Post-Apartheid Urban Spaces

Abstract

For three days in October 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) held Human Rights Violation (HRV) hearings in Alexandra, an impoverished township on the northern outskirts of Johannesburg that borders the affluent suburb of Sandton. Many of the witnesses gave testimony about the events of the so-called Six-Day War in April of 1986. This uprising turned the township into a “no-go zone” for police and outsiders for six months afterward; it included consumer boycotts, youth-led anticrime patrols, and people’s courts, even in the midst of occupation by the South African Defense Force; eventually the alleged leaders of the rebellion would be charged with treason.