Nobody's baby: The politics and perceptions of informal housing in Alexandra Township
Date
1996-05-13
Authors
Lucas, Justine
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Abstract
In late February 1996, a group of property-owners in northern Johannesburg attacked
residents of a squatter camp that had sprung up on their doorstep, and burnt down several
shacks. Local government officials, while not condoning the action, promised to relocate the
squatters to another site. The squatters, who were not told where they would be rehoused,
refused to move, prompting further threats from the enraged property-owners. On April 29,
there was an attempt to move the squatters to Diepsloot, far from their current homes and
jobs. They resisted, and in the ensuing struggle police fired teargas and rubber bullets.
This has been a familiar story over the last decade, as local government battled against
endless waves of 'land invasions' while a new democratic dispensation was being negotiated,
and mainly white property-owners protested against the rising crime and drop in property
prices that they feared would result from informal settlement. But there is a twist to this tale.
In 1996, two years after South Africa's first democratic election brought in a new housing
policy, and several months after local government was elected to provide urban municipal
services, the angry property-owners in the above account are residents of Alexandra
township's East Bank suburb. Many of them are members of the ANC, and are represented
by the ANC-aligned East Bank Civic Association. The local government officials who have
promised to remove the squatters are also mainly ANC members; several of them former
civic activists from Alexandra who championed the rights of squatters in the 1980s. As a 'squatter township' Alexandra is different both from the rest of Johannesburg's northern
suburbs and from most other townships or informal settlements. This difference is a legacy
of its anomalous history as a 'location' - a formerly freehold area where property rights were
granted a year before the introduction of the 1913 Land Act, and which survived the
demolitions and removals meted out to other similar areas like Sophiatown and Western
Native Township. Although usually described as a township, Alexandra predates the
development of these vast, regulated and uniform 'satellite towns', far from white areas,
which were designed to house and control the African workforce. For a significant portion
of its history, Alexandra fell outside municipal authority and remained free of much apartheid
legislation. As an overcrowded and crime-ridden slum, Alexandra was 'Nobody's Baby'-
situated in the heart of Johannesburg's northern suburbs, but too much of a liability for
white municipalities to take responsibility for. The modernist conceptions of planning that
underpinned apartheid thus largely failed to gain purchase in Alexandra. ...In this paper I look at how contestations over the representation of space in Alexandra have
been shaped by the failure of apartheid's racial modernism, and explore the historical roots
of current perceptions of informal housing as a problem for planners.
Description
African Studies Seminar series. Paper presented 13 May 1996
Keywords
Blacks. Housing. South Africa. Alexandra, Housing. South Africa. Alexandra