Johannesburg, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika and The Westcliff

Johannesburg is a vibrant sprawling city on a plateau 5,751ft (1753 M) above sea level, way too vivid and alive to be reduced to just a stopover. Unless you have to, like we did. We had a plane to catch the next morning for Cape Town. I don’t want to start a brawl, but the exquisite Mother City, nestling between the mountains and the ocean, now that’s what we’d come to see.

Despite our giving the place a bit of a brush off, Johannesburg insisted on greeting us like a brazen bride promising enough to make us sorry to arrive and then leave in a churlish 24 hours.

Oliver Tambo International Airport Johannesburg all ready for the World Cup soccer.

I grew up in Johannesburg too long ago so the city should have been less of a surprise. Except that the South Africa I grew up in and the country I am now visiting are two different places. Vastly.

The country I called home those decades ago was a place I was deeply ashamed of. Part of the tiny, largely ignored group of English speaking white liberals in Apartheid South Africa, we, along with the much larger even more consummately ignored black population, felt we belonged to a nation that symbolized only injustice and oppression. There was a gaping hole where a sense of national identity should have been. Apartheid policy was ‘Divide and Rule’. We were all fragments.

Why is this important? Because the country I am landing in now is supposed to be my country. The point is now, after all this time, it suddenly is. It suddenly is a place I feel proud to belong to. Myself and hundreds of thousands of others.

All vestiges of the formal system of Apartheid are gone, although there are effects that will take generations to heal. Nothing short of a miracle could have transformed the ugliness into what my country always should have been; a thriving multicultural mecca. So coming home feels like it should have all those years ago. It feels like a homeland I can be proud of. It feels like a nation I can identify with.

These are the earth shattering details that form the emotional backdrop for our whirlwind trip through Johannesburg.

Looking down from the hotel's top level where the pool and restaurants are located.

I was lucky enough to have a reservation at one of the best hotels in town, a gift from the online hotel booking agency we use. The Westcliff is perched high up on, well, a cliff in Old Johannesburg, old, terribly posh Johannesburg, This was the area I’d driven by as a young reporter in my little VW beetle and gazed up at in awe. This is where the rich have always lived. The view is spectacular; the whole of Johannesburg sprawled out beneath you, cascading down in shades of green turning to Jacaranda purple in the summer.

The hotel leads off one of the most prestigious avenues in the city, Jan Smuts. On the one side the legendary Zoo Lake, on the other Johannesburg Zoo, up a little hill and the hotel looms on several levels of deep blush on our right.

The gates are at street level but the rest of the elegant structure climbs the hill, up and up, from reception all the way to the restaurants and pool perched high above.

If you have only 24 hours in the city and a 15 hour flight from New York City behind you, Westcliff gives you a way to survey the city in a way that closely resembles cheating really, in a good way.

We had a very dear old Mauritian uncle to visit first so by the time we reached the hotel it was all we could manage before heading out to the airport for our flight to Cape Town first thing the next morning. Except for the steps, and we later discovered a lift, it was the perfect place to relax.

We knew we were behaving shamelessly; compounding the sin of a mere 24 hour visit by failing to move once we arrived at the hotel. We had had such plans. The city has several outstanding restaurant districts, we heard, such diverse cutting edge stuff to offer, lots of independently run, startlingly good places to go. Ah, but we were so tired. Almost too tired to make it up all the levels to the restaurant in time to watch the sun drop over the horizon, drink an ice cold South African Sauvignon Blanc and munch on a basket of traditional tidbits: samoosas, bobotie spring rolls and boerewors.

Africa sang in the background. Our young waiter enthusiastically volunteered his opinion on xenophobia, echoes of the many ads running in the country encouraging its citizens to welcome the incoming deluge of World Cup visitors with warm, distinctive South African hospitality: ‘invite them to your home, offer them a curry bunny’. We were home, and it was good, it was much, much better than it had ever been.

Johannesburg, we will be back. And next time we’ll not leave you standing.

Wee footnote: Yes, it is weird writing about the exciting transition in South Africa from an elitist, posh hotel like the Westcliff. It was a free night, what can I say...