People advise those who are embarking on a South African trip not to visit Cape Town first, and they’re right. Once you’re here, you have no desire to leave and the rest of the country is bound to be, well, another country.

Running from the sparkling beaches of the Atlantic coast to the foot of Table Mountain barely 2km inland, a city of grand architecture in a mish-mash of Dutch and Victorian style, and funky suburbs of multicoloured terraces and colonnaded verandahs, ‘the Mother City’ is an impossibly hip destination. Uniquely for South Africa, its population is neither predominantly black nor white, but mixed race or Coloured, in the still extant language of racial classification a product of its existence as a trading/slave/strategic port for centuries before the Union of South Africa drew it in in 1910.

When the Afrikaner government established apartheid in 1948, out of the intersecting mix of pass laws and racial restrictions already in place, the Cape was a double problem, since fully half the population were exactly the sort of black-Asian-white mix that the ideology of apartheid had such a horror of. Yet it also made the imposition of full apartheid impossible, since the total exclusion of such people would have brought the city to a grinding halt.

Indeed there is something grimly, bleakly funny about a place like Cape Town ending up in the paranoid neo-Calvinist prison of apartheid, since it is one of the few places in the world where people have fully blended, where one sees every conceivable combination of features: dark-skinned, curly-haired men with the square face and angular accent of a full Afrikaner, curvy black women with delicate Indian facial features, Chinese who sound like Boers, and on and on.

The city is like one of those sci-fi movies cast entirely with multiracial actors, to suggest a far distant epoch in which humanity has become one. Cape Town is the future. I try this theory out on Akiza, an economist-activist at a bar looking out on the city’s waterfront, a rare example of a still-working port which has had the ‘Docklands/Darling Harbour’ treatment, putting dry docks beside red-brick shopping malls. She snorts into her drink. Damn.

“That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she spits. “Where did you get that from?”

“Well I just, you know, I’m just a fat white bloke looking around…”

“I think this is the role that Cape Town plays in the image of South Africa; this is where we’re all going. I don’t think we are, and I’m not sure if it’s much of a trek anyway. Have you been to The Flats?”

I hadn’t yet been to ‘The Flats’, a vast stretch of fairly average suburbs on the other side of Table Mountain, because I was scared to. From the car they looked like the poorest western suburbs of Sydney two decades ago: street upon street of fibro houses and cheapjack apartment blocks. Central Cape Town is pretty safe to walk around, and they looked so too. “Yeah, so does south LA from the freeway,” someone had told me. ‘The gangs run the place. I wouldn’t go to The Flats alone.”

The Flats owe their existence to the apartheid regime’s increasingly neurotic trajectory in the 1960s, especially as regards to non-white intellectual life. They had already cleared out Johannesburg’s Sophiatown, an area near the university that had been a hot-bed of black artistic and musical culture in the 1950s, demolishing the whole Victorian area and replacing it with an arid suburb named, of all things, Triomf.

Cape Town’s ‘Sophiatown’ — an area known as District Six — had survived into the 60s, due to the city’s partial exemption from the Group Areas Act, but its very existence as a working community remained an anomaly, since the official doctrine of apartheid was that separate development was essential for peace.

With a mixture of outright sanction and weasally urban development laws, District Six was cleared out and once again largely demolished. Stretching from the railway station across a swathe of the inner-east of the city, most of it was never built on, partly due to an effective boycott, leaving the city permanently lopsided. Freeway overpasses take up some of it, and further up a series of white plaster churches and one large mosque occupy greenfields; houses of worship being the only buildings spared the destruction of hundreds of years of community.

In the brilliant science fiction film District Nine aliens make contact with earth, hover over Johannesburg, and unable to return to their home planet set up shanty towns. It was about many things, not least the recent violent hatred directed towards illegal immigrants, but its core story of a white public servant who becomes part alien after being bitten by one was a register of apartheid’s haunting fear that race-mixing of the Cape persuasion was ultimately monstrous.

But for the traveller in SA, Cape Town seems like the promised land because it means you can breathe easier; walk around the whole city area without much concern, especially in the daytime. After Johannesburg, where no-go zones live cheek-by-jowl with upmarket ‘burbs, and you have to keep a working knowledge of which main streets not to cross, there’s an entirely different sense of the city. Accurate or not, the place seems bound together by the looming presence of Table Mountain, visible from all points of the city proper. The green slopes seem to reach into the heart of the city.

