Travelling by minibus taxi in SA: literature highlights the perils of Black life in a racially unequal society

Marzia Milazzo, University of Johannesburg

Minibus taxis are ubiquitous in South Africa. Far from being simply the most common form of transport, however, minibus taxis signal how precarity and racial inequality continue to define everyday life for most South Africans.

While Black people largely depend on minibus taxis to travel to work and everywhere else, white people are rarely seen on public transport. This makes sense as white people, who make up less than 8% of the South African population of 62 million, still control most of the land and economy. Meanwhile, 64% of Black South Africans live in poverty.

The taxi industry, which is privately run, remains mostly unregulated and is stuck in feuds between different taxi organisations. These feuds are often deadly — for drivers, owners and commuters. Most targeted killings in the country are related to taxi violence.

The taxi industry thus stands as a reminder that, in democratic South Africa, moving from one place to another remains not just burdensome, but dangerous for most Black people.

In 1976, Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko condemned the apartheid-era “influx control” laws. While white people were free to travel everywhere, Biko lamented, Black people had to

go through a whole rigmarole of red tape in order to move from one area to another.

Three decades after the formal end of apartheid, most Black South Africans still “have got to go through a whole rigmarole” to travel.

Pass laws, which controlled the movement of Black people during apartheid, have long been abolished. But de facto segregation has not, and travelling remains time consuming, limited, and even potentially deadly for most Black South Africans.

Minibus taxis in post-1994 South African literature

Black writers have been denouncing the bleak state of public transport in democratic South Africa for decades, revealing how mobility in the country remains structured in racism and anti-Blackness. In my latest research article, I argue that paying attention to the minibus taxis that pervade post-apartheid South African literature, particularly Black writing, casts light onto the ongoing racialisation of mobility under democracy.

In contemporary Black South African literature, travelling by minibus taxi is usually portrayed as a burden and emblem of social stagnation, while taxi drivers are often mistrusted. Black women writers also cast a critical lens on how moving remains especially dangerous for Black women.

In Kgebetli Moele’s debut novel Room 207 (2006), the narrator Noko fights a tear at Wanderers Street taxi rank, in the Johannesburg central business district, as he laments:

The vow that I took with myself, of driving myself out of Johannesburg, has been broken. I’m still going out like I came in: taking a taxi out.

After trying to make it as a screenwriter for over a decade while living in a crowded former hotel room in Hillbrow, Noko leaves Johannesburg on a taxi — the ultimate marker of failure and social immobility.

Art student Naledi, the protagonist of Lebo Mazibuko’s novel Bantu Knots (2021), is also forced to rely on the taxi to travel back and forth from Soweto, south-west of Johannesburg, to her evening theatre rehearsals at university. This places her in great danger. When she is sexually harassed by a taxi driver while travelling back from campus, Naledi runs away in the middle of the night, hoping that

God would get [her] home unscathed.

Naledi’s white friend Anika, however, is spared these dangers. Mobile and comfortable in a society where she remains privileged, Anika has never even taken a minibus taxi.

Dudu Busani-Dube’s Hlomu the Wife (2015), a dramatic love story between a young journalist and a taxi owner, meanwhile opens with the protagonist Hlomu bemoaning:

I’d like this place better if it wasn’t so cold, if it wasn’t so overcrowded and if taxi drivers weren’t so rude.

Confronting us with such rudeness, Lesego Rampolokeng’s novel Bird-Monk Seding (2017) opens with a taxi driver nearly hitting a pedestrian at an intersection in Johannesburg. When the pedestrian, who is a white woman, shouts a racist slur at the driver, the narrator comments:

i can’t make out who i am angry at, the crap taxi driver showing his teeth or the wizened parchment-skinned racist creature in front of me.

Speaking volumes about the dominant representation of taxi drivers in South African literature, the narrator is not sure whether he dislikes the taxi driver or the racist woman more.

As these examples already show, following the motif of the taxi in post-apartheid literature opens up striking windows into South African life. Minibus taxis nonetheless have received little attention from literary scholars, while social scientists have written about the local minibus taxi industry for decades.

Thabo Jijana’s Nobody’s Business

Challenging negative images of taxi owners and taxi drivers that permeate the South African imaginary, Thabo Jijana’s investigative memoir Nobody’s Business: A Taxi Owner, a Murder, and a Secret (2014), my main object of study, provides a humanising portrait of Jijana’s father, a taxi owner who was murdered at the job.

Jijana shows that the death of his father, who was an innocent victim in the so-called taxi wars, cannot be understood outside the racialised conditions of poverty and dispossession that produced his need to work for such a dangerous industry in the first place. Poverty pushes Seyimani into the taxi industry in Peddie despite

its reputation for violence, greed and the temptation to run illicit side contracts.

In the process, Nobody’s Business reveals how precarity informs not just public transport, but everyday life for most Black South Africans, who have not achieved upper mobility. For them, even the simple act of commuting to work can be potentially deadly.

Whether in literature or in real life, in sum, public transport remains the site of stark racialised inequalities in South Africa, three decades after the formal end of apartheid.

Marzia Milazzo, Associate Professor, University of Johannesburg

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.