In the first weekend in Spring, we left William Kentridge's studio called The Centre for the Less Good Idea in downtown Johannesburg's Maboneng art district, mesmerised and enchanted.

Johannesburg's maestro presented an episode in his series How where artists-in-residence reveal to audiences their method and praxis of the work that eventually becomes the art as it is delivered or performed.

As we left, I wanted to pass 80 Alberts Street in nearby Marshalltown, the scene of the fire in which 77 people died, most of them burnt beyond recognition. I had spent Thursday and Friday trying to get to the bottom of what happened. By Saturday, my colleague Mark Heywood was reporting new violence and pain as residents came to collect what was left after the flames died, or to pray, or to stay.

You couldn't get close to the cop cars and raids on adjacent buildings as a panicked city administration pretended to do something after decades of neglect of the inner city.

How do I begin to understand my city of such duality? So much pain. And so much beauty. There is so much neglect and mediocrity in leadership. And so much exquisite human attention to detail globally heralded culture and art.

I have returned to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Danger of a Single Story this week to understand it. This is the essay...