Alexandra was laid out as a freehold township for Africans and coloureds in 1912. It was one of a handful of freehold African townships in the Pretoria- Witwatersrand-Vereeniging (PWV) area, such as Lady Selbourne, Sophiatown/ Martindale and Evaton, and was much prized by its residents. The majority of new immigrants who initially bought land in Alexandra were formerly relatively prosperous sharecroppers and labour tenants squeezed out of white South Africa's farms. These people shaped the social ethos in Alexandra in critical ways that have been barely registered in the literature. People came with skills they had learnt on white farms (in a kind of apprenticeship completely withheld from Africans in the towns). In addition, they often came with some capital, and with this they created a bustling entrepreneurial community perched on the outer edges of Johannesburg.

From the First World War onwards the community of Alexandra grew apace, particularly in times of rural depression or drought. Many of the new arrivals sojourned first in Johannesburg's multiracial slums before taking up residence in Alexandra and they often illicitly brewed beer to make ends meet. This introduced another distinctive and much more turbulent and ungovernable element into Alexandra's social and political culture. As a result, Alexandra possessed a dual, almost split personality that, after multiple other infusions, it still has today.

These twin features of Alexandra disposed the main adjacent administrative authorities of the time, none of whom wished to take responsibility for Alexandra, to engage in an experiment in self-government through a partially elected Alexandra Health Committee (AHC) established in 1921. However, the fissured character of Alexandra's community, as well as ethnic tensions among its land-owning elite, placed this experiment under considerable strain. The right to elect was nevertheless deeply valued, even treasured, by the people of Alexandra, making contestations over the Health Committee's powers and constitution a central theme in Alexandra's history over the ensuing decades.

‘Gateway to Johannesburg’

In 1905 Haile ka Nqaba Mbanjwa, his wife and his one-year-old daughter, Phumuza, left Emabovini in the Greytown district of Natal (now KwaZulu-Natal). Mbanjwa set up home on the farm that his employer, Herbert B. Papenfus, at that point an attorney and farmer, had bought in Midrand. Mbanjwa was employed as Papenfus's cook and his wife worked as one of Papenfus's domestic servants.