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Recent developments (in reverse date order):
Alexandra container homes to be allocated only when declared safe (TimesLIVE, 21 September 2024)
Ramaphosa unveils plans to relocate some Alexandra residents (Sunday World, 29 August 2024)
Ramaphosa's 2019 one million homes promise for Alexandra was ‘misinterpreted’ (EWN, 30 August 2024)
During the 80s, I was approached by the Get Ahead Foundation to open an office in Alexandra township, where a colleague and I shared a prefab with a team of social workers. I think it was in 12th Avenue, which is unrecognisable now. The idea was to identify and help develop entrepreneurs with potential, so we worked closely with a private sector organisation running a small business hub in London Road. Later, I became involved in other Alex projects – including one spearheading the development of Alexandra’s East Bank. So, I spent lots of time in Alex and came to know it quite well.
During a recent trip to Johannesburg I decided to see how the township has been doing. In 2010, I’d given a lift to someone I knew who lived there and remember being impressed by the tarred roads and the orderliness of the area through which I drove at the time. The only shacks I saw were near London Road. How things have changed during the fourteen years that have since sped by – and not for the better.
The aerial shot above of a queue outside one of the voting stations in Alexandra township on 29 May 2024 (Daily Maverick) paints a misleadingly innocuous picture given conditions on the ground. Where are the mounds of rotting garbage, the potholes filled with effluent, the goats? In reality, the old section of Alex – part of which the aerial shot portrays – is in a shocking state. Living conditions there were bad in the late 80s and early 90s. They’re far worse now. Begging two fundamental questions: ‘Can Alex be fixed?’ and if not, ‘Why bother to vote?’ Because despite all the promises of rejuvenation and renewal bandied about by one political party or another every five years during the run up to national elections, it’s blatantly obvious to anyone familiar with the issues that Alexandra township is beyond saving.

Tragically, similarly horrifying conditions can be found in or adjacent to most South African cities and towns, as well as across the broader continent and in developing countries worldwide. Nobody should be expected to live that way indefinitely, but millions of people do. Which is because the systemic causes of such terrible poverty are rooted in cycles of disadvantage transferred across generations and accumulated layer by layer over long periods of time. Individuals, families and whole communities become trapped – themselves generating multiple barriers to escaping the horror, albeit unwittingly (The Conversation).

What makes the poverty in Alex so deeply disturbing is that the township is located near some of the South Africa’s most affluent residential areas, in the country’s wealthiest city and province. Nobody really knows how many people live there, hemmed in between light industrial sites, residential suburbs and the Jukskei River. Estimates range from 180,000 to 750,000 people (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 2000). Most of them live in old Alex – an appallingly overcrowded, squalid slum established more than a century ago. Across the river, Alexandra’s more recently developed East Bank is paradise by comparison.
A few of the township’s original, pre-1913 Land Act brick houses are still standing. Relatively well constructed, they were built when Africans could own property under freehold title and were probably intended for nuclear family living: husband, wife and a handful of children. But long before the end of apartheid, most of these houses were already being rented out room by room by unscrupulous landlords – along with their backyard pondokkies. By the late 80s and early 90s, each dilapidated old house was already accommodating several families. The same happened to RDP houses built in Alex after 1994. The people to whom they were allocated have moved on and rent them out. Some have even been converted into poorly constructed multistorey establishments – generating a handsome monthly income at around R1500 per cramped room. Which is the going rate, although larger rooms can generate R2000 a month or more. Imagine the state of shared ablution and cooking facilities in those dwellings, the overloaded plumbing, the haphazardly improvised electricity connections …

