopeless, and proof that others have overcome while we are still struggling.