Alexandra,’ Michael Dingake writes, ‘was not all crime and politics. Between the two extremes existed a large area neither black nor white.’ Despite the insistent pressures of everyday life in the township, sport, music, dance and a variety of leisure-time pursuits thrived. The cultural capital with which Alexandra was so richly endowed is the subject of this chapter.

Football

Early in 1950 the newspaper Bantu World reported that the most popular sports in Alexandra were soccer (football), boxing and golf. Of these sports, soccer had the largest number of teams and enjoyed the biggest following. In the second half of the 1940s and in the first half of the 1950s, Alexandra's football enjoyed exceptional success. In 1945 football in Alexandra experienced a sudden surge of growth as the number of teams affiliated to the Alexandra African Football Association leaped from ten to sixteen, which exacerbated a somewhat unexpected problem experienced during the latter stages of the Second World War – there was a shortage of footballs. By 1950 fourteen teams were playing in the Alexandra League. The teams that made the biggest impact in this period were Rangers, Moroka Lions, Young Fighters, Moroka Stars, Moonlight Darkies, All Blacks and Celtic. Other teams such as Gunners, Naughty Boys, Blackpool and Brave Lions joined the league as they started up or split away from existing clubs.

The success of Alexandra's clubs both in the Transvaal and nationally can be traced to the late 1940s. In mid-1948 the talented young footballer, Elias Pudutsoane, captained what Bantu World described as the ‘crowd pleasers’, Young Fighters, to a win the Transvaal Charity Cup. Young Fighters dominated the Alexandra League at the end of the 1940s, but were displaced in the following decade by Rangers and Moroka Lions. Rangers enjoyed the dubious distinction of being composed mostly of former prisoners, which gave it a distinctly shifting composition. Many players were known by their nicknames, rather than by their real names. ‘Some of [their] fellows like Shu Shine,’ Leepile Taunyane observes, ‘some of the most wonderful play ers, were prison graduates …