A working archive- the Alan Toweel Gym
Remembering the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym, Linden, Johannesburg
In 2016, I started training at the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym in Linden, Johannesburg. From the outside, it could have looked like an ordinary suburban garage. Inside, however, was the history of South African boxing: photographs covered the walls, old equipment was still in use, newspaper clippings were carefully collected, and the story of the Toweel family seemed to be in almost every corner.
It was also, simply, the best year of my life.
I had grown up around boxing. My father was an amateur boxer, and my brother, Wasim Mather, went on to become a professional boxer and later, a journalist covering boxing news. Boxing was therefore not something I encountered for the first time at Toweel’s gym. But training there gave me a different way of seeing the sport. I began to understand that a boxing gym can hold much more than the memory of fights. It can hold a family, a community, a particular way of training, and generations of knowledge that are difficult to record anywhere else.
A family history written in boxing
The Toweel family story reaches back to 1924. Mike Toweel, originally from Lebanon, was selected for South Africa’s Olympic trials, although he ultimately could not compete. He went on to raise six sons who became central figures in South African boxing. Together, with later generations of the family, they became known as the “Fighting Toweels.” Their legacy is still visible throughout the gym.
Alan Toweel inherited that history from his father and uncles. Following his father’s death in 1995, Alan eventually left his job at the South African Revenue Service and extended his garage to create the gym. On the wall was the phrase: “Boxing in the shadow of legends since 1924.” It was more than a slogan. It described the atmosphere of the place.
When a gym becomes an archive
When I first began thinking about the gym academically, I was interested in archives. My 2016 Honours research at the University of the Witwatersrand asked a simple question: what happens when a family history is preserved, not in a museum or formal archive, but in a working space?
At Toweel’s gym, the answer was everywhere. The photographs were the most obvious part. The largest and most significant was a photograph of Mike Toweel with his six sons. Alan described it as the most sentimental photograph because it represented the beginning of the family’s boxing story. Elsewhere were photographs of fighters training, fighting and winning, photographs of Alan with fighters and trainers, and photographs marking more recent achievements.
The walls were a record.
This was the idea at the heart of my original academic essay, “The Archives of the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym.” Drawing on archival theory, I became interested in how memory can be preserved through ordinary objects, physical spaces and repeated practices. The gym complicated the conventional idea of an archive: its records were not tucked away in boxes. They were being looked at, touched, used, and lived with.
The objects that carried memory
What interested me even more were the objects that could easily be overlooked. There was a medicine ball from the late 1960s. Alan told me that his grandfather, uncles, and fighters had used it. There were boxing bags from the 1980s associated with fighters including Thalani “Sugar Boy” Malinga and Pierre Coetzer. There was an old weighing scale that Alan remembered seeing great fighters stand on as a child, before their official weigh-ins at the boxing stadium.
There were also lace-up gloves associated with a 1975 world-title fight, and on a windowsill was a black-and-white photograph of Muhammad Ali with an autograph attached to it.
None of these things needed a museum label to make them important. Their meaning came from the stories attached to them.
That is what stayed with me. An archive is often imagined as boxes, documents, photographs and official records. But knowledge can also live in a body. It can live in a routine: the way a coach demonstrates a movement, corrects a stance, wraps a hand or tells a fighter to move their feet.
The body as an archive
At Toweel’s gym, training itself was part of the archive. Alan had learned from his father, and his father had learned from the generation before him. The knowledge moved through the family not only through photographs and objects, but through practice.
When I was there, I was not simply looking at a history that had already happened. I was standing inside something that was still being transmitted.
This was one of the ideas I explored in my original essay: that physical practice can preserve information just as an object can. The repetition of training, the discipline, the language of boxing, and the methods passed from coach to fighter all carried memory forward. The past was not separated from the present. It was being rehearsed.
That is why the gym felt different from a museum. Museums generally ask us to look. A gym asks us to participate.
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Scrapbooks, photographs and the question of preservation
There was another archive too: the scrapbooks. Alan showed me one of four scrapbooks filled with newspaper clippings about the Toweel family. Some of the newspapers were already beginning to change colour with age. We talked about digitising them, but Alan was more interested in the possibility of eventually creating a coffee-table book about the family history.
I remember that conversation because it raised a question that still interests me today. Does preserving something digitally necessarily mean preserving it better?
The physical scrapbook with its ageing pages, the accumulation of articles, the evidence that someone cared enough to cut them out and keep them. The object itself has become part of the story. Digitisation can preserve information, but it does not necessarily preserve the physical experience of the archive.
Learning from a generation of trainers
One photograph in the gym shows Alan with Angelo Dundee, the celebrated trainer and cornerman associated with Muhammad Ali and Sugar Ray Leonard. Alan explained that his education as a trainer did not come only from his father. He also learned by seeking out other experienced trainers and spending time with them.
That detail stayed with me because it revealed another layer of the archive. The gym preserved not only family history, but professional knowledge. Boxing knowledge moved through conversations, demonstrations, corrections and observation. It was learned by being present.
Why these photographs matter to me now
Looking back at the photographs I took in 2016, I can see why I was so drawn to the gym. I was studying archives and museums at the time, but I was also a boxer in that space. I wasn’t approaching the gym only as a researcher. I was training there. I knew the feeling of the place from the inside. That makes these photographs personal to me in a way that is difficult to separate from the academic project.
My father had introduced me to boxing. My brother had made it part of his own life. And then I found myself in a gym where another family’s history had been physically built into the walls as a living archive
The Alan Toweel Boxing Gym taught me that archives are not always conventional and sometimes they are just a photograph on a wall. Sometimes they are a pair of gloves kept because someone remembers the fight they belonged to. Sometimes it’s a coach teaching a movement exactly as he was taught.
And sometimes they are a young person walking into a gym, training, and becoming part of the story without realising it at the time.
I wrote the original essay in 2016 as part of my Honours work in Archival Theory and Practice at Wits. Almost a decade later, I am returning to it because I figured that was one of the best years of my life. The gym was never just a collection of boxing memorabilia. It was a living archive that could still sweat, move, fight, teach and remember.
Perhaps that is what makes a place worth preserving: not simply that it contains the past, but that the past is still alive inside it.
Image and source notes
The photographs reproduced in this package were extracted directly from the original 2016 PDF. Figures 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 were credited in the original essay as photographs taken by Suhaila Mather. Figure 3 was credited to the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym website. Figures 7, 8 and 9 were credited to photographer David Sharabani in the original essay and should not be republished online without checking permission and credit requirements.
Original academic source: Suhaila Mather, “The Archives of the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym,” WSOA 7040, University of the Witwatersrand, 2016.
Image Appendix
Original figures extracted directly from the 2016 PDF.
Figure 1 — Mike Toweel with his six sons.
Figure 2 — Interior of the Alan Toweel Boxing Gym.
Figure 3 — Alan Toweel Boxing Gym logo.
Figure 10 — Historic Toweel family photograph.
Figure 11 — Alan Toweel with Angelo Dundee.
Figure 12 — Historic boxing equipment.
Figure 13 — Photograph of Muhammad Ali with an autograph.
Figure 14 — Historic training equipment.
Figure 15 — Recent fight photograph displayed in the gym.
Figure 16 — Wide view of the gym.
