Alexandra has a rich and distinctive history of continuous settlement that made it a mecca of black urban culture and politics for more than a century. Declared a township for “Natives and Coloureds” in 1912, Alexandra was one of a number of freehold locations where black people could own property. But successive white governments systematically undermined this right through the promulgation of segregationist laws, such as the 1913 Natives Land Act and the 1923 Natives (Urban Areas) Act. The residents of Alexandra for decades resisted these official efforts to eliminate their property rights and to remove the township, with varying degrees of success.
Solam Mkhabela’s Alexandra: A Backstory vividly and insightfully addresses these and other themes in the township’s complex and layered history. Positioned as a contribution to decolonial history, the book correctly insists that the history of black people in the region predates the establishment of Johannesburg. In particular, it recalls the presence of Nguni-speaking people before the arrival of whites in the 1830s, thus rejecting colonial histories that are premised on the empty land thesis and the marginalisation and erasure of the histories of indigenous people.
Historians have long confirmed that Khoe and San people traversed the entire southern African region for thousands of years before the advent of white colonialism. Recent research has also revealed the existence of medium-sized settlements of Tswana-speaking people in areas of contemporary Gauteng and North West province, including in the Suikerbosrand area, at least 300 years prior to the birth of Johannesburg.
The book reminds us how interwoven and mutually constitutive the histories of Alexandra and Johannesburg have been for more than a century.
Within two decades of its founding as a small mining town, Johannesburg grew into one of the world’s key gold mining centres, and by the 1930s it had developed into the country’s industrial heartland. Tens of thousands of people from across the world streamed into the city in search of work and fortune. Black miners who formed the backbone of the burgeoning economy came from various parts of southern Africa.
Most black work seekers were male migrants who were usually barricaded in single-sex mine compounds. As the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy expanded, more black workers, including women, settled in one of many poor locations and squatter camps spread across the Witwatersrand, including in Alexandra.
Their labour was instrumental in transforming an outpost on the highveld into the economic powerhouse of the continent. Despite their interconnected histories, the township’s place in the city has always been profoundly contradictory.
In the first period of its existence, Alexandra fell outside Johannesburg’s municipal boundaries and was therefore administered by the Alexandra Health Committee.
As the city expanded northwards, the township found itself incongruously located amid white middle-class suburbs and industrial zones, which proximity also made it a vital pool of labour for these areas. Until the late 1950s neither the Johannesburg Council nor the provincial government wanted to assume administrative responsibility of the township, which earned it the moniker “Nobody’s Baby”.
One result of this official neglect of Alexandra was the near absence of infrastructural and social development, manifested in the lack of public housing, tarred roads, sewerage system and electricity. Until the 1980s, the township still used the notoriously unsanitary bucket system and was known as “Dark City”, standing in sharp contrast to the wealthiest suburb on the continent, Sandton, a mere mile away.
This inequality is deeply etched in the landscape of Johannesburg’s northern suburbs and is wonderfully depicted in the novel.
An unintended consequence of the relative absence of white administration in Alexandra was that the township experienced less control and surveillance than municipal locations, making It attractive to immigrants wishing to establish a foothold in the city and evade the routine and harsh restrictions faced by African people in urban areas.
From the 1930s, as the graphic novel illustrates, overcrowding became endemic in the township, reaching crisis proportions in the 1950s and from the 1980s to the present. For white residents and officials, this home to tens of thousands of black urbanites was deemed a troublesome space and a “black spot” to be expunged from the white landscape.
White residents repeatedly demanded the removal of Alexandra, echoing similar calls that resulted in the removal of black people from the inner city at the turn of the century and from Sophiatown in the 1950s.
Throughout the 20th century, white governments promulgated a battery of racist laws to elaborate and enforce segregation, especially under apartheid when racist laws were more strictly enforced and often accompanied by violence.
Mkhabela, an urban scholar, is especially attentive to the historical production of spaces in Alexandra. The perspectives from which these processes are made legible are central to the depiction of the place’s history. Instead of a conventional top-down approach, this graphic history centres the experiences of people who made the township — property owners, tenants, political activists, informal workers and the unemployed — from the vantage points of their everyday lives.
