In recalling his youth in Marabastad, Es’kia Mphahlele described the looming figure of ‘Ra-Stand’, the name that residents gave to ‘the inevitable white superintendent of the location’ whose control over the streets made him ‘thought of only as the owner of the Marabastad stands’. Apart from the superintendent, Mphahlele remembered that ‘the location seemed to be the property of the police’. Mphahlele’s experience of a white authority figure as the imagined owner of the stands on which black people lived, and of the police as the controllers of the area, stood in stark contrast to black people’s experiences living in freehold areas in the first half of the twentieth century. In freeholds, where black people owned land in their personal capacity as private property holders, people popularly referred to landowners as mmastense, using this feminine form for ‘landowner’ whether or not there was a man in the household. Landowners’ families were often described in relation to this title, bana ba mmastense, mmastense’s children. Mmastense owned the stand’s land, the buildings that stood on it, and organised and controlled the yard and all that lived and grew on it. In black freehold areas, external actors like white superintendents and other state and private actors had limited power to act on people’s land. Freehold gave black people the freedom to imagine and develop the land on which they lived in ways that best suited their needs and that reflected their aspirations. With confidence in their permanence on their land, freeholders invested in homes where they could experience comfort and stability, and which they could leave to their children for cross-generational family security.

Alexandra Township was proclaimed as a freehold township for black people in 1912. For the first few decades of its existence, Alexandra’s residents called it ‘no one’s baby’. The township fell outside of municipal boundaries, which meant that the government played a limited role in oversight and support of the area.