In
the fifties and sixties there was a major move under
the group areas act to move Alexandra out of this area and people
filtered out to Soweto, to Temibisa, to ... , to Diepkloof and Soweto
... and a lot of families were moved but .... but there was a lot of
resistance from... the... people who knew that their parents had owned
the land, had bought it, and... so they, they resisted.
Government
was pushing people out and people were fighting to stay. Other people
relented and they left and other people stayed, this was now the
sixties, into the seventies. So when they, the student upheavals in
seventy six started Alex was even more affected. It started on the 16th
of June in Soweto but in Alex they say the 17th of June was a
nightmare, in Alexandra, I wasn't here at that time, but what I hear
and what the photographs I see of the Alexandra uprising were even
worse than what Soweto had looked like. But because it started in
Soweto and the fact that it became really commonly known as the
Soweto
uprising Alex was sidelined in terms of the reports, but from then on
there was a lot of a, like a build up of resistance against moving out
of Alexandra which the Alexandra committee finally won in 1979 when
the, when Alex was given the reprieve to stay. That's when the new
buildings were built, the apartment buildings and the new houses and
where we stay now. It all came as a result of that reprieve of 1979.
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