In so doing, it echoes social history’s approach of producing “histories from below” in which subalterns are the central actors. Bra Niky, long-time denizen of Reverend Sam Buti Street (formerly Selbourne Street), is the principal narrator of the graphic novel who offers street level perspectives of the various resistance movements, spatial reconfigurations and the socioeconomic convulsions that have marked the history of the township.
Born at the dawn of the apartheid era, he has experienced the effects on Alexandra of the imposition of strict racial segregation laws, efforts to obliterate property ownership, state repression, the resurgence and eventual success of black resistance and the institution of the democratic order.
The book highlights the division between property owners and tenants as a crucial fault-line that has defined socioeconomic relations among residents. Property owners were regarded as the original inhabitants and referred to themselves as the “bona fides” of Alexandra.
This self-definition was an important assertion of their right to the city, as belonging not only to the black location but also to Johannesburg. It was a powerful statement of defiance against the white authorities who deemed Africans as “temporary sojourners” in white cities, permitted to live there only for as long as their labour was needed.
In this racist conception, urban areas were citadels of modernity, of white power and privilege. Africans did not belong there but supposedly in “tribal” rural areas.
Like Bra Niky’s tree, “bona fide” families set down firm roots in the township and determinedly resisted numerous efforts to uproot them from their homes.
Until the late 1950s, tens of thousands of tenants made homes for themselves in the yards of property owners.
Their rents were a major source of income for property owners, who did not have access to bank loans to finance the purchase of land or develop properties. This core economic relationship notwithstanding, they shared experiences of infrastructural deprivation, threats of removal, unjust laws and also forged new cultures in their common urban home.
However, the surge in urbanisation (e.g. in the 1940s and 1980s) led to massive overcrowding and raised fears among property owners that they were losing control of their township to immigrants, the “amagoduka”.
Alexandra: A Backstory notes the coincidence of the formal establishment in 1912 of the township and of the South African Native National Congress (later renamed the African National Congress).
Prominent figures of this liberation movement lived and operated in the township, including Gaur Radebe, Richard Baloyi, Nelson Mandela and Florence Mphosho. In fact, Alexandra is renowned as a centre of mass protest politics. Since at least the 1930s it has been home to squatter movements, campaigns against removals, general strikes, and boycotts of buses, schools and elections.
These were invariably organised by community-based organisations such as civics and women’s movements. After 1994, new social movements emerged to mobilise against removals, the privatisation of municipal services and xenophobia. The township also has a rich tradition of left-wing politics.
At different times, the Communist Party and independent socialists (e.g. the Movement for the Democracy of Content, Society of Young Africa and Ditshwantso Tsa Rhona) enjoyed influence among activists. In the 1930s and 1940s, Lillian Tshabalala, a prominent figure in Left politics, organised women’s movements and was a leader in the bus boycotts.
These different movements reveal Alexandra’s important role in the liberation struggle. But, as the book emphasises, the advent of democracy has not freed most of Alexandra’s residents from the bondage of poverty and marginalisation.
Persistent overcrowding has caused more trees to be uprooted as desperate people struggle to find spaces to live. Unemployment figures have soared, resulting in growing numbers of people being dependent on social grants and the informal economy to survive. More and more residents have been pushed to the periphery of society. Mkhabela evocatively refers to the life of precarity, unemployment and survival as the “twilight zone”.
Alexandra: A Backstory is a welcome contribution to the growing genre of historic graphic novels. Based on scholarly research, it popularises the history of one of the country’s most iconic townships.
The illustrations in every frame produce richly layered narratives and make complex histories accessible to wider audiences. The author and illustrator are to be commended for producing an exciting graphic novel that should generate new interest in the histories of Alexandra and Johannesburg.
** Nieftagodien is the co-author with Phil Bonner of ‘Alexandra — A History’.
• ‘Alexandra: A Backstory’ by Solam Mkhabela is published by Jacana Media
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