Moments from the xenophobic mayhem flash in my memory like a strobe light. Perhaps the torn narrative is the result of coming too close to the bloodshed. Or maybe it's just the way I've remembered it, working to meet deadlines for a newspaper that changes its front page four times a day.

As a reporter for The Star, I was dispatched to cover the violence on the afternoon of 12 May – a day after the mayhem began on the dark streets of Alexandra. In one night, more than 60 people had been attacked. I remember arriving at London Road and seeing hundreds of people fleeing the township, their belongings piled up on the pavements as they raced to beat the sunset. Many had no idea where they were going. One woman – a foreigner – had spent the night hiding under her bed as her husband stood guard at the door. She had lived in Alexandra, in peace, for five years.

Suddenly, up the road, a gang ran up behind a youth and flung a brick at his head. He collapsed on the ground, his head falling at the edge of the pavement. Blood flowed down into the gutter and was carried off by a small stream.

That night we filed our stories inside the police's heavilyarmoured Nyala as it drove up and down the township, police officers firing rubber bullets into the alleys.

The storm was just beginning, but from our position at the epicentre it was clear that something was very wrong. ‘Outside the bulletproof glass [of the Nyala] something frightening has engulfed Alexandra,’ I wrote at the time. ‘The scenes that play out in the streets belong somewhere else. Anywhere but in the new South Africa.’

Technology allows experts to forecast deadly storms and raise the alarm. But in this case, the service delivery protests and scattered murders of foreigners near Pretoria and in the Western Cape were almost entirely under the radar. And then, after one night of bloodlust, the storm struck.

For most of the first week we covered Alexandra. We watched as bodies turned up in the dusty slivers between shacks. As mobs went on the rampage in Extension 7, forcing residents to show them their identity books, I remember a vicious stick fight that began in slow motion and then turned into a bloody blur.