Alexandra's place in the new apartheid order had been largely settled by the Mentz Committee in 1953. The Mentz Committee was appointed by H.F. Verwoerd, the Minister of Native Affairs, in 1952 and was charged with giving substance to the 1950 Group Areas Act, which had laid down the broad principles for racial, residential and business segregation. The Mentz Committee sat to consider the racial zoning of the peri-urban around the Witwatersrand in September 1952. In June 1953 the committee of three tabled its recommendations. Although Alexandra was probably the most burning issue that it was tasked to consider in terms of the peri-urban areas, the committee's report devoted only three brief paragraphs to this subject. These declared that Alexandra should not be allowed to grow any further and that its population should be reduced so that it ultimately was comprised of residents working in the northern suburbs. This meant, as the report indicated elsewhere, that the bulk of Alexandra's working population who were employed in south/central Johannesburg and Germiston would have to be relocated and rehoused in the African townships servicing those metropolitan centres. This intention was communicated to the Alexandra Health Committee by the Secretary of Native Affairs (SNA) on 19 January 1954. Key issues were, however, ducked by the committee. No time scale was laid down for accomplishing these goals, and no word was uttered as to what policy should be adopted on the question of the freehold rights enjoyed by stand owners in Alexandra.

At this stage the committee seems to have been adopting the wait and see attitude of the SNA, W. Eiselen, who a year earlier had advised ‘freezing the position (of Alexandra), obtaining (better) control, cleaning up and gradually reducing population (if possible) and ultimately deciding whether the township as such is to go’. Over the following two to three years the authorities proceeded vigorously with the policy of freezing and cleaning up by imposing permits on residents and by raiding or arresting those who failed to take them out. Any more decisive action, however, was inhibited or forestalled by the heavy expenses involved in removals and by the absorption of the central and local governments’ energies and resources by the Western Areas Removal Scheme. The direction in which official thinking was moving, however, became steadily more apparent in late 1955/early 1956.