Alexandra

The Canada-born clergyman, who holds a PhD from Edinburgh University, entered South Africa still in the apartheid era.

His first ministry in that troubled country was at a parish in the Alexandra Township, and he then went on to become a researcher with the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights.

He completed his PhD at New College Edinburgh, doing fieldwork with the communities which had been forcibly removed from ancestral lands under apartheid.

During his work in South Africa, he met Nelson Mandela and Bishop Desmond Tutu.

It is a Sunday evening in May 2008.

You're standing on a dirt road in Alexandra Township, Johannesburg.

You can smell burning rubber, kerosene, and something worse.

A few metres away, a 35-year-old Mozambican man named Ernesto Alfabeto Namuave has just been beaten, doused in flammable liquid and set on fire by a mob.

According to the World Bank's 2022 Inequality in Southern Africa report, the wealthiest 10% of South Africans own more than 80% of the country's wealth.

Black South Africans, three decades after the formal end of apartheid, still face a black unemployment rate north of 35%.

Townships like Alexandra, Soweto, Deep Sloot, Kyalitsha and Umlazi have rolling blackouts, water outages that last days and homicide rates that would qualify as a low-intensity civil war anywhere else.

When a working-class South African in one of those townships looks across the street and sees a Somali-owned spaza shop, a Pakistani-owned barber, a Zimbabwean-owned welding workshop and a Mozambican construction crew, the conclusion they reach – that foreigners are taking jobs and resources that should be theirs – is not crazy.

Thabiso Machaka for Jacaranda News Watch in Polokwane.

In other news, the MEC of Education in Gauteng, Lebogang Maile, says he's dismayed by the shooting death of two pupils in the Alexandra Township north of Joburg on Monday.

According to preliminary reports, the matric pupil from Minerva Secondary School and a 17-year-old grade nine pupil from the Alexandra High School were shot near the Madala Hostel.

Onyangale Lubelwana is the spokesperson.

The circumstances remain under police investigation.

Communities must work together with government and law enforcement to fight criminality and protect young people, and urges anyone with information to approach the Alexandra Police Station.

The bail application hearing of the suspended Deputy National Police Commissioner, Shadrack Sibiya, has also been postponed to next Tuesday.

Today it's for further arguments.

The regent sent a telegram to the mine authorities demanding his return, and just like that, he was out.

He drifted to Alexandra Township, a place the locals called Dark City because the government had never bothered to wire it for electricity.

He rented a single room in someone's backyard, slept on the floor, used a bucket for a toilet.

The rent was almost impossible to pay.