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Alexandra was a farm originally named for the wife of the white man who owned it. Like Sophiatown and
other black spots populating white areas before apartheid, Alex started out as a squatter settlement where
blacks gathered and lived when coming to Johannesburg to find work. What was unique about Alex is that this
farmer sold plots of land to some of the black tenants in the time before it was illegal for blacks to own
property. So while Sophiatown and other black ghettos were razed and rebuilt as white suburbs, Alex fought
and held on and asserted its right to exist. Wealthy white suburbs like Sandton grew around it, but Alex
remained. More squatters came and more squatters came, putting up makeshift shacks and shanties. They
look like the slums in Mumbai or the favelas in Brazil. The first time I saw the favelas in Rio I said, “Yeah,
that’s Alexandra, but on a hill.”
Soweto was beautiful because, after democracy, you watched Soweto grow. Soweto has become a proper
city unto itself. People went from three-room houses to five-room houses to three-bedroom houses with
garages. There was room to grow because the piece of land from the government gave you something to build
on. Alexandra can’t do that. Alex can’t get any bigger, because it’s pinned in on all sides, and it can’t build up,
because it’s mostly shacks.
When democracy came, people flooded into Alex from the homelands, building new shacks in the
backyards of other shacks with still more shacks attached to the backside of those shacks, growing more dense
and more compressed, leaving close to 200,000 people living in a few square kilometers. Even if you go back
today, Alex hasn’t changed. It can’t change. It’s physically impossible for it to change. It can only be what it is.