Book Review

An interdisciplinary illustration of colonial and/or apartheid use of space and place as an oppression tool

Book Title: Alexandra: A Backstory

Author: Solam Mkhabela

ISBN: 9781431435319

Publisher: Jacana Media, Johannesburg, South Africa R280*

*Book price at time of review

Review Title: An interdisciplinary illustration of colonial and/or apartheid use of space and place as an oppression tool

Reviewer:
Indiphile S. Vezi¹

Affiliation:
¹School of Social Sciences, Department of Sociology, Faculty of Humanities, North-West University, Vanderbijlpark, South Africa

Corresponding author: Indiphile Vezi, indiphile.vezi@gmail.com

How to cite this book review: Vezi, I.S. “An interdisciplinary illustration of colonial and/or apartheid use of space and place as an oppression tool.” New Contree 92(0) (2025): a888. https://doi.org/10.4102/nc.v92i0.888

Copyright Notice: © 2025. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS OpenJournals. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Introduction

Alexandra: A Backstory is a fascinating retelling of the township’s background. It is a multidisciplinary approach, combining history, architecture, and art, to add to the discourse on the sociocultural landscape of townships affected by colonialism and apartheid. It is an interesting approach that shows how space and place had a significant contribution to different groups’ experiences of apartheid. Furthermore, it highlights how social engineering endeavours used space as a tool to enforce oppression and injustice. Alexandra: A Backstory achieves this by using the graphic novel medium to accentuate the history of Alexandra and its proximity to ‘City of Gold’ (Johannesburg). This proximity is critical; it engages an important factor in the discourse on colonial influences and the significance of place in the apartheid’s exploitation of black people. The analysis on how Alex was impacted by historical transitions and the distribution of wealth humanises the devastating impact of colonial and apartheid systems on black people. It furthermore gives insight into consequences that continue to be hard felt by the residents.

Points to ponder

The book is exceptional in illustrating Alex’s contribution to the struggle for liberation and the resulting consequences (mostly negative) and its economic relationship with Sandton and Johannesburg. The graphic novel style of storytelling is compelling and provides an opportunity for history to be more widely accessible. It promises accessibility far beyond academia, to the layperson or, at the very least, to school students learning about the history of South Africa. It promises to provide an easier-to-follow, interesting medium for understanding how history contributed to contemporary life in townships shaped by the apartheid policy framework. In my subjective positionality however, the book does not optimise on the medium of retelling the story, it chooses to tell the story of Alex. The book reads more as an illustrative history book that simply retells the timeline of events that happened in the country, at times zooming in to recount the legislative impacts on the specific township in question. The book does not take full advantage of the ‘story’ part of it being a backstory, but instead focuses more on accurately accounting the timeline of events and the specific ways in which they impacted Alex as a collective place, not focusing enough on the people.

In addition to the missed opportunity of utilising the full scope of the graphic novel medium, the book also does not sufficiently utilise the narrative approach it promises or claims to use. The book is meant to specifically highlight the experiences of the Nguni people, but it does not do enough to keep that apparent throughout the book and mainly speaks about race. In the way the book is written, with the knowledge of the author’s vocation, the architect is often more audible than the storyteller in the ways it focuses on the accurate representation of the layout, most notably places of historical concern and political events. It does not sufficiently provide an in-depth, humanised version of the events throughout, whereby the reader would be able to feel the emotion of the people impacted through its pages. Fundamentally, the reader needs to, I suggest, visualise against the grain to gain a deeper essence of place. For example, the book often explains how broader historical events happened in the specific context of Alex, with the accompanying pictures illustrating exactly what the texts describe, without engaging enough with how the ‘voiceless’ experienced those events and navigated their impact on a deeper level.

Oral history with civilians could have featured a bit more to fill this lacuna, fundamentally, as was the case in the exceptional short film version of the book viewed at the book launch in Brixton. The author repeatedly emphasises the significance of using the people’s voices to illustrate and understand the impact colonial and apartheid regimes had on people in Alex, specifically by using Bra Niky and the voices of those typically unheard to tell the story of Alex. However, except for parts in the last chapter (p. 101) where the author tells his own story, and some parts where Bra Niky comes across to tell the story to the reader (i.e. pp. 25, 35, 45, 55, 58, 60), the book does not do enough to elevate the voices of the people through highlighting how they experienced and were impacted by the events. The book does not sufficiently tell a more personalised account of the impact in as much as it states what happened when to the people of Alex and so mainly reads as a retelling of historical events from an observer’s (the author) point of view.

Conclusion

Overall, the book is an important contribution to an important ongoing conversation in South Africa. It provides a new, exciting and Afrocentric approach to storytelling through the voices of those who experienced and continue to suffer the consequences of colonial and apartheid oppression. Fundamentally, it gives imagery access to an environment misdiagnosed as modern-day Gomorrah, Alex, through the book accentuates moments of Ubuntu, neighbourliness, hustle, and homeliness.