Here and there, rows of portable chemical toilets serve houses where the sanitation facilities have stopped functioning or never existed – along with an ever-mushrooming number of nearby shacks. Some toilets have been placed next to enormous piles of refuse resembling landfill sites, although most are illegal dumping grounds. One has been spilling into the river for years. Every rainy season, when the river bursts its banks, nearby shacks are washed away with the refuse. One resident on higher ground says people vie for positions near the water because when disaster strikes, they’ll be top of the list for proper housing in a better area.
In the old days, shacks did pop up randomly on vacant council ground but were mostly confined to the banks of the river and the area around Madala men’s hostel – a grim brick monolith of eight five-floor blocks arranged in the shape of a diamond. But now, there seems to be no vacant ground left. The shacks are everywhere, competing for space with mounds of rotting garbage on what should have been pavements, encroaching on school grounds and community facilities – anywhere with room for a makeshift shelter or a pile of household waste. Goats amble about, chewing on anything worth the trouble. Rats dart here and there.
In one street of shanties, an offal vendor sells her wares from a rickety table within a stone’s throw of running effluent, possibly even raw sewage. It’s pooling in a cluster of potholes where small children play. Washing hangs limply from lines strung shack to shack. A drunk urinates against old tires piled haphazardly next to the rusted chassis of an ancient vehicle. A minibus taxi hurtles past, barely missing two boys careering about on a cast-off skateboard. Junkies loiter around a spaza shop hoping for handouts.
It’s impossible to tell how long the piles of rubbish have been there. Some residents say they’ve only been accumulating since PikitUp’s casual refuse removal workers went on strike. Which seems unlikely, because festering garbage on street corners and dotted among shacks has featured in media articles about Alex for years. The stench is horrible, all-pervading. But you get used to it. You have to. There’s no escape. Occasionally, the aroma of braaiing meat wafts from a chisa nyama, offering fleeting relief. Combined with the acrid pungency of simmering mogodu, the blander scent of boiling samp and beans, the smell of cooking is strangely homely despite the bleakness, the poverty, the squalor, the despair.
There’s no shortage of information about conditions in Alex. Studies have been conducted, clean-up campaigns have come and gone, hopes have been raised by news of upgrading plans – then dashed for the umpteenth time when nothing materialises. According to one resident with a good job in a nearby warehouse, things only began to deteriorate at the end of Mandela’s presidency. During his time in office, pre-1994 ‘standards’ were maintained – or so this resident says. He’s lived in the area for 24 years. Because it’s close to his place of employment, he saves on transport. So, he puts up with the filth, the stench, the chaos, his landlord’s greed.
During the 80s and early 90s, in houses with no pit latrine, human waste was deposited in buckets left outside for a night soil collecting team to empty (Learn and Teach) – a system that worked quite well, or so it seemed to visitors. In some areas, piles of garbage did accumulate but were cleared regularly enough to prevent a rodent invasion. So, some streets in Alex did smell the way entire stretches of shanties do now. But not the entire township. That was during apartheid, when yellow and blue Zola Budd police vans and Casspirs crisscrossed Alex maintaining ‘law and order’ with the help of FN rifle wielding soldiers at roadblocks.
Nobody wants a return to those times. But why have things been allowed to deteriorate so badly under a government of the people for the people? Why is only lip service paid to protecting and promoting human dignity in places like Alex?
Five years ago, shortly before the 2019 elections, violent protest action prompted then Democratic Alliance mayor of Johannesburg, Herman Mashaba, to launch ‘a full forensic investigation’ into the whereabouts of R1.6 bn set aside for an Alexandra Renewal Project that never got off the ground (Daily Maverick). Mashaba was supposed to have joined then Gauteng premier David Makhuru and President Cyril Ramaphosa on an Alex walkabout. Reports say he never made it. An inquiry into the cause of the unrest followed, conducted by the Human Rights Commission and the Public Protector. The joint report on their findings blamed ‘severe overcrowding, inadequate service delivery, rampant crime and illegal land occupations’ – exacerbated by ‘maladministration in the running of Alex’. According to the report, at the time there was only one portable chemical toilet for as many as fifty-five shack dwellers – while accessing piped water meant walking several kilometers to the edge of the township.
Five years later, nothing has changed except for the addition of container homes stacked three storeys high near Madala hostel and still standing empty. They were intended for some of the families living in what was always supposed to have been a single sex hostel but never really was. For decades, its hundreds of units have been home to entire communities living in ghastly conditions. During Covid there was talk of moving shack dwellers into the units to reduce the overcrowding and curb the spread of disease. Why neither plan materialised is anybody’s guess. Perhaps there’s a waiting list. In February, ‘more than 100 families’ illegally occupying some of the containers were evicted (Eyewitness News). Apparently, the project is ongoing although there’s no sign of activity.
And so it is that another layer of disadvantage is added, another entrapping barrier raised.
Will the plight of Alex and the thousands of communities like it feature in discussions on the form of government most suited to ‘taking South Africa forward’? Probably not. Although commitments to ‘poverty alleviation’ might – superficially, in the rhetoric. Our politicians across the ideological spectrum would do well to ponder on words of wisdom attributed to Chinese teacher and philosopher Confucius: “In a country well governed, poverty is something to be ashamed of. In a country badly governed, wealth is something to be ashamed of”.
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