The article below looks at the fascinating story of how Alexandra survived demolition attempts during the apartheid years. It was written by passionate Joburger and well known journalist Lucille Davie for the City of Joburg's website on 6 October 2003. Click here to view more of Davie's work.
Alexandra has been under threat of demolition many times in its 100-year-old history. The marvel is that the township still exists. It should have been obliterated years ago, at the height of the apartheid period, when other "black spots" in the middle of white suburbs met their deaths under the bulldozers. But Alex alone survived. Because of a friendship.
A friendship between a church minister and a cabinet minister is what finally saved the township from demolition in 1979.
The church minister was the Reverend Sam Buti, who initiated and drove the Save Alex Campaign in the late 1970s, and Dr Piet Koornhof, Minister of Co-operation and Development in the apartheid government.
Reverand Sam Buti (Lucille Davie)
Their friendship came about because their fathers, both ministers in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Free State, were friends and their sons knew one another from those times. Buti spoke Afrikaans and when Koornhof was appointed minister, he approached him and said: "My mense praat van 'die erwe van ons vadere' en vra: Hoe moet ons verstaan?"
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