As a result of the general electimons of 26 May 1948, the Afrikaner Nationalists came to power on the election ticket of apartheid. The constituencies that elected the Nationalist government into office were white platteland (rural Highveld/ plateau) farmers who were losing huge quantities of African labour to industry in the towns, which had grown explosively during the Second World War; semiskilled Afrikaner workers who were threatened with job competition from blacks; and a section of white suburban residents who feared being swamped by black immigration to the towns. Among the government's first legislative acts in 1950 were the Race Classification Act, which slotted all of South Africa's citizens into discrete racial categories, and the Group Areas Act, which was designed to allocate separate residential areas to Africans, coloureds, Indians and whites. Another key piece of legislation followed in 1952, the ironically named Abolition of Passes and Documents Act, which granted urban Africans rights of permanent residence in the towns, but which tightened influx control so as to prevent all newcomers, especially from the farms, from acquiring such status. Any African male who was unable to produce a pass indicating his right to work and live in the towns was arrested and sentenced to several months in gaol. Alexandra, which stuck out like a sore black thumb among the expanding white northern suburbs of Johannesburg and whose residents comprised a muddled mix of urban ‘insiders’ who were entitled to urban rights, and a mass of newly arrived outsiders, who in the government's eyes were not so entitled, was an early target of apartheid's social engineers. Only one year into the new government's term of office and three years before the 1952 Act was passed, Alexandra's access to the Johannesburg job market was severely restricted, creating massive social problems in the township, notably in the forms of criminality and gang violence. This chapter charts these shifts. Chapter Six explores the political radicalisation produced by these developments, which was probably deeper than in any other black urban area in South Africa. Chapter Seven records the exceptionally rich and fertile cultural and leisure life in Alexandra, which somehow flourished in the midst of political radicalisation and state repression. During the period covered by these chapters the government ducked the issue of Alexandra's continued existence, as previous administrations had done for the past 40 years.