Halfway down from the Esangweni High School, at a fork in the road in the Kwieza, Aziza is trying to organise her campaign team, and work out a point of reference. Rows of single room cement houses go in all directions, but the streets have no name. Eight or 10 volunteers, mostly black, a couple of coloured, and one pasty white Australian.

They’re high-school students and organisers, wearing stickers saying “I’m fasting for libraries”. Three of them live near here, but the rest are from other parts of Khayelitsha, the southern suburbs of Cape Town, and the city itself.

“OK look,” she says, “in one hour we meet here outside house number 59,686, OK?” Everyone nods. “Do we all know where we’re going?” Everyone nods. “OK let’s work.”

Everyone scatters in directions that it’s clear they’re not mean to go in. “No uh — oh, OK OK,” says Aziza. “We won’t know which houses we’ve covered but we’ve got to start somewhere.”

Kwieza is an area of Harare, a larger area of Khayelitsha, the city south east of Cape Town proper, and itself a city of anywhere from a quarter of a million to a million people. When you swing into it from the highway, you wonder how, large though it is, it could contain so many in the thousands of shacks made from corrugated iron and wood panels belted together, bent, split and rusted from the elements.

Then you go up a low hill and you realise that the place stops and starts, with gaps, and strips of vacant land, and that what you’ve seen is only part of the whole city, sprawling in every direction, past the highway and to the horizon. From the offices of Equal Education, the group organising the door-to-door campaign, it had taken us 15 minutes by minibus-taxi to reach Kwieza. On the board before we left, Joey, the perpetually overstressed co-co-ordinator had run through the list of areas, and those assigned to them:

“Makhaya — Pharie can you lead that and take uh Zintle, Michelle, Ntsiki, Harare, that’s EG, Doron, Aziza, Site B, um My Lord, Small, Yosh, Mac … OK who have I missed?”

On the wall a map of part of the city has been marked up in terms of educational investment: “school sites under construction, school sites completed, school sites abandoned, school sites overrun/squatted …”

Kheyalitsha A, Harare, Town Two, Greenpoint, Site B … the names are redolent of a mix of official building and squatted sprawl, of a place taking an identity beyond its designations. The bus takes us through Site C, the sea of rusting iron that reaches up to the Equal Education offices, incongruously housed in a block of display units for a development that never got built.

Alleys meander through, no more than the gaps between groups of shacks. Around the edge of each block, there’s shops, display windows punched out of iron sheets, and metal Coca-Cola ads hung above the roof. Barbers and electronics shops are housed in shipping containers, ads painted, sometimes welded into the sides. At each corner, tripe, liver and other innards are being cooked for sale on metal sheets over braziers. The shacks will part suddenly to reveal a petrol station, a terrace of built shops, before closing over again.

Out of Site C, we hit a stretch of RDP houses, those built in the first flush of spending in the post-1994 period, all of the same pattern, then a stretch of private housing, some with a second storey and garden — and then the shacks begin again.

“Hi we’re going door to door for oh … at house 59,794,” Sizeka switches into Xhosa, to give the pitch to a young woman. The three of us crowd into the place. The house is about eight metres by eight, divided by a three-quarter wall, to create a bedroom. Shelves with glassware, a TV, DVD and CD player. The front room is dominated by an enormous Franco Cozzo-style melted toffee baroque sofa.

The next house is sparser but with a larger TV, playing a cable feed of German news. The house after that has almost nothing at all, empty shelves, fraying lace curtains over the window and a tired older woman in a brown shapeless dress.

It is mostly women in the houses — a young chemical engineering student in the first, a velvet tracksuit, and her hair done in a ’70s sort of bob, looking momentarily guilty when we came in because she was reading Drum, the venerable South African magazine, now a lifestyle glossy, her chem-eng notes beside her. In the second, a pair of tubby sisters, in pressed white shirts, cross-necklaces, Jesus postcards on the dresser.

Ostensibly, I’m meant to be focusing on Equal Education’s campaign to mobilise protest and demand the government follow through on funding libraries for state schools, the vast majority of which lack even the most vestigial collection of books. EE is running a World Cup tie-in “yellow card” campaign, postcards addressed to politicians where people can write a personalised message about how they want schools to improve.

