Alexandra is, and always has been, a special place. It is special, among other reasons, because it is almost the sole surviving example of what was once a hugely influential segment of black urban society, which cultivated a distinct social ethos and imparted its own distinct flavour to the entire black urban world – the black freehold township. Even when it was being ground down under the heel of high apartheid, the township clung on to this identity. As a result, it bears the imprint of a largely vanished urban past. Alexandra is also noteworthy because it served as the crucible of numerous urban political traditions, which crystallised into the mass African nationalism of the 1950s, as well as a new popular civic culture in the 1980s. It has thus been the source of path-breaking black political cultures for many decades. In this respect Alexandra has frequently started trends, but often has bucked them as well. Finally, Alexandra has been an unfailing source of political controversy, whether as the subject of repeated commissions of inquiry between the 1920s and 1960s, which sought to efface it from the map, as the home of the extraordinary bus boycotts of the 1940s and 1950s, as a key locale of the eruption of student resistance in June 1976, as the site of the Six Day War in 1986, or as the starting point of the recent violence against people from elsewhere in Africa that gripped many areas of South Africa in May 2008. In these and countless other cultural, social and political ways, Alexandra is distinctive. This book seeks to explore and explain this multitude of activities packed into the one square mile of Alexandra and the many faces and phases of the township's tumultuous past, and to convey its various facets to a wider world.

This book has been written, first and foremost, for the present and past communities of Alexandra. It was the product, at its inception, of the presidential Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP) and has also been overseen and supported by a community reference group in Alexandra.