SPACE. DOMESTICITY AND 'PEOPLE'S POWER': Civic organisation in Alexandra in the 1990s.

This paper examines local level civic organisation in Alexandra township, north-east of Johannesburg. A geographically small but densely populated area, Alexandra has a rich and well documented political history.1 Much of the writing on Alexandra has focused on political and civic organisations, and the role they played in the struggle against the apartheid state. This paper takes a more anthropological approach, and looks at the relationship between political and social dynamics at a grassroots level Carter has argued that youth and civic activists ' strategies in Alexandra during the 1980s represented "an appeal to organisational and ideological allegiance, as well as the promotion of a certain kind of morality as the morality to be adhered to " [Carter, 1991:15]. In other words, community mobilisation was directed at transforming people ' s understandings of their social and political environment, rather than just eliciting support for a political cause. Civic activists in the 1990s continue to follow this strategy, whereby the organisation of local civic structures represents an attempt to effect social as well as political transformation. Just how successful this strategy was in the hostile conditions of the mid-1980s is open to debate, although activists at the time confidently proclaimed an era of 'people's power'. Although direct state repression had decreased by the time I conducted my research in 1991 and 1992, wide scale violence and security force actions continued to serve as an impediment to organisation. A second factor affecting political activity, both in the 1980s and 1990s, is competition between different organisations within Alexandra. The two largest organisations in the township- the Alexandra Civic Organisation (ACO) and the ANC- have an uneasy alliance, and at times make contesting claims of support and legitimacy. In addition, ACO faces competition from several rival groupings such as the Alexandra Civic Association (ACA) and th