By the way,’ Leepile Taunyane reminds us, ‘Alex is just one square mile [1,6 square kilometres]. Just one square mile. How small for so much.’ It was indeed truly remarkable that despite endemic poverty and the depredations of the gangs in Alexandra, so much political and cultural energy was packed into this tiny space. A kaleidoscope of political and cultural activities unfolded in Alexandra, which few, if any, other African residential areas could match. Its only real rival was Sophiatown, and elderly residents of Alexandra and Sophiatown still cross swords over which was politically and culturally the most fertile. The political movements contended with each other in a spirit of relative mutual tolerance and respect. The African National Congress (ANC) was the most durable and influential, but it did not in any way decisively eclipse the others or, equally importantly, press them into a common mould. Political diversity, not a suffocating uniformity, was the hallmark of Alexandra. Much the same can be said of its cultural life. In music, dance, sport and literature, the township was at the vanguard and often set the pace. This chapter and Chapter Seven are devoted to exploring these themes.

‘As long as you were born in Alexandra,’ Jika Twala remarks, ‘you were a politician.’ The politicisation of Alexandra did indeed grow steadily in the late 1940s and 1950s, but political tendencies in the township remained remarkably diverse. This political pluralism and the relatively easy co-existence of political beliefs – all, it should be said within a broad resistance framework – have been a persisting and distinctive feature of the township's history. In the early to mid- 1940s, as we have seen, the Transvaal provincial wing of the ANC was divided and weak. In Alexandra, perhaps because of the property-owning component of the population, the ANC nevertheless enjoyed a broad sympathy, even if political activity both there and in the province as a whole remained at a low ebb. Louisa Rivers, who was a high-school pupil at the end of the 1940s and in the first half of the 1950s, recalls that ‘Alex [then] was an ANC place. Each and every property owner was an ANC.