The South African government is working to reform Alexandra Township, one of the poorest, most...
Since 2001, Johannesburg's Alexandra Township has seen vast changes, propelled in part by a national urban development project to improve the area, but also by an influx of rural South African and immigrant jobseekers who have further densified an already-crowded landscape. Still, there are deep strands of identity that have remained in place—residents whose families helped found the township over a century ago, or the informal settlement that has persisted for decades as a site of poverty and crime.
Presented in this slideshow are some of the people and places in Alex that tell the township's story and history: two rival organizations representing Alex's longtime property owners, both of which are suing the city in search of compensation for past injustice; a soup kitchen for drug addicts, run by a group of neighborhood women; and the structures—hostels, houses, and bridges—that have been built and renovated in the attempt to lift the community out of its longtime poverty.
