The Dark City

The Mail & Guardian has a feature on the sprawling community of Alexandra, one of the most notorious of all of the apartheid-era townships that emerged in the shadows of Johannesburg. If gleaming Joburg came to be known as "Egoli," Zulu for "City of Gold," Alexandra was "The Dark City" both because of its status as a desnsely-packed black township and because it lacked even the rudiments of electricity.

I am writing a book in which The Dark City features prominently, so Alexandra is on my mind a lot these days. The end of apartheid did not signal the end of suffering for many among South Africa's masses. Nowhere embodies the recidivism of poverty and the monstocities of apartheid more than Alexandra, a status made all the worse by the fact that Alexandra is adhacent to Sandton, one of JoBurg's, indeed the country's, most affluent and still overwhelmingly white suburbs.

My work emphasizes the 1940s and 1950s, a bygone era easy to romanticize. Yet what is alarming is how little things have changed even after 1994. Nelson Mandela lived in Alexandra as a law clerk in the 1940s. One wonders how many thousands of young men and women with Nelson Mandela's gifts never even had a chance in Alexandra.