Fittingly for such a complex nation, South Africa’s response to the World Cup has been as vibrant as it has been opaque. Big, brash corporate sporting tournaments such as the World Cup don’t often do shades of grey, but South Africa is providing one of the most interesting host nation tales yet, off the pitch at least.

Departing Heathrow, England — with its fluttering St George Cross bunting — is left to its familiar World Cup ritual of hype and despair. The country has revamped itself as a separate entity from Britain in recent years — the 1966 World Cup in England was festooned with Union Jack flags, rather than the red cross — and now it is South Africa’s turn, via football, to display its redefined national DNA.

Johannesburg is a city that takes a while to understand and even longer to admire. Visually, it’s appalling. Barbed wires snakes the walls of almost every building, with an unrelenting fear of crime pervading almost every facet of everyday life. The populace doesn’t walk anywhere. Even car journeys are fretted over, due to the threat of car jacking. The idea of a Copenhagen-style bicycle lane system would be laughable in Jonzi.

And yet the World Cup has ushered in an undeniable pride among Johannesburg residents. Not that all of them are too downbeat over their city anyway — a straight-faced comparison with London is made to me several times during my stay.

“This is a good city,” says Ndismo, a taxi driver who is patiently explaining to a drunk Texan that he won’t be haggled out of 20 Rand (about $3) for a ride. “The government has said it will build lots of new houses in Soweto when you all leave.”

“This is a proud moment for South Africa. It will show you what we could do. Before, FIFA was too white. It was just for white people. Now it is for all of us.”

Soweto, the famous 4.5m-strong township to the west of Johannesburg, is Ground Zero for any ambitions the government has for demonstrating the benefits of the World Cup. Rather incongruously, the brand new, multi-billion-dollar Soccer City stadium is placed in the scruffy no-mans-land between Johannesburg and Soweto. While millionaires from faraway continents tug at each others’ shirts amid the blare of vuvuzelas, residents of Soweto are living in tin shacks barely 5km away.

The contradiction of South Africa, and Johannesburg in particular, can be found in Soweto. Pleasant new builds overlook the townships, while extreme poverty and a history of violent protest against apartheid if framed within in atmosphere of benign friendliness and optimism from the residents.

Life is improving, but it is a slow process. The government, due to corruption and inefficiency, struggles to find a meaningful presence in Soweto. New houses are constantly being built for residents of the shacks to move into, but as soon as they leave, new arrivals, often from Zimbabwe or Mozambique, move in.

Meanwhile, the people moved into the new houses find that infrastructure hasn’t kept up a similar pace, with children having no nearby school to go to and no transport to remedy the situation. A railway line that slices through Soweto provides a new kind of divide, a new kind of economic apartheid.

Many houses were built on wetlands, causing predictable problems. The prospects for Soweto’s youth are often bound to community projects, such as the Sky Youth Centre.

Founded by the dreadlocked Bob Nameng, the centre provides literal and metaphorical colour to the lives of children. Nameng, with hair and demeanour that makes a passable double for his idol and namesake Bob Marley, sees South Africa’s problems as a spiritual one, rather than one solved by a financial boost from the World Cup.

“A prophet is never welcomed in his own time,” says Nameng of the struggle to keep Sky open for the last 25 years. “But the children here can come here and be free. They don’t have the worry we had when we were growing up. Apartheid. The great evil. The great Satan.”

Apartheid may be consigned to the past, but it’s legacy lives on in tangible ways. While Bob Nameng shares a water pump with 40 of his neighbours and one in four South Africans are unemployed, the shopping malls of nearby Sandton are crammed with Gucci-clad whites.

Sandton is one of the suburbs whites fled to when apartheid ended, fearing a black ‘swamping’ of Johannesburg’s city centre. The homes and offices they left behind in the CBD have never been adequately filled, with squatters and other miscreants blamed for the disturbingly high crime rate.

Despite inadvertently causing many of the problems experienced by Johannesburg today, the denizens of Sandton are happy to spend life in a bubble of luxury. Even in Nelson Mandela square, where Madiba (father of the nation) is immortalised in bronze, consumerism is rampant. Nearly 30 years spent in Robben Island in order for rich people to buy Ed Hardy.

The unifying force that football is meant to bring a nation is largely absent from Johannesburg. It’s only in the brash seaside party town of Durban that one can forget about the racial divide that scarred this nation.

A joyous scene of thousands of white and black fans of Bafana Bafana singing Shosholoza — a Zulu song about black hardship — at a fan park in Durban was the best evidence that Mandela’s Rainbow Nation wasn’t little more than a slogan.

But it is hard to see how the World Cup will benefit those at the bottom of the heap once the sand has been dusted off and the hangovers ease. FIFA’s profits are 50% up on the last World Cup, despite underselling its ticket allocation, and much of the event has been sanitised into a giant marketing operation by sponsors Budweiser and MTN.

The new stadiums, designed flawlessly by German architects, are stunning, but there is no real coherent plan on how they will be utilised after the World Cup is over. As ever with South Africa, a lack of over-arching thinking means that the stadiums are likely to become both a source of pride and frustration.

Mandla, a guide who has lived in Soweto for 20 years, sees beyond the instinctive pride of having the world’s gaze upon South Africa. “The World Cup is too early for us. The spending on it has been exuberant, at a time when many people in rural areas don’t have running water and there is no education on HIV/AIDS. The World Cup will make the rich rich and the poor poorer.”

Once the cities — flooded with extra police for the World Cup — clear of football fans and the droning sound of the vuvuzelas, it’s inevitable that almost all of South Africa’s pre-World Cup problems will remain. Perhaps the benefit will be a more tangible one – another step in the rebuilding of the country’s shattered psyche.