Alexandra is crying. Her beauty is spoilt by despair. Her perseverance marred by hopelessness. Her children can’t fly away; their wings are clamped by lack of motivation. Their star doesn’t shine for it’s snuffed by substance abuse. Her sons age in jail while her daughters raise babies who are most likely to model their absent fathers. Alexandra misses the merry days when marriage songs echoed across her humble streets. And her hopes of seeing her children in graduation gowns fade by the day.

Alexandra is crying. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Alexandra was supposed to turn me into a dream – turn us into dreams. Folks were supposed to say great things about me back in the village. They were supposed to claim me as their son who had made it in the jungle of Gauteng.

I came to Alexandra for the first time in November 1982. I was six. We rode in the back of Rakgolo’s pickup truck, the legendary Chevrolet Custom 10. We were supposed to visit for two weeks at the most, or until my father got his big pay from work and we could return to our Limpopo village. We were actually here for Christmas clothes but we sommer spent the Christmas, and the following year I was enrolled at a local school.

I was glad I got into this school. It was a nice school, big with a ground and top floor. I also looked forward to being taught to speak English perfectly, just as my mother had told my father when they argued over whether I should start school in the village or in Alex. But mother won. Women often win against men. I’m a grown man now; I know.

Gauteng had always been seen as a place where dreams came true. Back then two things defined a man in the village: first, he had to go to the mountain school, and after that he had to find work in Gauteng. And only then he could talk about taking a wife.

I wondered what I’d find in Alexandra but I was convinced there’d be lollipops aplenty since my father brought some each time he came to the village. I was also hoping to see a television set. There were no televisions in our village. The SABC was fairly young at the time, having started in 1976. A television set was a luxury for black people, many of whom slept on pap and tomato gravy.

The journey was long and tiring and the atmosphere was dark. For the most part, I slept on the sponge cut carefully to fit the Chevrolet’s loading bin so that passengers sat comfortably throughout the journey. When we neared Alexandra, mother said loudly, “Re fehlile – we’re here!”

Hearing this, I roused myself to look through the canopy window but couldn’t see much because it was dark, save for a couple of bright buildings sliding sideways out of view. But my mother had been here before, so, we were indeed here. This was the place village folks wouldn’t stop raving about; Makgoweng – the place of white people.

Alexandra is situated thirty kilometres north of Johannesburg and, like many South African townships, this place sprung to life in the middle of towns and industrial areas to the benefit of white people because cheap and fast labour was ready to appear on request.

According to South African History Online, Alexandra came into existence in 1904 after a lovelorn, wealthy farmer called Papenfus bought a patch of land as a farm for his wife named Alexandra. In 1912 Alexandra became a native township when migrant workers flocked to this area lured by the prospects of jobs in Joburg. At the time, Alexandra was one of the urban areas where black people could buy land.

Over the years, strides have been made to give this township a make-over but corruption impeded some of those efforts and the old ‘madala’ houses are still here, unshaken by ageing or generations of people they sheltered throughout time. Though Alexandra is still the face of despair, those grateful for a roof over their heads, and those who live here out of their ties to its earth, continue to love this place, imperfect as she is, just as Papenfus loved her.

If Alex streets could talk, they’d brag about millions of footprints they’d carried, belonging to people from all walks of life, some of whom went on to inspire the world, the Great Nelson Mandela being one of the most notable. Mr Nelson Mandela stayed here after coming to Johannesburg from the Eastern Cape village of Mvezo. And so did multitudes of black Africans who trekked from as far away as Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and other places. These people made this township their home away from home. My father, Samuel, was one of them, and Alexandra embraced him without prejudice, unlike the apartheid regime.

At the time, scores of black Africans came to Gauteng to work for white people. There was nothing else for them anyway; it was the era of masters and slaves. This was at the height of apartheid when black people had no human status. They were objects that could be used and disposed of when spent.

There were, of course, active liberation movements fighting to topple the apartheid regime so that black people could be treated equally to white people. But the fight for freedom was far from being won because, in the words of Hertzog, colonial Afrikaner General: “A grown black man stood as an eight-year-old boy against a grown white man” – circumcised and all.

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Tell us: Do you think Alex was the place to be at that time that the writer has mentioned?