Alexandra,Johannesburg

Established in 1912 by an Afrikaner farmer, Alexandra is a black African township in Johannesburg and is situated on the banks of the Jukskei River. It saw a population boom to 30,000 people by just 1930. However, from the beginning, the people in Alexandra were overlooked and misplaced in the South African bureaucracy—because of its relative distance from the center of Johannesburg at the time, the Johannesburg City Council did not recognise the township as part of Johannesburg and thus refused to take responsibility for its development and management. In 1948 with the establishment of official Apartheid, it was shifted under the control of the Department of Native Affairs. Over the years, there has been much civil unrest in Alexandra in reaction to the Apartheid government. In the early 1960s, there were widespread protests against the proposed demolition of all family accommodation in Alexandra, which was to be replaced with same-sex hostels, but due to extreme unpopularity and financial costs the scheme was abandoned in 1979. The Soweto riots of June 1969 had also spread to Alexandra, which resulted in the deaths of 19 civilians. But, because of this, evictions, forced removals and expropriation of black property ended, as blacks were no longer seen as merely temporary residents in these townships. In 1980, a “Master Plan” for Alexandra was proposed, that intended to redesign the township into a “Garden City,” but this plan was never realised. It was permanently cancelled by the “Alex Six Days” uprising in 1986, against the police attack on a funeral in the area, which took 40 lives and saw arrests and assaults against the Alexandra Township Committee. To combat the extreme poverty and crime rates in the area, the Alexandra Renewal Project was introduced in 2000. This has funded 26 infrastructure and 12 housing projects. However, the township still suffers from serious socioeconomic issues. Due to the population boom in the early twentieth century and due to insufficient attention from policy-makers, the infrastructure is overloaded and serving a population four times greater than it was built for, with the problems in the sewage systems making maintenance and proper health sanitation very difficult. The imprint that the incredibly poor and trying living conditions have made on the residents was visible in the 2008 xenophobic attacks that started in Alexandra and eventually spread throughout South Africa. The attackers claimed they were tired of foreigners taking their jobs, but it’s clear that, in reality, the economic slavery that Alexandra’s residents have been born into, and the incompetent sociopolitical system that will not free them of it, are the real obstacle to them finding prosperity.