Alexandra

A history

Noor Nieftagodien, Phil Bonner

• Verlag: Wits University Press
• Jahr: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781776141234
• Thema: History
• Thema: African History

Alexandra: A History is a social and political history of one of South Africa's oldest townships. It begins with the founding of Alexandra as a freehold township in 1912 and traces its growth as a centre of black working-class life through the early years before the Nationalist government, through the struggles of the apartheid era and into the present day. Declared as a location for 'natives and coloureds', Alexandra became home to a diverse population where stand owners, tenants, squatters, hostel-dwellers, workers and migrants from every corner of the country converged to make a new life for themselves near the economic hub of Johannesburg. The stories of ordinary people are at the core of the township's history. Based on numerous life-history interviews with residents and previously unexamined archive sources, the book portrays in vivid detail the daily struggles and tribulations of the people of Alexandra. A significant focus is the rich history of political resistance, in which political organisations and civic movements organised bus boycotts, anti-removal and anti-pass campaigns, and mobilised for housing and a better life for the township's residents. But the book also tells the stories of daily life, of the making of urban cultures and of the infamous Spoilers and Msomi gangs. Over weekends Alexandra came alive as soccer matches, church services and shebeens vie for the attention of residents. Alexandra: A History highlights the social complexities of the township, which at times caused tension between different segments of the population. Above all else, despite a long history of hardship and adversity, the community spirit of the people of Alexandra, expressed in a fiercely loyal love of their township home, has repeatedly triumphed and endured.

Chapter One

Settling on Alexandra

Alexandra was laid out as a freehold township for Africans and coloureds in 1912. It was one of a handful of freehold African townships in the Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) area, such as Lady Selbourne, Sophiatown/Martindale and Evaton, and was much prized by its residents. The majority of new immigrants who initially bought land in Alexandra were formerly relatively prosperous sharecroppers and labour tenants squeezed out of white South Africa’s farms. These people shaped the social ethos in Alexandra in critical ways that have been barely registered in the literature. People came with skills they had learnt on white farms (in a kind of apprenticeship completely withheld from Africans in the towns). In addition, they often came with some capital, and with this they created a bustling entrepreneurial community perched on the outer edges of Johannesburg.

From the First World War onwards the community of Alexandra grew apace, particularly in times of rural depression or drought. Many of the new arrivals sojourned first in Johannesburg’s multiracial slums before taking up residence in Alexandra and they often illicitly brewed beer to make ends meet. This introduced another distinctive and much more turbulent and ungovernable element into Alexandra’s social and political culture. As a result, Alexandra possessed a dual, almost split personality that, after multiple other infusions, it still has today.

These twin features of Alexandra disposed the main adjacent administrative authorities of the time, none of whom wished to take responsibility for Alexandra, to engage in an experiment in self-government through a partially elected Alexandra Health Committee (AHC) established in 1921. However, the fissured character of Alexandra’s community, as well as ethnic tensions among its land-owning elite, placed this experiment under considerable strain. The right to elect was nevertheless deeply valued, even treasured, by the people of Alexandra, making contestations over the Health Committee’s powers and constitution a central theme in Alexandra’s history over the ensuing decades.

Establishment of Alexandra as a freehold township (Source: Museum Africa).

‘Gateway to Johannesburg’¹

In 1905 Haile ka Nqaba Mbanjwa, his wife and his one-year-old daughter, Phumuza, left Emabovini in the Greytown district of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal). Mbanjwa set up home on the farm that his employer, Herbert B. Papenfus, at that point an attorney and farmer, had bought in Midrand. Mbanjwa was employed as Papenfus’s cook and his wife worked as one of Papenfus’s domestic servants. At more or less the same time Papenfus purchased the farm Cyferfontein 2, on which the township of Alexandra now stands.² Here he installed a number of African tenants who also came from the same area of Natal. One of these was Bright Mkhize’s father, who arrived from Nkandla in 1905.³

Papenfus divided the property into 338 lots, two parks and a square, and set about selling off the lots to white buyers.⁴ While he awaited potential purchasers, Papenfus used Cyferfontein as a staging post for conveying milk from his farm in Midrand to Johannesburg, where it would be sold. Haile Mbanjwa was responsible for conveying the milk and would change carts at Cyferfontein before proceeding on to Johannesburg with his consignment of milk.⁵

