For me Alexandra township has always been Alex — a place I know only from a distance. That is besides my recent passing acquaintance with Alex when I played idiskie with my ol’ krok soccer team one Sunday at the local stadium.
Fine, we lost the game; but I came out wealthier, with a film about the human side of Alex in my head and heart. The hospitality demonstrated by the Alex team countered the many grotesque pictures of hostility that one often picks up in the media. There are also the tragic tales of car hijacking and other bull that come to my ear via the ghetto grapevine. But the pictures and stories are not always those of blood and gore.
I recall, quite vividly, a friend in Meadowlands, Soweto, boasting about his numerous delicious encounters with beautiful girls from Alex. Their sheer beauty, he observed religiously, was inversely proportional to the ugly reality of the shacks from whence they came. Well, growing up in Ndofaya, I was fairly familiar with the idea that beauty thrives even where hunger and violence reign.
Nevertheless, during the world summit, I was rather puzzled by the discovery that, in fact, Alex is something of a tourist attraction. Tourism for me has always been about places like Sun City, with its valley of fongkong waves, and the not-so-raw jungle of Kruger National Park. I fail to see how Alex fits into this category.
Is it not a crazy idea to think of that sprawling sea of shacks as an attraction of sorts? Haaikhona! Why should anyone fly all the way from Europe, America or Japan just to see the mad existence of human traffic jostling for space and dust in the narrow streets of Alex. Alex, where the shacks are as crammed as a mouth full of teeth that seem to squeeze each other off the jawline. Alex, where shacks are erected so close to the pavements that they almost spill into the road. Alex, where the offending smell of filth attacks the nose with blows that hit harder than the stench of 9/11. Alex, a place that in the 1970s gave birth to Mongane Serote’s guttural utterances, in a poem aptly titled Alexandra. Taste it:
My beginning is knotted to you,
Just like you knot my destiny.
You throb in my inside silences
You are silent in my heart-beat that’s loud to me.
Alexandra often I’ve cried.
Well, when I decided, grudgingly, to find Alex for myself, it seemed like very little has changed since Serote’s ambivalent affair with a place he refers to as a mother.
For Serote, the children of Alex grow to love her dearly, especially when other “worlds become funny” to them. But I was coming into Alex, not as a child, but as something of a distant relative and, more importantly, as a tourist of sorts.
For the first time in my life I wore tourist spectacles to see a slice of loxion life. I took a shuttle bus from the Market Theatre to Alex on a tourist mission, courtesy of the Gauteng Tourism Authority. This time I was not in the company of semi-fit, semi-drunk, and fully babalaased soccer players; I was riding with a makoya tour guide. Of course, I came armed with doubts about the wisdom of this tourist trip for a darkie like me. “Tourism is stuff for the lahnies!” I heard a voice refrain inside me. But I reminded myself to stop tripping because this was a sponsored trip. So I opened my eyes and ears to listen to the tour guide’s guidance.
I must say that the tour guide, Abbey Sechoaro, himself a son of Alex, oozes a politically conscious kind of tourist spirit. As soon as he coughed out his township lingo, laced with resourceful tourist address, I was delightfully infected. He was a far cry from the khakhi-clad, kortbroek liar of a ranger I once met in Kruger National Park.
Yes, that ranger is a liar because, when he took us for a drive, he showed us the statue of Paul Kruger and told us that the man was dearly called Skhukhuza — “the clean sweeper” — because he was so loved by the natives, who were apparently pleased to let him fence away their ancestral land to serve the tourist market. Niks! In fact, it was Stevenson Hamilton, the first ranger in the land of the Shangaans, who was bitterly named Skhukhuza — “one who removed the people by force”.
Excuse this digression. I am supposed to talk about my trip to Alex, there where people were forced to live because their racial stock did not qualify them to reside in “the city of the white man”.
Abbey took me to see the tiny room where Nelson Mandela stayed briefly in the ’40s when he was a country bumpkin from the Eastern Cape. Legend has it that it was the year he spent in Alex that altered the young Madiba from a rural moegoe to a township clever. Ja! With his sense of fashion sharpened in Alex, he would defy the Victorian suit when he became president; he chose what we now know as the Madiba shirt.
Imagine what kind of a clever he would be now, had he spent his 27 years in Alex rather than Robben Island? Abbey also showed me what used to be the home of luminous trumpeter and Mzansi’s leading jazz musician, Bra Hugh Masekela. Now, you see my point? Bra Hugh is mos nie a moegoe. He still makes use of the township lingo quite sharply in the lyrics of songs like Tanaai. What keeps Bra Hugh’s music fresh and vibey is precisely the ghetto temperament he picked up from his upbringing in places like Kofifi and Alex. But forget about Kofifi, it has now become a model-C that goes by the name Triomf. Come to Alex for a true feel of ikasie.
Of the store of “monuments” in Alex, KwaMadala hostel and Beirut section are reminiscent of the red headbands and traditional weapons that flooded television news footages of the early 1990s. As we traverse the gory streets of Alex, my mind begins to wander to a time at St John High School, where I went to give a poetry workshop. It was a heartsore when I discovered that some of the darkie students have never been to any township or squatter camp.
How, then, do we teach the history of this land if the “born frees” have not had even a limited freedom of movement? My answer is tourism, or field trips, if you like. There is just so much that our children and us, black and white, can learn about this country if we allow our pompous selves to be guided by the likes of Abbey.
Abbey is a streetwise authi who’s got his finger on the rhythm and feel of his kasie. He spices his historical notes with some lekker anecdotes about Alex and its people. One that sticks in the mind is one about the women’s hostel called Nobuhle, meaning she who possesses beauty. Nobuhle was apparently erected in 1981 to host women migrants who came job seeking in the city of gold. These women served the city mainly as domestics and street sweepers.
The saucy part of the story is that some of these women serviced the men folk around Alex. But Nobuhle Hostel does not allow men: whatever biznis you have with the male species: “do it outside!” The only outsiders allowed to enter are the ama-Venture, those small boys who hang outside hostel premises, waiting to be sent to summon sister So-and-so for some dough. They do not forget the face of a miser. Ama-vulture will avoid any groot man who does not play with his silvers. The story of Nobuhle and ama-Venture is just one in the rich forest of tales that is Alex.
Then there was the graffiti on the walls. Among the political slogans, are adverts for the many spaza shops. The eye kept roving, looking to catch a signboard rightly or wrongly spelt PUBIC PHONES, that a friend from the kasie assured me I would find.
And hey! I also met this great artist and his works, a painter who goes by the name of Mbheki Banda. Banda hails from Daveyton, and squatter camps are his pet subject matter. Of all the squatter camps that he’s had to sketch, Alex provides him with the greatest inspiration. Bhanda’s paintings of Alex capture the textures and character of a people taking chances with life, refusing to be beaten down by the hard knocks of any working or non-working class existence.
For information on tours to Alexandra township call the Gauteng Tourism Authority on (011)340 9000.