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"How does it happen that Hillbrow is so popular, but writers ignore it?"
-Writer Phaswane Mpe  1970 - 2004

"Olé Olé Olé Olé,
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So there I was on Sunday evening standing in the freezing winds whipping around Soweto's Soccer City as the clock ticks off the final seconds and the Spaniards explode into song:

Yo Soy Español Español Español
Yo Soy Español Español Español

It was a joyful end to a month of watching fit young men kicking around the controversial Jubilani', which means "to celebrate" in isiZulu.

The 64 soccer matches were breath-taking, the 32 helpings of patriotic pride appealing (Go Bafana Bafana) and the ten stadiums are beautiful.

FIFA technocrats and their private jets remain as arrogant and unpenetrable as ever.

Shame.

Yes, all that you read about South Africans finally getting over a self-doubting hump is true, they did it, they proved to the (Western) world that an African rainbow nation is capable of hosting a successful party.

The new rapid transit train is brilliant, the streets where the tourists walked are clean and the parking garages in the sleek Nelson Mandela and Sandton City malls are efficient and safe.

As far as Google knows no tourists were murdered during the World Cup and the only attacks I heard tell of were during the popular safari tours where everyone from the German team to my roommate had their picture taken petting lion cubs.

The cubs were the docile ones.

Even the historic Radium Beer Hall on the teeming Orange Grove end of Louis Botha street - over the decades a Castle-perfumed hangout for diamond prospectors, union and anti-apartheid activists and scribblers - welcomed tourists without too many questions.

Dramatic, ancient Africa welcomed us all.  The peasants who were gathering winter's dry maize cobs on the Free State veld readily dropped their heavy bags to shake hands. And then of course we all shared the agony of Suarez-the-Uraguayan whose hands cheated a continent.

Shame again.

We are all Ghanian Black Stars now.

But the inner-city Johannesburg neighbourhood of Hillbrow is where South Africa won my heart.

I was not even supposed to set foot there.

In early June when I first arrived in Johannesburg I was given a security briefing by a company that makes lots of money protecting foreigners like me.

The ex-British Officer pointed to a wall map and said that he had already heard that I was a bit of a lone wolf reporter and that this was one part of the city that I was not allowed to visit  unless I was accompanied by an armed guard.

Seriously.

You want to make me salivate tell me that, Hillbrow here I come.

One Sunday I insisted on going to a service at the Central Methodist church which sits spank in the middle of the neighbourhood.

I was not accompanied by one armed guard.

I was accompanied by two.

Thank the Lord their pistols stayed in their pants and they stayed in the lobby while I sat in the pews with the hundreds of moms and dads and kids as they prayed and sang.

I went back to the neighbourhood a couple of times with an armed guard to meet with Zimbabwean asylum seekers who are terrified of being targeted should xenophobic violence break out again as it did in 2008.

Welcome to My Hillbrow

There is a novel about Hillbrow written by the late     Phaswane Mpe.
 
Welcome to Our Hillbrow follows  Refentše, "child of Tiragalong," who moves to Johannesburg and ends up living in a room in one of Hillbrow's crowded apartment blocks.

Xenophobia is at the core of the story.

Just like my new Zimbabwean friends, the immigrants in Mpe's novel hear the word Makwerekweres thrown at them at taxi stands, in shops and on the street.

It is as "a word derived from Kwere kwere, a sound that their unintelligible foreign languages were supposed to make, according to the locals."

"Makwerekwere knew they had no recourse to legal defence if they were ever caught. The police could detain them or deport them without allowing them any trial at all. Even the Department of Home Affairs was not sympathetic to their cause. ...Ambiguities, paradoxes, ironies... the stuff of our South African and Makwerekwere lives...."

During the World Cup there have been two competing story lines:

One is about opponents beating each other on the pitch.

The other is about South Africans beating their immigrant neighbours in their homes.

Community groups and all kinds of social activists have been coming up with ways of demystifying neighbourhoods like Hillbrow hoping that it might defuse the tension that is very real all across this country right now.

X Homes was one way of doing that.

A group of artists with the help of the Goethe Institute organized ten minute plays in seven Hillbrow apartments. Two visiters at a time walk with a guide through the streets of Hillbrow to apartments where actors - and the residents- put on performances about their lives.
 
No, I did not take along my armed guard.  I did not tell him I was going.

A South African friend and I went to the X Homes performances on our own.

We squeezed by the tables lining the sidewallksheaped high with cabbabages and clothing and cell phones.

We climbed seven flights of stairs at the Dungavin Court building to visit Thobeka Zinakitti where she lives in one room with her teenage son  Wanga.

Her story is how after being robbed and beaten she became politcally active and now sits on her building's resident committee.

A couple of blocks away we climb ten flights  - Hillbrow landlords do not fix elevators- where a young woman greets us at the door with "So you want to rent this room do you? Come in, let me show you around," and then five minutes later a fight breaks out between her and a drunk neighbour and then a tenant with AIDS vomits in the communal bathroom.

Welcome to Hillbrow, real people acting their lives.

Another few blocks away and kids invite me to play soccer with them. The ball is a plastic bag stuffed into a plastic bag stuffed with rags. The pitch is a tarred roof, you duck under clotheslines to score.

There's a concert in one apartment, think Harlem during the Jazz age.

In a basement a gay man dances a lonely striptease behind a curtain.

In one building a family from Zimbabwe struggles to drag their suitcases five flights down the stairs.

I help.

"What performance is this?" I ask the mom, Margaret Nyathi.

"We are sending our kids back home to Zimbabwe because we are afraid they are going to be beaten," she says.

Art meet life. Margaret is sending her kids away for real.

Finally, we take an elevator up 20 floors to visit apartment number seven.

Lights and television sets in the  thousands of Hillbrow appartments flicker  below. Soweto township flickers on the horizon.

Mandisi welcomes us into his white walled room. He turns on a spotlight.

Music pours from his laptop speakers.

And we dance on top of Hillbrow's teeming streets, dance thinking of the neighbourhood's poverty and violence, dance thinking of the five year old soccer star, danced thinking of the pregnant waitress who climbs 14 stories twice a day, danced thinking of the twenty one year old man with earrings and shiny shoes who makes his living singing in a church gospel choirs.

Dance thinking of the rumours of xenophobic attacks that are now making headlines.

We dance in Hillbrow like there was no tomorrow.

But there is.