Papenfus was already by this stage a fairly prominent figure in the life of the Transvaal (now Gauteng). Like his father, Lodewyk Jacobus, who had acted as Attorney General for the Orange Free State in the early 1870s, Herbert had qualified as an attorney. A supporter of the Uitlander or British immigrant cause, prior to the South African War of 1899–1902, he was appointed as justice of the peace for the entire Transvaal at the end of the war. Herbert Papenfus was a supporter of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts’s South African Party. He had political influence as was confirmed when he was elected as a member of parliament for the Hospital Hill (that is, Hillbrow) constituency in 1915, a position that he used for many years to defend his and black property owners’ interests in Alexandra.

By the time Papenfus bought his properties in the Alexandra/Midrand area, this part of the Transvaal had been dominated by whites for 60 years and the whole area had been long divided into farms. Africans, however, continued to live on and cultivate these farms. Long after Alexandra was laid out Ndebele people occupied the area between Midrand and Pretoria (now Tshwane). Before Papenfus bought Alexandra the Ndebele may have occupied this area as well. Keke Koalepe, an early resident of Alexandra, recalls:

Halfway House … what you call Midrand … used to be occupied by these Ndebele people … They came into Alexandra in hulle ossewa [their ox-wagons] to come and sell their wares, you know brooms and many other things, 16 oxen-waggon … pulled by 16 oxen. It was a lovely picture when you see them coming from Halfway.⁶

According to Simon Noge, who was born in Alexandra in the 1930s, these Ndebele occupied the present site of Freedom Park. ‘Just before you enter Pretoria,’ Noge declares, ‘here is the Voortrekker Monument and across there is a beautiful kopje [small hill]. You still see the scar of old buildings of the Ndebele people. They have not even [been] completely wiped out.’⁷ Novelist Modikwe Dikobe, who lived in Alexandra in the early 1940s, locates Ndebele settlement on the very border of Alexandra. ‘Lombardy Estate,’ he remarks, ‘has vestiges of Ndebeles; some homes are still intact. The land is still in furrows. Cattle pens are still traceable. About 1½ miles is a heap of rocks strewn with ash; this was an initiation altar.’⁸

Papenfus had little success in selling off plots on the Cyferfontein estate to Transvaal whites. Only a few properties were purchased. Simon Noge remembers: ‘You’ll notice from the title deeds there were sometimes a few whites who had already bought these places. For instance, the one that’s at 3^rd Avenue, it belonged to Van Jaarsveld … it was being bought by a Mbatha.’⁹

A common view among older Alexandra residents is that whites were reluctant to buy plots because of the prevalence of disease. As Mrs Louisa Rivers puts it: ‘When the whites examined this place they found it had some disease … it was muddy … . It was true. Alexandra was disease infested, measles, smallpox, polio that killed many people.’¹⁰ Philip ‘Kay’ Manana makes the same point, recalling the words of Simon Sewgapane, the first African caretaker of Alexandra who told him: ‘Now do you know that for ten years this place was put up for sale for whites to buy it, but the whites declined saying, no, they won’t go to such a dirty place, it has diseases and everything else.’¹¹ Another frequent thread running through several oral testimonies is that the wetness of Alexandra put white buyers off. As Manana remarks: ‘[I]t was a swamp … white people wouldn’t take it … it had a lot of clay, and they couldn’t live on it.’¹²

Alexandra’s wetness may well have been a factor in putting prospective white purchasers off, although it should not have been such an important consideration in the upper reaches of Alexandra near the old Pretoria Road, the stands that were the first to be sold off. Official documents generally place more emphasis on the distance of Alexandra from Johannesburg and the absence of transport links,¹³ although this should have also had an impact on the development of Wynberg, which was laid out at roughly the same time.