But really, what one wants to know is far more compelling: simply, how people live in a township, what the texture, colour, flavour of life is. It’s only when you’re there that you realise you have no idea what the differing levels of poverty are, the different choices made.

If there’s a rule of thumb, it’s that such middling levels make priorities stark. Practically everyone in areas with power has a TV. Other choices are highly individual. One place has an enormous fridge, a real shining metal, two-metre LG number, standing like the 2001 monolith on a bare concrete floor.

I don’t ask nearly as many questions as I should — I remain in a continuous state of semi-mortification, not a goot ‘tude for a journalist — but here I blurt out: “Uh, why do you have such a big fridge?” The woman turns and says “I like to entertain.” Fair enough. Life’s good.

Further down the road, this area — sewered, powered, solar cells on each roof — ends, and we’re in shack territory. Here poverty is more reliably poor, odd strips of lino making a floor, furniture as off-cuts. Even here though, there’s a ghetto-blaster and a stack of CDs or a rack of sharp shirts.

We meet a guy willing to talk above the music pouring out of his speakers — and it’s clear, even in another language, that he’s a Kwieza Alf Garnett, enumerating a range of complaints. Sizeka nods and nods, it seems to end, we’re about to go, it starts again. He won’t take a yellow card.

“What was he saying at the end?”

“He was apologising for being so tetchy. But he hasn’t eaten for two and a half days.”

Poverty, there and here, does not present itself with any decorum, sense of proper order. It’s a long time since it has advertised in rags for example, at least in an urban setting — these days, the world wears Adidas or its imitation, T-shirts and tracksuits. It’s the same with things such as a TV.

Those keen to debunk the idea of widespread poverty can easily rustle up figures about the number of poor who own a TV, a DVD player, etc. But if you’re poor, it makes sense — a TV would be pretty high up my list, starting from nothing, just after pants, the chance to be transported elsewhere for a commercial hour at a time.

What is perhaps so confronting about the whole structure of South Africa is that township/cities are places of transition, products of crisis, but settlements where most people will spend much of their lives in unchanging conditions.

Khayelitsha did not even exist until the early ’80s — it was established as a place of forced relocation from the Eastern Cape. After pass controls were abolished it became a magnet for people in rural poverty even worse than that of the townships, and more recently for immigrants from other African countries, seeking work.

When it became clear that apartheid was on its way to being over, it was assumed by many that the kilometres of shacks would yield rapidly and successively to solid, expansive housing. That didn’t happen to anything like the degree hoped for, and when the economy was battened down in the mid-1990s, a sort of triage took over. Thus Khayelitsha has railway stations — nine of them — but also vast unsewered areas, with public “bucket” toilets, concrete shells sticking out like rows of crooked teeth.

And the only big question really worth asking is, how much of this is inevitable? “No one who lives in Cape Town and works in Khayelitsha doesn’t get f-cked up from time to time” one of the Equal Education people had said earlier, but at some point looking through the eye of pity ensures that you will end up seeing nothing more than your own stooped posture.

Huge realities such as the whole, wider Cape Town area are so all-encompassing that they tend to imply their own inevitability. Is there an alternative reality, a road not taken, that did lead to a different reality, where the shacks had been beaten back? To even ask the question is to enter a battle of the books, of accusations of neoliberal sellout to utopian unrealism and back again. Every other challenge — crime, AIDS, education — seems to turn on this central question. The drive from Khayelitsha to Cape Town takes in parts of the world that, though inter-related, are usually separated by thousands of kilometres. The place is the world in miniature.

By four o’clock we’re all reassembled at house 59,686. “We’re missing someone,” Aziza says, “… and we don’t leave any soldiers behind. It’s My Lord.”

We’re missing My Lord? Improbably we are. “He lives round here.”

“Oh that’s all right then.”

We pile back into the bus.

On the way back, we go through the Site C main shopping drag, iron shacks with iron shutters spread wide open. There’s a cow or two nosing at a grass patch. Further up, pretty much an entire cow disassembled and cooking on hot metal.

“They use the whole cow,” I say tentatively.

Someone sees what I’m looking at. “No, those are milk cows. The intestines, that’s delivered here from the abattoir every morning.”