COLOURFUL CAPE CHRONICLE

LEADING a colourful life, and one lived to the full, it’s inevitable that the man not scared to speak his mind would publish his autobiography as he approaches his autumn years.

Kenny Alexander is a well-known personality around Athlone, and most certainly further afield. He wears many hats, as a social activist, an artist, and worked for many years as a draftsman and architect, having designed and made alterations and additions to some of the city’s key buildings.

He writes in an accessible style, peppered with wry humour wry as he relates the life of a man who was born in the fledgling years of apartheid, and often given the rough end of the stick. He describes how he circumnavigated the trials and errors of his coming of age, his working life and his more mature years.

What comes across throughout is his forthrightness and a singular lack of fear in speaking out for his rights.

Alexander was born in a single garage in Limerick Road in Athlone, as his father, a construction worker, was busy building the family home.

There are warm and fond recollections of his early childhood – descriptions of family gatherings, both happy and tragic that are written about whimsically but always with a sense of humour.

The book is as much a tribute to the early years of Cape Town as to recreating the memories of his own family.

Whether it’s his description of the Luxurama Bioscope and Theatre in Wynberg, where his father once lived or Alexander’s years as a young man working in the centre of Cape Town near Parliament and the city hall, he creates a deep sense of nostalgia. With the warm recollections there are some painful memories.

Once flown to Joburg to work on a project, he was filled with expectation as he was driven up to the mansion of a manager in a leafy, affluent suburb, only to be shown to a shoebox-sized room in the “servants’” quarters. But ever outspoken, he voiced his outrage and was transferred to the then Moulin Rouge Hotel in Hillbrow – a Pandora’s box of delights in those days...

A wonderful chronicle of a chunk of Cape Town history in the predemocracy and post-apartheid days.