Born a Crime

can’t do that. Alex can’t get any
bigger, because it’s pinned in on all
sides, and it can’t build up,
because it’s mostly shacks.
When democracy came, people
flooded into Alex from the
homelands, building new shacks in
the backyards of other shacks with
still more shacks attached to the
backside of those shacks, growing
more dense and more compressed,
leaving close to 200,000 people
living in a few square kilometers.
Even if you go back today, Alex
hasn’t changed. It can’t change.
It’s physically impossible for it to
change. It can only be what it is.