South Africa: Around Alex

October 13, 2016 | Pulitzer Center

Christian Belanger

The Alexandra Property Owners Rights (APOR) are a second community group in Alex representing former property owners. APOR and the Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association (ALPOA) have conflicting ideas of how best to resolve various land-related issues, such as the question of how leases given out on expropriated land under apartheid should be treated. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

This $10 million pedestrian and cycling bridge between Alexandra and Sandton, currently in its final stages of construction, is slated to be completed in October 2016. The high-rise office buildings in the background make up Sandton City, the financial center of Johannesburg. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

The exterior of a rental house in Alexandra’s Extension 9, a government housing development. The tenants say they have only constructed a wooden fence, less sturdy than brick or concrete, because they are not allowed to make more permanent alterations to their home. Like most other residents in Extension 9, they also say that the government installation of the solar geyser on the roof, which is used to heat up water in the home, caused several leaks in their home. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

One of the hostels renovated under the Alexandra Renewal Project. Alex’s hostels were built under apartheid to house workers employed in the industrial corridors surrounding the township. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

The banner of the Alexandra Land and Property Owners Association (ALPOA) represents a little under 2500 families in Alexandra Township who had their land expropriated from them under apartheid. A couple of years after the Alexandra Renewal Project began in 2001, ALPOA successfully sued the city to prevent further development on their former property. In June 2016, the group came to a settlement with the city that established various forms of compensation that property owners could choose between. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

Belinda Mathevhaula, a hairdresser who runs a stand outside the Pan Africa Shopping Centre. Like most other hairdressers in Alex, Mathevhaula is Mozambican. Image by Christian Belanger. South Africa, 2016.

In Old Alex, a group of women run a self-financed soup kitchen for nyaope addicts such as the two in this picture. Nyaope is a street drug—its primary ingredient is thought to be heroin; though it is used more in Durban, Alex’s residents say it is increasingly becoming a problem in their township. Tshepile Makjato, who leads the project, says that the women’s goal is to get the addicts, many of whom are homeless scrap metal vendors, into free government-provided rehab programs. Image by Ronald Selota. South Africa, 2016.

Since 2001, Johannesburg’s Alexandra Township has seen vast changes, propelled in part by a national urban development project to improve the area, but also by an influx of rural South African and immigrant jobseekers who have further densified an already-crowded landscape. Still, there are deep strands of identity that have remained in place—residents whose families helped found the township over a century ago, or the informal settlement that has persisted for decades as a site of poverty and crime.

Presented in this slideshow are some of the people and places in Alex that tell the township’s story and history: two rival organizations representing Alex’s longtime property owners, both of which are suing the city in search of compensation for past injustice; a soup kitchen for drug addicts, run by a group of neighborhood women; and the structures—hostels, houses, and bridges—that have been built and renovated in the attempt to lift the community out of its longtime poverty.