Johannesburg - Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's most
notorious townships, marks its 100th anniversary this year with hopes of
revitalising a slum that has come to symbolise inequality in South Africa.
The ramshackle township that was Nelson Mandela's first home
in Johannesburg sits just across a highway from the gleaming high-rise
buildings of Sandton, which boasts of being Africa's richest square mile.
Alexandra seems to have little to celebrate, with some 400
000 people, a third of whom believed to be unemployed, packed into 7.6 square
kilometres.
But Philip Bonner, historian at the University of the
Witwatersrand, said: "The fact that it survived is a cause of some sort of
celebration."
An accident of history, Alexandra survived the bulldozers
and violence of South Africa's segregationist apartheid rule.
Known popularly as Alex, the township began in 1912 when a
group of blacks bought the land from a white farmer who failed to find white
buyers.
It became one of the few places in the country where people
of colour could own property, giving rise to a tradition of autonomy and
resistance which today is the pride of residents.
Apartheid authorities, determined to crush the black
neighbourhood seen as a blight on nearby Sandton, moved tens of thousands of
people to other townships such as Soweto some 40km away.
But they could never get everyone out, making Alexandra one
of the only neighbourhoods to successfully resist apartheid's forced
relocations.
"I didn't want to go there, I wanted to stay here in
Alexandra, because they were not farming there. Here we were farming,"
said Selina Mpisi, a feisty centenarian renamed "Lady Alex" who has
become the embodiment of the anniversary.
'A legacy project'
Modern Alexandra is a far cry from the rural expanse that
greeted Mpisi when she arrived 74 years ago. The first houses have been swamped
in an ocean of makeshift homes where masses of migrant workers have gathered.
Not without incident. The anti-immigrant attacks that
convulsed South Africa in 2008 began in Alex and quickly spread across the
country.
In the early 1940s, Alexandra made headlines by boycotting
buses to protest against fare hikes, forcing the white authorities of the day
to shelve the plan.
Those boycotts helped inspire Mandela's fight for freedom,
Bonner said.
"He says it made a big impression on him. It opened his
eyes politically," Bonner said.
"From that moment on he... ceased being an observer and
became a participant."
In 2001, an ambitious renovation project was launched.
Thousands of houses and tarred roads were built, street lights were put up and
a park was designed to replace a shantytown that suffered regular floodings
from the nearby river.
While many people wouldn't dare venture there, the township
is not the lawless gangster valley it used to be.
"When I come back from the church, I am not scared, I
just go. A few years ago you couldn't go alone," said Pauline Dlamini, who
was born here 70 years ago.
Despite the improvements, Alex remains an island of poverty
where goats graze among the trash accumulating outside a new shopping centre,
and where the municipal council has procured a squadron of owls to hunt rats.
Organisers hope publicity around the centenary will draw
attention and investment away from Soweto to Alex, said Mpho Motsumi, president
of the Greater Alexandra Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
"We see it as a platform for changing the face of
Alexandra, socially and economically, apart from just partying. We've got a
legacy project - so that the people will always remember the 100 years of
Alex."