When Papenfus found himself unable to sell his property to whites, he had the plans for the estate redrawn. In 1911 official approval was given to redivide the land into 2 308, 144 × 82 foot lots, three squares and one reserve. The intention now was to sell off the plots exclusively to coloured and African purchasers. Early buyers were mainly coloured people, along with a sprinkling of Africans. In 1913, 40 houses had been erected in the upper areas of Alexandra, accommodating the same number of families.¹⁴ By 1916, 200 houses had been erected and 900 coloured and African families had taken up residence.¹⁵

The new township was known as Alexandra, as was the Township Company that sold the plots. It is generally believed that it was named after Papenfus’s wife or daughter, Alexandra, because, in the words of Linda Twala, son of one of the first residents of Alexandra, ‘she loved Africans’.¹⁶ This explanation of the origin of Alexandra’s name is so widely accepted that it is now never questioned. Closer historical inquiry, however, raises real doubts. Not one of H.B. Papenfus’s immediate female relatives bears the name of Alexandra. His wife was Ethel Papenfus, his sister was Katherine Mary, and his daughters were named Ethel Mary and Irene Alice.¹⁷ Similarly, Stephanus Papenfus, a cousin or brother of H.B., who acted as an agent for the Township Company when it began to sell plots to black owners in 1912, and whose name appears at the bottom of the well-known photograph of a billboard advertising properties in Alexandra in 1912 (see page 18), also had no female relative named Alexandra.¹⁸

Another tantalising possibility is held out by H.B. Papenfus’s last will and testament, which he drew up in November 1929 and amended in February 1936. This and the inventory of his assets compiled in December 1937 contain two seemingly unrelated clues about the identity of the mysterious Alexandra. In his last will and testament Papenfus bequeathed his assets to his children procreated in wedlock, out of which £600 per annum would be devoted to the support of his wife. In his inventory of goods, shares in the Alexandra Township Company do not appear. Papenfus’s financial interests in Alexandra had evidently been disposed of some time earlier.¹⁹ An unlikely source, the unpublished journal of James Stevenson-Hamilton, who was largely responsible for creating the Kruger National Park and served as its first warden, links these apparently unrelated fragments of information and suggests a possible solution to the overall puzzle. Stevenson-Hamilton was a close friend of Papenfus who served as a South African Party representative on the National Parks Board of Trustees and often visited the Kruger Park.²⁰ Six weeks after learning of Papenfus’s death in a car accident near Middelburg in September 1937, Stevenson-Hamilton records undertaking a journey to Johannesburg to sell skins. There he paid a courtesy visit to Papenfus’s widow, Ethel, whom he found in an angry mood. According to her, Papenfus had only left a paltry £20 000 in his will to his family (this is confirmed by the inventory of goods). His prize asset, the Alexandra Township Company, had been made over in its entirety to his former typist, a Mrs Gordon, with whom he had a child 30 years before.²¹ The gender of this child is not recorded, but if she were a girl, who would give odds on her name not being Alexandra?

The timing of Alexandra’s conversion from a white to a black area may have been coincidental, but it seems more likely to have been connected to the drafting of the Native Land Bill, which was passed into law as the Native Land Act in 1913. The new Act had two purposes: firstly, to stop the buying back of land by African communities from white farmers, which was happening on a large scale in the Transvaal; and secondly, to outlaw sharecropping, especially in the eastern Orange Free State, a practice that allowed African families to enter into agreements to...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Social History Project
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Map of Alexandra
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Settling on Alexandra
• Chapter Two: ‘Nobody’s Baby’
• Chapter Three: The Fight for Survival in Alexandra, 1938–45
• Chapter Four: The Inner Life of Alexandra, 1938–47
• Chapter Five: Reaping the Whirlwind, 1948–58
• Chapter Six: Political Culture in Alexandra, 1948–60
• Chapter Seven: Taking Time off in Alexandra
• Chapter Eight: The Perils of Peri-Urban: Permits, Protests and Removals, 1958–75
• Chapter Nine: Student Uprising and Reprieve
• Chapter Ten: From Reprieve to Civic Crisis
• Chapter Eleven: Mzabalazo! Struggle for People’s Power
• Chapter Twelve: Fighting for the Hearts and Minds of Alex
• Chapter Thirteen: From Defiance to Governance
• Chapter Fourteen: Civil War
• Chapter Fifteen: The Promise of Democracy, 1994–2008
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index