World Cup columnist Duncan Hall reflects his time in South Africa and the challenges the country faces in the post-apartheid era

Three weeks in South Africa, and I am still coming to terms with this complex country.

The football was easy to fathom the World Cup ran like a charm, from the ticketing, to transportation, to accommodation, the lot.

And the people everyone we met, from cab drivers, to restaurant workers, even the guy on the bus to Soccer City for Sunday's final – were brilliant … so proud that their country was hosting the World Cup, even prouder that it was going off so well, and so pleased that we were having a wonderful time.

Ah, yes, the guy on the bus. Buzzing like one of the comics from the South African film, 'Bunny Chow', he held court on the bus while we awaited our driver. "Hey driver, hey driver," he'd shout, before giving a blast on a vuvuzela. "We are ready to leave! Where are you from? Bermuda? Hey, everyone, these guys are from Bermuda! Give them a hand!"

On it went, a perfect stranger welcoming visitors and giving us all a few laughs while the driver waited for the bus to fill up so that he could start the winding journey through Johannesburg centre to Soweto.

Soweto that's South Western Township is a former farmland some 11 miles from Johannesburg that black South Africans were banished to in 1930 when white, inner-city residents became uncomfortable with their residence nearby. Today, Soweto's population is somewhere around four million. On our tour of the township, we took the first left after the 'Welcome to Soweto' sign, and were immediately surrounded by middle class homes with values of between $100,000 and $1,000,000.

That wasn't what we expected, of course but, two minutes' drive away, a woman used a pump to draw water from the communal water supply, a dead rat lay on the dusty road while kids played nearby, and our Soweto compass was being adjusted.

The two Soweto scenes abject poverty, and relative wealth, just minutes apart were representative of the new South Africa. Often, we think of this country only along racial lines more than 40 years of apartheid justifies our thinking but sometimes, the splits are along class lines, or even based on nationality. It is an uneasy co-existence.

The success of Ghana at this tournament, and the transfer of support from Bafana Bafana to the Black Stars once South Africa was eliminated, was heralded country-wide as a sign of an emerging African unity.

Perhaps those who celebrated this continental pride forgot to tell the black South African residents of Paarl, a wine-growing district some 35 miles north of Cape Town. While cab drivers in Cape Town wore Ghana T-shirts to demonstrate their African solidarity, residents of Paarl were telling immigrants from Somalia and Zimbabwe to leave their homes before they were burned out of them.

We passed perhaps 50 such immigrants at a truck stop just south of Paarl. Their belongings as much as they could comfortably carry sitting on the grass verge beside them, they were seeking lifts from truck drivers heading to the city so that they could catch a bus back to their homelands.

Their fears are real xenophobic attacks accounted for more than 62 deaths in 2008 and a further 100,000 people were displaced. A smaller outbreak of xenophobic violence erupted in November 2009, with thousands of foreigners driven from their homes. Rumours have been circulating for weeks in South Africa that there will be a rise in xenophobic attacks after the World Cup.

Just last week, a Zimbabwean citizen was thrown from a train, breaking both ankles, while travelling from Khayelitsha to Cape Town to seek work. The attacks are often related to protests against a lack of basic services and competition for scarce resources. Many of the cab drivers who assisted us, and all of the women who served us at our guest house in Cape Town, were from Zimbabwe, refugees of Robert Mugabe's gross mismanagement of a country that was once the breadbasket of southern Africa. Today, its citizens venture south to seek work. Most that we spoke to vowing not to return until Mugabe is ousted. Some estimates of the number of immigrant workers in South Africa from places like Malawi, in addition to Zimbabwe range as high as five million. This is in a country where the official unemployment rate is 26 percent.

Some immigrants live in the cities, while others migrate to the townships and informal settlements on their outskirts. Soweto, of course, is an established city, while Khayelitsha between Cape Town's airport and city centre is less so. I mentioned to a South African friend that no amount of reading about Khayelitsha can adequately prepare a visitor for the experience of seeing the harsh conditions under which so many live. You should have seen it 16 years ago, he replied.

He was referring, of course, to the time before the first free elections were held in 1994, which marked the birth of one of the world's youngest democracies. In 1994, of a population of 38 million people, some six million were unemployed. Ten million had no access to running water, and 20 million had no electricity.

Today, those numbers have been reduced. But 16 years after the first free elections, more than one million South Africans still live in shacks, many without easy or any access to electricity or running water. The right to access water is guaranteed under South Africa's progressive Constitution. Nearly three million houses have been built, but their allocation has given rise to accusations of nepotism and corruption. Protests against inadequate service delivery have taken place in townships across the country.

In Khayelitsha, some former tin shack dwellers have been re-housed in small cottages. The new abodes aren't luxurious, but many have the basic services electricity, proper sanitation, a water supply that so many in Khayelitsha, and other townships like it, still lack.

So that's South Africa … better than it was, but nowhere near as good as its citizens deserve. Perhaps we need to give it time.

Veteran World Cup observer Duncan Hall is reporting exclusively from South Africa for The Royal Gazette.