More tentatively, I am expounding this theory to a journalist in a bar when she breaks in. “You should come back when this is all over,” she said. “We won’t be so smiley smiley then.”

Oh God. Got it wrong again?

“No, look, I mean, this place is still safer than a lot of other places, there’s more mixing on the street, but that’s when there are people on the street. Usually this city closes at five in the evening,” Natasha says. She’s sipping at a peppermint tea, but in every other respect, down to a belted raincoat, she has the air of a reporter in a tough city, as news editor of the city’s afternoon paper The Cape Argus.

She has the same mix of love and exasperation that can only come from deep association with a distinctive city. She is determined to burst all my balloons.

“You know,” she says, “because I think Cape Town is a European city, it’s trying to be a European city anyway. I don’t think of it as an African city. Johannesburg, that’s an African city. Life feels more hectic there.”

“Yeah, ‘cos you don’t know if you’re going to be carjacked or not…”

“Well yeah, I think that’s part of it. But it’s got an intellectual life which Cape Town really lacks.”

That struck me as true enough. Cape Town had the same air as Sydney, that of big dumb beauty, turned towards the outer world. It’s a city on the way to what all South African cities want to be. And in at least one respect it has come out on top. By some measures it is the most economically unequal city in the world.

“Yeah, we won the World Cup there alright, Bafana Bafana beat Brazil,” says Patrick, one of the half-dozen people I had contacted to talk about AIDS, a topic of much expertise in the region.

Were Cape Town to be merely the city itself, and its sprawling southern suburbs on the other side of Table Mountain, it wouldn’t be in the competition to top the Gini coefficient scale. Indeed it would probably be doing better than a few European countries like Moldova. But south east of its southern suburbs is Cape Town’s other Khyalitsha, the country’s second most famous ‘township’ after Soweto.

Township is, of course, an utterly misleading term, confirming what I suspect is the image of such places in the rest of the world taken from news footage in the 80s of running battles in front of an undifferentiated rows of shacks.

The shacks are still there, but they’re part of larger conglomerations, and radically different areas, from recognisable brick-built suburbs, to a sea of slums, thousands upon thousands leant up against each other, made of wooden and corrugated iron, roofs held down with stones and tyres.

Townships are cities, in other words, with their suburbs and shops, schools and municipal offices. They live in a grey zone between official recognition and shadow existence. On the one hand there’s electric lighting over pretty much all areas. Yet on the other, no-one actually knows how many people live here. “We don’t have a clue,” Kelly, an education activist, said while driving me and three other activists out there.

“I mean ballpark, what’s the figure?”

“Somewhere between a quarter and one and a half million.”

“That’s ballpark?”

“It could be more…”

“And Khyalitsha’s not the worst place,” someone said from the back seat. “Yeah, they’ve got toilets. You should see Nyanga.”

Nyanga is a smaller township. You can see it from the airport as you drive in. In fact you can see it from the plane, as it circles down. When I flew in last week, the seats behind me were full of proud locals pointing out landmarks to two World Cup tourists.

“That’s the stadium lit up … oh, and that’s Sea Point where we live…”

“What’s that there?” they asked, pointing to a sea of darkness, with dots of dim light.

“Oh, that’s, uh, that’s Nyanga.” The travelogue ended. And tonight, after being dropped off in Long Street, at its globalish boho centre — a restaurant called Fork, a bar called Ragazzi — in an essay by Andre Brink, A Vision of the Future, written in the 80s from a mostly annoying collection, I read his hope, from within the bitter end of apartheid, of how it would be:

Previously flying from Johannesburg to Cape Town, there used to be the startling contrast between the affluent white towns and their depressing shoebox satellites which housed the black workers on which the vast riches of the country depended: now people can live where they wish; and there is no ceiling to the upward mobility of the poor, because they are no longer restricted by the colour of their skin. Many of the vast estates previously run by syndicates or by wealthy white farmers have now been taken over by the state and redistributed among the poor…

Yeah, uh, not yet. That mountain is still to climb. And while the country waits to begin that next stage of the journey, Cape Town is shielded, by its own sublime defining peak, from undue contemplation from what is yet to be done.

Read Guy Rundle’s latest take on South African townships. Register to read if you’re not a Crikey subscriber yet.