Alexandra: Township of broken dreams that Mandela called home

By MACHUA KOINANGE in Alexandra

The stench from uncollected garbage is overwhelming.

The sight of idle youth and children playing with a skipping rope can be a welcome departure from the reality of abject poverty in Alexandra township, located 12km north-east of Johannesburg.

Founded in 1912, Alexandra has a population estimated at over 200,000.  The densely populated black township is emblematic of South Africa’s great divide between the rich and the dirt poor. It is a town that speaks largest about broken dreams following the 1994 all-race elections.

It is also the place that Nelson Mandela called home when he moved from Transkei to begin his working life as an aspiring lawyer.

The township extends over an area covering 800 hectares and is divided by the Juskei River.

On the corner of 7th Avenue and Richard Baloyi Street, a large mural adorns a white wall with the number 46664 – Mandela’s prison number when he was on Robben Island.

A fragile wall that extends on both sides of the street envelopes a variety of small brick houses. Across the street, a discount mart is perched next to a bar where revellers are already imbibing their favourite drink. The time is 11.30am.

Hundreds walk the streets and idlers sit on corners chatting, a fitting and tragic epitaph to South Africa’s huge unemployment problem. Sixty per cent of young people have no jobs.

RED BRICK HOUSE

Inside the wall, a single red brick house with a circular sign reads: “Alexandra Heritage Site; Mandela’s place, 46 7th Avenue.” Two garbage bins guard the tan front door to the single room that Mandela once called home.

Unlike Mandela’s other homes in Soweto and Houghton, there are no crowds of people dancing and singing here. The dirt poor neighbours walk past the historical house oblivious to the historical significance it contains.

But that speaks volumes about the township’s broken dreams. Mandela moved up from the neighbourhood to Soweto and then Houghton.

But the thousands of his poor former neighbours are still waiting to get to the Promised Land.

“What Mandela did to Alexandra was to make it part of something particularly historical,” says Mongezi Xhoma, 20, whose great-grandfather was in effect Mandela’s landlord.

Xhoma’s grandmother, Gladys Xhoma, was six years old when Mandela moved into the tiny room. Xhoma was too young to know who Mandela was then but recognises South Africa has lost a great man.

But he says Mandela’s demise exemplifies the broken dreams of a better life for many blacks.

“There are many who moved from the townships to the suburbs and others from the rural areas to the townships. The line of separation between blacks and whites is thinner. But many are still poor.

“I think we have forgotten what our vision as blacks was. We need somebody to remind us what the vision was and to help us focus on the country and its needs,” he said.

The street littered with mounds of garbage, the nauseating stench that attacks you as drive along, epitomises the other half of South Africans who are mourning the loss of an icon but are apprehensive about whether their own dreams of good housing and jobs will ever be realised.

The tiny room tucked amidst a compound of several rooms marked Mandela’s first steps to being his own person pursuing a career in legal practice.

The room has no toilet or running water. Tenants share bathrooms and toilets and have access to water from a single tap outside.

Next to the tap is a short bush embraced by flowers and a burnt out candle, the closest evidence of salute to the fallen apartheid giant slayer.

Alexandra is, after all, this tiny corner of the city where ululations and jubilation rent the air in 1994, and where residents wake up to the realisation that they have been almost forgotten.

Mandela set foot in Alexandra at the age of 23 in 1941, from his ancestral village of Qunu, to start life on his own. It was here that Mandela learnt to live on his own, sometimes getting food from neighbours when he could not afford to eat.

It was also here that he morphed from an heir to a traditional leadership title to a revolutionary leader.

Legend has it that Mandela moved here in part to dodge an arranged tribal marriage.

He talks glowingly of the house in his book, No Easy Walk to Freedom, musing that the house “was no more a shack with a dirt floor, no heat, no electricity and no running water. But it was a place of my own and I was happy to have it”.

FUTURE LEADER

It was this shack that Mandela used as a base to start work as a legal clerk at a Johannesburg law firm. But the salary was hardly enough for rent, food and transport.

Yet the experience here is credited with exposing the future leader to the painful truth about segregation, poverty and unemployment.

“In that first year, I learnt more about poverty than I did in all my childhood days in Qunu,” Mandela wrote.

Mandela last visited the house in 1993, three years after his release from prison. Besides the lack of activity in contrast to the other Mandela homes, Robbie Senoelo, who works with the South African Department of Communications, says a condolence book has been opened at the venue.

“The house is now a heritage site and a museum across the road is under construction,” he said.

“People express grief in different ways when you remember memories of the old man. We should not expect uniform mourning.”

Alexandra may be in quiet mourning, but the residents are too overwhelmed by poverty and apprehensive about what life will be without Madiba. And they are still waiting for the promises of jobs and economic prosperity under a black government, 20 years after majority rule.