This chapter begins by tracing the explosive growth of Alexandra's population between 1938 and 1947. Such growth provides the background and context for the increasingly urgent campaign waged by the City Council of Johannesburg for the removal of Alexandra, and when this was refused by the government in 1944, for its incorporation into Johannesburg. Both campaigns represented a threat to Alexandra's survival, the first overt, the second disguised. The people of Alexandra also found themselves at risk in more day-to-day ways. Their capacity to survive even at a breadline standard of living came under intense pressure in the early to mid-1940s from an increase in the price of all kinds of goods, and in a critical and symbolic way from rises in the cost of transport. Alexandra residents responded to the latter with a sequence of successful bus boycotts staged between 1940 and 1945. The bus boycotts were of seminal significance for two reasons. Firstly, as mentioned at the end of the last chapter, the extraordinary levels of mobilisation that they achieved signalled a new phenomenon in South African resistance politics, which came of age in the 1950s – a mobilised mass base combined with a new militant leadership. Secondly, they placed a public spotlight, in a way that had never happened before, on the whole structure of black exploitation in South Africa, upon which white prosperity rested. The bus boycotts thus came to stand for the elemental struggle of black urban families physically to subsist, and constituted one of the most important acts of black self-assertion in the late 1930s and 1940s. That act of assertion, moreover, was unprecedentedly successful. The issue of making ends meet and eking out a living is discussed in more detail in Chapter Four. These two chapters thus stand together and the introductory section of this chapter serves to frame Chapter Five as well.

Population explosion in Alexandra, 1935–44

Alexandra's population continued to grow rapidly in the late 1930s and 1940s. Much of this, as seen in the previous chapter, was comprised of what Alexandra's stand holders described as ‘the poorest class of native, driven out of Johannesburg [by slum clearance] which resulted in a sharp increase of “drunkenness and disorderly conduct”’.