Reform, repression and resistance in South Africa: a case study of Alexandra township, 1979–1989

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Abstract
This article is a case study of reform policy and popular opposition in Alexandra, a black township in the heart of Johannesburg and Sandton's wealthiest white suburbs. First, it examines the popular response to reformist policy in the early 1980s and the transformation to ‘people's power’. ‘People's power’ was informed by an insurrectionary strategy which gave rise to hasty organisation and was based on a limited conception of state power. The demise of ‘people's power’, it is suggested, was not solely due to a clamp‐down on popular organisation by the state. Second, the nature of current reform policy and the way in which it differs from the earlier reform package is discussed. Urbanisation policy, Regional Service Councils and Joint Management Centres are complementary aspects of the new urban reform strategy. It is argued that the current era of repression in the late Eighties was a period of managing reform policy within a new ideological and institutional framework rather than a desperate resort to maintain the status quo.

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